What Hath God Wrought (86 page)

In the North, however, Clay’s speech did him no good. There, some Whig politicians diminished the distance between themselves and the abolitionists—for example, by supporting their right to petition Congress. The northern Whig propagandist Calvin Colton, writing as “Junius” in 1844, declared, “We do not yield to the Abolitionists a whit in our opposition to slavery; we differ from them only as to the mode of getting rid of the evil.”
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In the mean time, Clay’s anti-abolitionist speech prompted northern Whigs to consider Harrison and Scott as alternatives for the nomination. When the convention came, Clay received the votes of no northern state save little Rhode Island. The effects of Clay’s antiabolitionist speech illustrate the supreme difficulty of bridging the sectional gap on the slavery question within the Whig Party—even for so skillful and principled a moderate as Henry Clay.

There is an ironic footnote to this speech of Clay’s. When warned by a sympathetic fellow senator that this remarkably full exposition of his position would make an inviting target for extremists on both sides of the slavery issue, perhaps jeopardizing his presidential campaign, Clay responded, “I had rather be right than be president.”
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It became probably his most famous quotation. One can only wish that this profession of virtue had been voiced on behalf of a more morally courageous statement. Still, though never president, Clay
was
often right.

II

“There never was a President elected who has a more difficult task imposed upon him than General Harrison,” observed one cautious Whig. “Too much is expected of him.”
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The public did have strong expectations, and the new President Harrison confronted his challenge head on. He appointed a capable cabinet, headed by Daniel Webster as secretary of state. He summoned a special session of Congress to deal with the depression and enact the Whig economic program. His meetings with Henry Clay, who would be the dominant power in the legislative branch, revealed that the two men had not yet transcended their rivalry for the Whig nomination. At one point, when the senator pressed advice upon him too presumptuously, Harrison snapped, “You forget, Mr. Clay, that
I
am the president.”
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But their personal feelings could probably have been subsumed within their broadly common goals. Harrison would have been a mainstream Whig president, enjoying cordial relations with many northern party leaders, if not with Clay, and in any case committed on principle to respecting the will of Congress. He held meetings of his full cabinet and had confidence in its collective judgment.

But within days, Harrison fell ill. At first it seemed a bad cold, presumably caught when chilled at his inauguration. Then it turned to pneumonia. Being president, he of course received the best medical care available—perhaps the worst thing that could have happened to him. His doctors administered the “heroic” treatments of the age: “topical depletion,” harsh laxatives, and blistering. Their favorite remedy, bloodletting, they postponed.
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It was all too much for the veteran of many a battle. Exactly one month after his inauguration, President Harrison died. The Whig electoral triumph had turned to ashes.

It was the first time a president had died in office. “When a Christian people feel themselves to be overtaken by a great public calamity, it becomes them to humble themselves under the dispensation of Divine Providence,” declared his successor, in proclaiming May 14, 1841, a day of national prayer and fasting. Charles Finney preached one of his greatest sermons for the occasion, calling on the bereaved country to repent of its sins, which ranged from slavery and the treatment of the aborigines to desecration of the Sabbath, mercenary values, intemperance, and political corruption.
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Vice President John Tyler, also a Virginia governor’s son, came like Harrison from the tidewater aristocracy. The running mates shared little else in common. Where Harrison had been the oldest chief executive, Tyler at fifty-one became the youngest so far. Rejecting the title “acting president,” Tyler successfully insisted that he had fallen heir to the presidency itself. Six feet tall and slender, when his ailing wife, Letitia, died in 1842 he wasted no time courting the beautiful twenty-four-year-old New York heiress Julia Gardiner. Their wedding, the first of an incumbent president, initiated a period of virtually regal luxury in the White House.
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Like other vice presidents who have succeeded to the presidency, Tyler came into power on short notice and unprepared. At first he retained Harrison’s cabinet; perhaps he would defer to their advice, some supposed. They were wrong.

It would be easy to demonize Tyler as a sinister frustrater of the popular will, wrecker of the Whig Party’s only clear mandate, and the president who prostituted the Constitution to evade the requirement that the Senate ratify treaties. But the historian’s duty is to understand, not simply condemn. In his own mind, John Tyler exemplified high principles. He had entered politics at the age of twenty-one and served as both governor and senator from Virginia. He was a dedicated Old Republican and a faithful disciple of Thomas Jefferson, devoted to both state rights and national expansion. He construed the Constitution strictly in defense of state rights and broadly in asserting executive authority to extend American sovereignty and commercial interests. Like Jefferson, he owned slaves while professing regret for the institution of slavery; like the master of Monticello, he left behind black people claiming descent from him.
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Tyler had joined the Whig Party because he objected to Jackson’s strong response to nullification and to his withdrawal of the deposits from the BUS. In 1836, the Virginian had been Hugh White’s running mate. Tyler’s views on public policy, however, left him in a highly anomalous position within the Whig Party. Many of the former sympathizers with nullification, such as members of the old State Rights Party in Georgia, had not only joined the Whig Party but also had embraced Clay’s views on a national bank. As major producers of commodities for export, these planters understood the importance of banking, currency, and credit. They preferred a revived national bank to continued dependence on New York City financiers.
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Government intervention in the economy did not fill all southerners with horror; many of them wanted public funding to dredge river channels or construct railroads, for example. Of those southerners who still shared Tyler’s views on strict construction, most had followed John C. Calhoun back into the Democratic Party once Jackson himself had retired. Indeed, in Tyler’s own Virginia, most tidewater Old Republicans had never left the Democratic Party. A large majority of Virginia’s Whigs sided with Clay, not Tyler, when the choice had to be made.

John Tyler was also a politician. Throughout his four years in the White House, he assiduously pursued election to a term in his own right. His isolation within the Whig Party complicated matters, but Tyler stuck with his goal and displayed remarkable ingenuity in furthering it. In the end the odds against it were simply too great, but in the course of pursuing it he inflicted huge damage on the Whig Party.

Harrison had called the special session of Congress to meet on May 31, the earliest date practicable in that age of slow communication and travel. “We come here to relieve the country,” declared a Whig from New York when the Congress had assembled. “The eyes of the nation are bent upon us with an intensity which has never before been experienced.”
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Clay and the other Whig congressional leaders knew what they wanted and they wanted it quickly. (Democrats suspected that Whig haste betrayed a fear that the economy might begin to recover before their program could take effect; in the event, no such early recovery occurred.) The Whigs repealed Van Buren’s Independent Treasury Act, then drew up legislation to establish a third national bank. Tyler signed the repeal, but his reaction to the other bill remained the subject of much speculation as it moved through Congress. The new president offered no alternative proposal. Secretary of the Treasury Thomas Ewing, trying to fill the void, suggested a bank of limited powers. Clay preferred to press ahead with his original plan, making, however, two concessions to strict construction: the bank would be based in the District of Columbia, and states would enjoy a limited right to refuse the establishment of its branches. Clay believed the Whigs had a mandate from the electorate, which was true, and persuaded himself that “Tyler dare not resist”
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—which was wishful thinking. Tyler waited the full ten days allowed by the Constitution, whether out of indecision or secret pleasure in making Clay squirm, then vetoed the bank bill on August 16, 1841. Unpersuaded by the existence of two previous national banks for a total of forty years, or by the opinion of the Supreme Court, Tyler insisted that such an institution was unconstitutional.
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The Whigs did not have the two-thirds majority necessary to override a veto, but they did pass another bank bill, this time in the form that Secretary Ewing had proposed, in the hope that Tyler would accept it. They gave the revised bank a euphemistic name, “fiscal corporation,” and forbade it to establish any branches in states without their consent. Tyler’s fellow Virginian, Whig congressman John Minor Botts, who represented the urban-industrial constituency of Richmond, declared that although he would vote for it, Ewing’s bank was so weak that investors would shun it, making the plan unworkable and exposing Tyler’s economic ignorance. Botts’s claim both infuriated and convinced Tyler. He vetoed the Ewing bank bill as well—thus denying the financial community the chance to fulfill Botts’s prediction. In the last analysis, Tyler had no interest in reaching an accommodation with Clay. If a compromise bank bill passed, Clay would remain leader of the Whig Party and its next presidential nominee. Tyler was challenging Clay for leadership of the party. No longer possessing either Van Buren’s Independent Treasury or a reconstituted BUS, the federal government once again resorted to placing its money in private banks. The solution of the soft-money Democrats prevailed by default over those of the hard-money Democrats and the Whigs.

Despite the deadlock over the national bank, the Whigs managed to pass some items of their program. One of these was the Land Act of 1841, which Whigs hoped would stimulate land sales and strengthen their party in the West. It provided that settlers on government-owned lands would from now on enjoy the right to buy 160-acre homesteads at the minimum price without having to compete in an auction. This made permanent the “preemption” privilege that squatters had been granted from time to time retroactively. The law gave preemption rights to any male citizen over twenty-one or heading a family, and also to widowed women, provided the settler already owned no more than 320 acres of other land. It constituted a long step toward the altogether free homesteads for settlers that the new Republican Party would enact a generation later. Indeed, a careful scholar of federal land policy has declared the Land Act of 1841 even more important than the later law in encouraging western settlement by farmers of modest means.
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For years, the Jacksonian Thomas Hart Benton had struggled for such a “prospective preemption” law. Ironically, when it finally passed, it did so on a party-line vote with Whigs supporting and Democrats opposing. The reason for Democratic opposition was that the bill included “distribution” of the proceeds of land sales to the states.

Whigs intended the distribution of funds to the states to stimulate internal improvements without running afoul of any constitutional scruples. They had been waiting for this measure ever since Jackson vetoed Clay’s distribution bill of 1833. But Tyler, like Calhoun and most Democrats, wanted the proceeds from land sales to go to the federal government so tariffs could remain as low as possible. He therefore insisted that distribution of land proceeds not occur if any tariffs exceeded 20 percent, the ceiling set by the old Compromise of 1833.

The president also approved a depression-relief measure, the Bankruptcy Act of 1841. The Constitution specifically empowers Congress to pass uniform national bankruptcy legislation, so even a strict constructionist could not object. The law applied to individuals, not banks or other corporations, allowing them to declare bankruptcy and start financial life over. No previous federal legislation permitted individuals to seek the protection of bankruptcy, and only a Whig Congress would have passed such a law. Democrats disapproved of voluntary bankruptcy for somewhat the same reasons that they disliked bank notes; they saw it as encouraging people to borrow beyond their means and then defraud their creditors. During the one year the law operated (1842–43), forty-one thousand persons took out bankruptcy under it. The experience chastened some of them (as Democrats thought it should); others plunged back into the whirl of commercial life (as Whigs hoped they would).
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The depression had brought hard times to American manufacturing while simultaneously so reducing federal revenues that the surplus of Jackson’s day had given way to a deep deficit and the national debt reappeared. As a result, both the impulse to protect domestic industry and the government’s need for revenue indicated that the Compromise Tariff of 1833 should be terminated (or reinterpreted) at the close of its nine-year time frame. Twice Tyler vetoed Whig bills to increase the duties; eventually, however, persuaded by the need for revenue if not by its protective features, he signed the Tariff of 1842.

But when the Tariff of 1842 breached the 20 percent ceiling on duties, the distribution of land revenues to the states automatically ceased. Whigs tried to get Tyler to relent and change the law, but he was adamant. Southern Whigs had relied upon distribution to get money for internal improvements and to sweeten the bitter pill of higher tariff duties to their cotton-growing constituents; New York’s Governor Seward had hoped for distribution to enable him to help the anti-rent movement. Southern Whigs also felt especially disappointed at the failure to establish a national bank; northerners had stronger state and regional banks of their own and needed a third BUS less urgently. Tyler hoped the disaffected southerners and New Yorkers would blame their troubles on Clay and rally behind his own banner.