What Hath God Wrought (84 page)

For too long historical accounts have attributed Harrison’s election to mindless hoopla. A Democratic contemporary came closer to the truth when he wrote Van Buren that “the second revulsion” (meaning the Panic of 1839 coming on top of that of 1837) “and no other cause whatever, has elected your opponent and would have elected any other man.”
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The most judicious modern scholarship concludes, however, that the voters did not just lash out at the incumbent party but rendered a judgment on which party’s policy they trusted to get the country out of hard times. The Whig campaign possessed “reason as well as rhyme,” as one historian has put it.
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A conspicuous feature of the 1840 election was the massive voter turnout of 80.2 percent of the qualified electorate, a dramatic increase over the 57.2 percent turnout four years earlier. It stands as one of the three highest national election turnouts in American history, all of them in the nineteenth century.
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The Whigs did particularly well among the many voters participating in their first election. The high voter participation of 1840 and the rest of the nineteenth century in general reflected the effectiveness of the parties’ efforts to get out the vote as well as the high state of public interest in politics by comparison with more recent American history.

“The spirit of the age,” the English visitor Frances Wright observed, was “to be a little fanatical.”
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She described American politics fairly. The Whig and Democratic parties took sharply differentiated positions on policy. Typically, they each endeavored to maximize their appeal, not by moderating their stands so as to win over people in the middle, but by energizing and mobilizing their own core supporters. Organizing the partisan endeavor were men with a personal stake in the outcome: officeholders and those who hoped to hold office. The broad reach of the patronage, with a postmastership in every little community up for grabs, tended to diffuse this kind of strong motivation throughout the public.

The newspapers of the communications revolution, widely distributed and strongly partisan, prodded men to vote while also rousing general popular interest in political events. Some voters, somewhere in the Union, were casting ballots just about all the time, with the press avidly predicting or reporting the results. Aided by the disguised government subsidy of cheap postage rates, the partisan newspapers provided effective propaganda to their respective sponsors with only very modest party subsidies. Rank-and-file Democrats and Whigs paid subscriptions to their respective party newspapers, and advertisers paid to reach them. The general high level of political awareness maintained by the press meant that the parties could depend on a broadly based mass of donors; they also kept their financial costs to a minimum by receiving many contributions in kind, that is, free services from their supporters. Businesses (especially banks) gave money and favors to politicians, but except for the BUS most businesses were small. Political parties of the day, like the philanthropies of the evangelical “benevolent empire,” chiefly relied on pooling many modest contributions, not on soliciting a few large ones. We should not read the current political apathy of the American public back into the antebellum past. The public was not yet jaded then, and fewer rival sources of mass entertainment diverted popular attention and loyalty away from the political parties.
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Even more than the Democrats, the Whigs depended on literacy and the printed media. Whig support usually came from environments providing good access to information and an awareness of people and events beyond the immediate horizon.
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Of the many Whig journalists, the greatest undoubtedly was Horace Greeley, editor of the
Log Cabin
and other campaign periodicals. A self-made man who came from a hardscrabble New Hampshire farm, Greeley combined a practical, methodical business sense with idealistic politics (much as did Benjamin Franklin, with whom contemporaries compared him). Starting in 1838, Greeley hitched his talents to the reform-minded cause of New York Whigs William H. Seward and Thurlow Weed. In 1841, he founded the
New York Tribune
, which went on to become one of America’s great newspapers, with a circulation that reached 200,000 before the Civil War; its spin-off, the
Tribune Weekly
, reprinted its articles for a nationwide readership.
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No strong sectional pattern emerged in the election of 1840. Harrison carried both North and South, though by an overall popular margin of 53 percent to 47 percent—nowhere near as great as his preponderance in the electoral college. Of the seven states Van Buren carried, five were in the South. But, overall, the New Yorker’s long courtship of the slaveholders seems to have been neutralized by Harrison’s Virginia background and record in favor of the expansion of slavery into both Missouri and, earlier, the Northwest Territory itself. Whereas the National Republicans had been weak in the South, the Bank War had brought the Whigs considerable recruits in that section, especially among larger planters who recognized the benefits of a strong financial system for commercial agriculture. North and South, a relatively small percentage typically separated winners from losers in 1840, and this remained a striking characteristic of the second party system over the next decade. In antebellum times, more than half the seats in the federal House of Representatives were genuinely competitive, a striking difference from today when more sophisticated voter analysis enables the parties to protect their incumbents, leaving few “swing” congressional districts.
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Whigs and Democrats had created not only the first mass political parties in the world but also the only truly nationwide party system in America prior to the rebirth of the southern Republicans late in the twentieth century.

Contemporaries generally assumed men with greater income, education, and respectability more likely to vote Whig. But there were innumerable exceptions to such social categories, highlighted when prominent brothers made different political choices. The Whig James Barbour, senator from Virginia and John Quincy Adams’s secretary of war, was the brother of Democrat Philip Barbour, member of Thomas Ritchie’s Richmond Junto, rewarded by Andrew Jackson with a seat on the Supreme Court. Benjamin Tappan, Democratic senator from Ohio, was the brother of Arthur and Lewis Tappan, abolitionist admirers of John Quincy Adams. Data from North Carolina show virtually the same party breakdown between voters who could meet the fifty-acre freehold qualification to vote for state senators and voters who could not.
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Easier for historians to categorize than individuals are the voting patterns of geographical entities like counties. In 1840 and other elections, Whig majorities typically came from commercial areas where all classes had been hurt by the depression; Democratic majorities, from less economically developed regions where farmers practicing “safety first” agriculture could fall back on their subsistence crops and local barter to tide them over.
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The pattern would remain for the duration of the second party system. Occasionally, however, relatively poor areas would back the Whigs, hoping for government-sponsored development projects; such a region was eastern Tennessee. Cities and towns generally yielded Whig majorities. The most important exception to this rule was New York City, where both parties competed vigorously. The Democratic strength there reflected devotion to international free trade arising from the city’s role in cotton export, as well as ethnic bloc voting by immigrant groups.
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In 1840, embarrassingly, Van Buren failed to carry his home state, and the capable Whig governor William Seward won reelection.

The Whig adoption of publicity methods pioneered by evangelical preachers reflected an important dimension of the party’s constituency and program. Indeed, evangelical preachers, like the Whig campaigners, had been calling attention to the depression. The preachers saw it as a divine punishment visited upon the people for their sins both individual and collective, including cupidity, fraud, violations of the Sabbath, and injustice to the Indians. Americans, the preachers warned, were not living up to their high destiny to usher in the millennium.
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Harrison specifically courted evangelical voters with assurances of his sabbatarian, Antimasonic, and temperance principles. Despite having won fame as an Indian fighter, in the election year he published a sympathetic history of the Northwest tribes and carefully distinguished his own record toward them from Jackson’s injustices.
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With so many of the political issues of the age involving moral judgments, it is hardly surprising that different ethnic and religious groups often viewed such issues differently. The distinction between evangelicals and nonevangelicals proved particularly important. Supporters and opponents of evangelical revivalism generally lined up on opposite sides of the Whig–Democratic political debate. The moral and reforming outlook of evangelicals like Lyman Beecher and Charles Finney found the Whig ambition to improve America congenial. Indeed, the evangelical modernization of religion proved both a precursor and a model for the modernization of the economy that Whig political leaders embraced. Many of the skills and virtues promoted by the evangelical awakening helped establish preconditions for economic development: literacy, thrift, impulse control, respect for diligent work, honesty and promise-keeping, moral involvement with the world outside one’s local community. Not surprisingly, those whose Christianity prompted them to redeem the world, to agitate for penitentiaries instead of jails, insane asylums to replace locked cellars, or common schools instead of home instruction during the parents’ spare time, came to ally with politicians committed to an activist state and a developed economy. The interrelated benevolent projects of the Evangelical United Front bear a strong analogy to the integrated economic program of the American System. The Whig Party benefited from evangelicals who decided to enlist the power of the state on behalf of reform.
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To be sure, many good Christians followed the Baptist preacher John Leland and the Methodist itinerant Peter Cartwright in supporting the Democratic Party. The Democrats appealed more to those sects that remained outside the reformist Evangelical United Front. These were particularistic, liturgical, “confessional” groups like Roman Catholics and Missouri Synod Lutherans, concerned to bear witness to their traditional sacraments and creeds (“confessions” of faith) rather than to remake society at large through interdenominational voluntary associations. The Whigs exemplified a political postmillennialism, seeking to improve the world so as to render it fit for Christ’s return, endorsing a form of social progress that they believed was a collective version of redemption. Premillennialists, on the other hand, suspicious of worldly elites and looking to providential intervention for deliverance from suffering and oppression, often endorsed the austere tenets of hard-money Jacksonianism.
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Reflecting such distinctions, some denominations acquired deserved reputations for partisan voting. Congregationalists constituted a Whig voting bloc, Antimission Baptists a Democratic one. Other denominations split: Low Church (evangelical) Episcopalians Whig, High Church (antievangelical) Episcopalians Democratic; New School (prorevival) Presbyterians Whig; Old School (antirevival) Presbyterians Democratic. Even some denominations kept outside the Evangelical United Front by their particular doctrines usually voted Whig out of support for the moral reform agenda: Quakers, Unitarians, and Reform Jews. Anticlericals and avowed secularists like Abner Kneeland (convicted of the crime of blasphemy under Massachusetts common law) worried about the power of the Evangelical United Front and found the Jacksonian party more congenial. Democratic leaders occasionally catered to their preferences, as Richard Mentor Johnson did when he rejected the sabbatarian petitions and Jackson did in resolving not to proclaim a day of prayer and fasting in response to the cholera epidemic of 1832.
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Denominations with a particular ethnic character seemed all the more likely to vote as a bloc in the presence of neighboring rivals. Thus New York state politics saw Dutch Reformed voters support the Democratic ticket against Yankee Presbyterian Whigs, despite a common Calvinist heritage; the two denominations also took opposing sides on the legitimacy of revivalism. Irish Catholics, resentful of Protestant evangelicalism even though somewhat analogous movements flourished within their own church, voted Democratic by nineteen to one. Scots-Irish Presbyterians who had been voting Democratic sometimes switched over to the Whig Party when Irish Catholic immigrants showed up nearby. Historians and sociologists call communities with such mutual animosity “negative reference groups.” In a world where people often defined themselves in religious and ethnic terms, negative reference voting was common.
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But evangelicals and the various antievangelical communities constituted the largest pattern of negative reference groups.

Then as now, voters acted out of various motives and did not necessarily sort them all out and classify them. Ethnoreligious and negative reference group voting influenced politics more in the North than in the South, since the North had greater ethnic and religious diversity. Southern politics more often reflected geographical regions defined by their dominant local economies. Historians have come to accept that, overall, the political loyalties of the second party system involved both economic and ethnocultural alignments.
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Both kinds of concern could be perfectly legitimate; to vote on the basis of moral principle or ethnic identity was no less rational than to vote one’s economic interest. In most cases, no doubt, several different kinds of consideration all pointed toward the same action at the polling place.