http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1852
Old Fuss and Feathers has my vote.
Franklin Pierce is certainly one of the least appealing Nineteenth Century presidential candidates, to modern eyes. He was a proslavery northerner, a compromise candidate nominated not despite but because of an undistinguished record, and a morose, brooding borderline alcoholic.
Winfield Scott was a competent general, but a blank slate as a politician. He had never held nor run for political office, and (as was the custom of the time) said little during the campaign.
The VP candidates were even more enigmatic. William R. King was dying of tuberculosis, and William A. Graham was an undistinguished Secretary of the Navy barely known even at the time.
I suppose I would vote for Scott, just because he wasn’t Pierce.
I might have been tempted by the Free Soil Party but I probably would have gone with the Northern Whigs.
There was actually a “Southron Rights” Party?!
That’s apparently a typo. It was the Southern Rights Party.
A lot of that last part came about after he saw his son killed in a pretty gruesome accident in front of him just before he got inaugurated (The family were in a train that derailed. He and his wife survived, but his son, the only one to survive infancy, was killed). His wife, who suffered from what was probably severe depression anyway, said that their son’s death was divine punishment for Pierce’s election, and blamed Pierce for letting their son die for his ambitions.
And really, he wasn’t a terrible president as far as these things went. So there’s that.
I’m not a big Pierce fan, but from the lens of 1852 I wouldn’t dislike him as much as I do in 2014. Part of my dislike for Pierce relates to his actual performance as President which a voter in 1852 would not know about, he was one in a string of Presidents that did basically nothing to try and fix the growing sectionalism that was going to inevitably lead to Civil War. I don’t know that anything short of war ever could have fixed it, but we won’t know since we had a series of spineless/gutless Presidents leading up to the ACW. I also wasn’t a big fan of Pierce’s criticisms of Lincoln during the ACW, his friendship with Jefferson Davis which continued in correspondence even during the war and etc–although I do rank Pierce higher than John Tyler (my lowest ranked President.) Pierce was at least still theoretically pro-Union even though he didn’t sympathize with any of the goals or conduct of the war (he basically was pro-Union but didn’t believe in waging war against the South), Tyler on the other hand was elected to the Confederate Congress and was an outright traitor. Luckily for what small shred of his reputation remains he died early in the war before he could assume his seat and be more fully known as a traitor in the annals of history.
But I generally more closely align with the Whigs in mid-19th century politics, so would vote for Winfield Scott regardless.
Good summary, Martin, and I agree. I’d probably be a Whig back then, and Scott gets my vote.
He did try to fix the growing sectionalism over slavery that led to the Civil War. His efforts didn’t work, but he tried. He backed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, even if he wasn’t entirely enthusiastic about it, figuring that, if territories got to vote on whether or not they’d allow slavery rather than having the decision imposed on them by Congress, that would localize the issue and reduce resentment, and he pretty strictly enforced the Fugitive Slave Act, hoping it would show the South that the federal government, even though there was a northern President, would enforce the slave laws.
On the contrary, Pierce labored mightily to fix sectionalism. The problem is that his efforts were in an immoral and impractical direction.
Pierce supported and signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, providing that the white people who organized federal territories would determine whether slavery was legal in each territory. Surely, he thought, this would eliminate the endless conflicts in national politics over slavery in the territories.
There were two problems with this. First, it was pro-slavery, and it was immoral. It reversed the federal policy of 34 years under which slavery was banned in the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase. More broadly, it reversed 70 years of policy, dating back to the Northwest Ordinance, under which slavery was not permitted to expand to the northwest.
Second, it was impractical. It was an invitation to pro-slavery and anti-slavery agitators to fight it out in each territory, trying to get there fustest with the mostest, win the early elections, and lay down the law.
For this policy to have any chance to work, it required stern, impartial administration. Pierce provided no such thing. His first territorial governor, Andrew Reeder, reported personally to Pierce about Southern ruffianism and fraud in the first territorial election.
Pierce responded by dismissing Reeder. He replaced him with weak and pliable Wilson Shannon. Shannon’s weakness and pro-slavery bias were major factors in the trauma of Bleeding Kansas.
When it came to enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law, however, Pierce was an absolute tiger. He sent in the army and placed Boston under martial law to remand Anthony Burns to slavery, and even ordered the local US Attorney to discourage efforts to manumit Burns, because Pierce wanted to set an example.
Southern politicians were pro-slavery because they had to be. They grew up with slavery, it was all they knew, and everyone around them thought that slavery was wonderful. Pro-slavery northerners were worse. They were pro-slavery either out of reasoned conviction or naked ambition. Pierce was the latter. His conduct as President would not have been a surprise.
A lot of people forget the timeline of events in the eighteen-fifties. They think that the controversy started in 1860 and the pro-slavery people were just responding to what the Republicans were doing.
But the formation of the Republican party in 1854 was itself a response to what the pro-slavery people had been doing in recent years. It was the pro-slavery people who wanted to change the status quo.
I hate slavery with every fiber of my being, bleed Union blue, and am certainly no fan of Pierce, but the Constitution did provide for the return of fugitive slaves, and the Second Congress passed a bill to that effect, later amended and strengthened. All American public officials, under oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, were obligated to comply with the law.
The fugitive clause in the Constitution just established the principle that escaped slaves were liable to be sent back to slavery. But the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 established the particulars of how this would be applied - and it seemed to have been enacted to create the most possible offense.
For example, it made it not only a crime to help a fugitive escape slavery but even refusing to assist somebody in capturing a slave was now a criminal charge. Imagine applying this practice to some modern laws. Most of us, for example, agree with speed limits. But how would we feel if a law was enacted requiring you to report anyone you observed speeding and would fine you if you failed to do so? Most citizens feel they should not be compelled to enforce laws.
Earlier fugitive slave laws had also required some burden of proof be provided to establish a person was actually a fugitive slave. Granted, this was often abused and some anti-slavery areas set an unreasonably high standard of proof in order to protect people who most likely were fugitive slaves. But the 1850 law reversed this and set a national standard that was absurdly low. It was now virtually impossible to fight an accusation. Anyone who was accused of being a fugitive slave was virtually certain to be found guilty of that. The system was literally rigged to find people guilty.
As I said, the law was later strengthened… much to the slavecatchers’ benefit. But it was the law of the land, and the President was obliged to enforce it. Were I in the White House at the time, I would have strongly lobbied for its modification for the reasons you wisely state, but Pierce did share my views in that regard. I have read that the law was enforced even by Lincoln, even after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, before it was finally repealed.
I don’t think that second part is true, unless you were a federal marshal. The law does give the commissioners the right to summon a posse, and orders the public to be good citizens, but there doesn’t seem to be any penalty for failing to participate:
Meant to say, of course, “Pierce didn’t share my views…”
Rather than a typo, I suspect that it’s tongue-in-cheek.
Well, it could have been for real. In the long ago I remember reading in The American Pageant (standard high-school history text) that the antebellum Southern elite found the word “Southron” in the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott and proudly applied it to themselves.
To me and probably to all of you, it’s a word more evocative of Tolkien than Scott.
Yes indeed. It turns up often in quotes from Southerners in Civil War-era histories, usually of the form that “no true Southron could abide X”, where X is some action insufficiently supportive of slavery. Google “no true Southron” and you’ll see some choice examples.
However I don’t believe the word was ever used as the name (even in slang) of the short-lived Southern Rights Party.