Various
Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February, 1885
THE DEMOCRATIC VICTORY IN AMERICA
BY WILLIAM HENRY HURLBURT
The United States being, and having been from the outset of their history, a Democratic Republic, it may well puzzle a European reader to understand why American “Republicans” should bewail a “Democratic” triumph, or American “Democrats” exult in the overthrow of a “Republican” party.
Yet it may not be impertinent to suggest that in no country are the names of political parties or factions commonly selected by a committee of philologists with an eye to making the national politics intelligible. What notions of English history are conveyed by the mere names of “Whig” and “Tory” or even of “Liberal” and “Conservative” to a person unfamiliar with the political history of England? What light is thrown on the history of Byzantium by talking of the “Blues” and the “Greens,” or on the history of Florence by casual references to the “Bianchi” and the “Neri”?
When one asks for the origin of such names, history is apt to give him no better answer than that of the small African child who was invited by a sympathetic lady to explain how she came to have six toes on one of her feet – “they growed so!”
This is so emphatically true of American political parties that my readers must pardon me if I take them back to the “beginnings of things” for an accurate perspective of the recent Presidential election in the United States, and of its significance.
The existing Constitution of the American Union was adopted in 1789 by the citizens of thirteen new-born Republics who had grown up to manhood in the then anomalous condition of subjects of the British Crown enjoying all the privileges and immunities of local self-government in thirteen distinct and independent colonies which differed among themselves in origin, in social traditions and habits, and in religion, almost as widely as Wales differs from Ireland, or Ireland from Scotland. These colonies had co-operated from time to time with the mother country for the common defence against a common enemy, colonial France. And they had been united under a temporary political bond in the great revolutionary war of 1776, by a common spirit of resistance to that Parliamentary despotism, tempered by corruption, which after the English Revolution of 1688 and the establishment of the House of Hanover assumed to itself the place originally held by the British Crown in the allegiance of these stalwart “Home-Rulers” beyond the Atlantic.
At the peace of Versailles in 1783 Great Britain found herself compelled to recognize the independence of all and of each of these colonies, which thenceforth took their places in the family of nations as separate and sovereign states. They were recognized in this capacity not in block, but severally and individually, each by its own territorial designation; and from the moment of such recognition each of them felt that it was absolutely free, and “of right ought to be free,” saving so far as it had bound itself to the then existing confederacy of 1778, to adopt any form of government which might suit the humor of its citizens, and to form any alliances advantageous to its own interests. The States were, indeed, at that moment bound together for certain specified purposes by a federal compact formed during the war in 1778; but this compact sate so lightly upon them that it was not only impossible to compel the several States into an exact fulfilment of confederate obligations, but very difficult even to induce them to get themselves properly represented under it for legislative and executive purposes at the then federal capital of Annapolis in Maryland. A striking illustration of this is given in a private letter, now in my possession, written by Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, the author of the Declaration of Independence of 1776, and eventually the founder of that great Democratic party under the Union of 1789, which now once more, after a quarter of a century of extra constitutional experiments in government, has been commissioned by the voters of the United States, in the election to the Presidency of Governor Cleveland of New York, to restore in all its parts, and re-establish on its original and enduring foundations, the sway of the Federal Constitution of 1789. Writing from Annapolis to a friend in Virginia in regard to the negotiations at Paris which had secured the recognition of American Independence, Mr. Jefferson, in December 1783, complains bitterly of the indifference of the States to this momentous event. Under the ninth article of the then existing confederate compact of 1778, the assent of nine States represented in the Congress at Annapolis assembled was necessary to the ratification of any treaty with a foreign power. The time fixed for the ratification by Congress of the Treaty of Versailles was rapidly running out at the date of the letter to which I refer, and the Congress had been long in session. “We had yesterday, for the first time, seven States,” exclaims Mr. Jefferson; and he goes on to express his concern lest the necessary quorum of nine States should not be assembled before the expiration of the term fixed for ratification in the treaty by which, after seven years of an exhausting war, their independence was to be established!
I dwell on this point in order to emphasise the truth, vital to any intelligent appreciation of the great change now impending in the administration of public affairs in the United States, that the commonwealths by which the American Union was established were, from the first, in the opinion of their inhabitants, sufficient each unto itself; and this because each of these commonwealths was indeed a well-organised body politic, the members of which had long managed their domestic affairs under one or another form of chartered authority, after their own fashion; and, for the protection within their own borders of life and of property, had adjusted to their several situations and necessities the maxims and principles of English liberty defined and guarded by law. These States were the creators, not the creatures of that “more perfect Union” which (the Confederacy of 1778 failing) was finally formed by them after all its features had been discussed, debated, and redebated, not only in a Convention of the States assembled for that purpose in 1787, but in the several States subsequently, with a fulness, vigor of thought, and intelligence which, in the opinion of others than my own countrymen, make the volumes of Elliott’s Debates on the Constitution the most valuable treasury of constitutional politics in existence.
The framers of the American Constitution of 1789 were no rude uninstructed settlers, summoned from the axe and the plough to improvise an orderly government. The traditions of the older States went back to the struggle between the prerogative and the taxpayers of England under the Stuart kings. Virginia, the “Old Dominion” of Elizabeth and the Restoration, with her Established Church, her College of William and Mary, and her legends of the Cavaliers, was in no hurry to believe that her consequence could be much enhanced by any merger of her sovereignty in that of a federal union with Charles the Second’s Crown colony of Rhode Island, and with the gallant little community which keeps green on the banks of the Delaware the memory of the self-sacrificing and heroic Thomas West. The colonial story of the great central State of New York had made its sturdy people familiar with those ideas of federated liberty on which the fabric of Netherlandish independence had been founded. The curious in such matters have found an indication of the extent to which the spirit of the Netherlands influenced the framers of the new American republic in the fact that when the style and title to be taken by the American President were under consideration, Washington inclined to the notion that the Chief Magistrate should be addressed and known as “His High Mightiness.”
Nor were the citizens of the youngest of the colonies disposed to put the control of their persons and their purses unreservedly into the hands of any imperial central authority.
After the Constitution of 1789 (to take the date from the day, April 30, 1789, on which Washington was inaugurated at New York as the first President of the United States) had been definitely adopted by eleven States, the two States of North Carolina and Rhode Island still withholding their ratification of the instrument, remained as foreign powers outside of the Union, the former until the 21st of November 1789, and the latter until the 29th of May 1790.
A notable date this last!
Never was a great compact more opportunely framed and ratified!
Almost upon the morrow of these final adhesions to the “more perfect Union,” the storm of the French Revolution broke upon the world, bringing with it great international convulsions which affected every nerve and fibre of the social, political, and industrial life of America, and tested to the utmost every seam and joint in the fabric of the new American Republic. The excesses of Jacobinism in France strengthened the doubts and fears of many excellent persons in America who had small faith in the capacity of the people for self-government on a grand scale, and who accepted the Constitution of 1789 not as a final and trustworthy frame of polity, but because, while they thought it, to use the language of one of the ablest of their number, “frail and worthless in itself,” they hoped to see it lead up to the eventual establishment of some such “splendid central government” as in our own times Mr. Seward, the true founder of the “Republican” party which has just been defeated in the United States, used to dream of and did his best to build up.
The influence of these doubts and fears upon the politics of the new American Republic was fortunately met and countered by the genius and the faith of a group of great American statesmen, the friends and associates of Thomas Jefferson; and the fundamental divergence between the controlling ideas of the two great parties which now occupy the field of American politics goes back to this closing decade of the eighteenth century. When the existing Constitution was first submitted by the Convention of 1787 to the people and to the States, those who, with Alexander Hamilton of New York, and James Madison of Virginia, advocated its adoption were called “Federalists”, and those who, with Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, and Patrick Henry of Virginia, opposed it as threatening the rights and sovereignty of the States, were called Anti-Federalists. After its adoption the latter party took the name of “Strict Constructionists,” their object being to bind down the administration of the new system to the closest and most rigid interpretation of the powers conferred by the States upon the Federal Government; while their opponents were styled “Broad Constructionists.” Both parties happily had such confidence in the patriotism and wisdom of Washington that he came into power as first President by a unanimous vote, and selected his first cabinet from the leaders of both the great parties which had contended over the adoption and the construction of the new Constitution. At the first session of the first Congress, in 1789, ten amendments to the Constitution were adopted, embodying a Bill of Rights to secure the liberties of the citizens of the several States, and explicitly reserving to the several States “respectively” or to the people, “all the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the States.” These amendments Thomas Jefferson counselled the friends of Home Rule and State Rights to accept as an adequate guarantee of both. His wise advice was taken, and the great political party which was formed under the Constitution took, at his suggestion, the name of the “Republican Party.” The name was appropriate enough to that party which held each State of the new Union to be indeed an independent “Republic,” and regarded the “Federal” Government as the agent and protector of the “Republican” independence of each State.
It gathered to itself a kind of passion, too, in the popular heart from the then very general conviction that the leaders, at least, of the “Federalist” party secretly desired to see these “Republics” disappear into some form of centralised monarchy.
As the French Revolution grew more portentous and interesting, and its agents busied themselves with efforts to draw America into the European contest as an ally, or rather as a dependency, of Republican France, the political antagonism of the “Federalists” and the “Republicans” grew dangerously high and hot. Men wore French or English Cockades in the streets of New York and Philadelphia. A distinguished public man of Massachusetts once told me that his earliest recollection of any political event took him back to a day on which a friend of his father, who was a leading Federalist of Massachusetts, met him in the streets coming home from school, and, giving him a bright Spanish dollar, said, “Now, Jack, run as fast as you can to your father’s court, and tell him from me that Robert Spear’s head has been cut off, and he must give you just such another dollar!” News came at long intervals then from Europe to America, and the tidings of the fall of Robespierre had that morning reached Boston.
Under the stress of these emotions the “Republicans” took to denouncing the “Federalists” as “Monocrats” and “Anglomen,” and the “Federalists” retorted by reviling their opponents as “Jacobins” and “Democrats.”
The “Federalist” party held its own during the two Presidencies of Washington, and elected John Adams to succeed the “Father of his country” in 1796. Under the Presidency of Mr. Adams the “Federalists” lost their heads, and the “Republicans” in the year 1800 took possession of power under the first Presidency of Thomas Jefferson. They had for some time been known commonly as “Democratic Republicans,” and in the ninth Congress which met under the second Presidency of Jefferson in 1805 they boldly took the name of “Democrats,” in the spirit of good Bishop Willegis, who put the wagoner’s wheel into his coat-of-arms, and like the “Gueux,” the “Huguenots,” and the “Roundheads,” extracting “glory out of bitterness.”
From that time to this the “Democratic” party has continued to be what Jefferson made it, the party of “Home Rule” as opposed to centralisation, and of a strict construction of the organic law by which the provisions and the limitations of Federal power are sanctioned and defined, as against that plausible paternalism under cover of which, in the language of a great living leader of the Democratic party, Senator Bayard of Delaware, “the general government assumes guardianship and protection over the business of the private citizen, and functions of control over matters of domestic and local interest.”
If I have enabled my readers to estimate aright the vital importance attached by the people of the several States in the formation of the Constitution to the recognition of the rights and the reserved sovereignty of the States, they will not be surprised to learn that when Thomas Jefferson established the Democratic party upon this recognition as its fundamental principle he secured for the Democratic party such a profound and permanent hold upon the confidence and the affections of the American people as can never be shaken while the Union remains what it was meant to be. For forty years after his first Presidency, no combinations succeeded in wresting from the Democrats the control of the executive authority. The only apparent exception to this statement confirms it. In the Presidential election of 1824, the electoral ticket of General Jackson, the leading Democratic candidate, received a considerable majority of the votes of the people; but as there were four candidates in the field, and General Jackson did not secure a majority of the votes of all the electoral colleges, the choice of a President went, under the Constitution, into the lower House of Congress, in which the members vote for a President not individually as representing the people, but by delegations as representing the sovereign States. John Quincy Adams secured a majority of the delegations; but such was the popular indignation that in the next House of Representatives President Adams found himself confronted by an overwhelming opposition; and at the end of his term of office General Jackson was made President by a majority of more than two to one against him. Jackson was twice elected, and transmitted his power to his Secretary of State, Martin Van Buren of New York, in the election of 1836. Between the years 1840 and 1860 the predominance of the Democratic party was but twice disturbed. In 1840 the Democratic President Van Buren, being a candidate for re-election, was defeated after a very severe struggle by General Harrison, the candidate of a conglomerate party which, for lack of a better, had taken the name of the “Whig” party, and which represented in a general way the Anti-Democratic classes of the country, and more particularly the banking interests and the Protectionists, of whom more hereafter. The real and brilliant leader of this party, Henry Clay of Kentucky, had been deprived of the presidential nomination through the machinations of a nominating device unknown to the Constitution, called a “Presidential Convention;” and though the Whig candidate secured a great majority in the electoral colleges, thanks to the skill with which his managers played upon the financial distress of the country caused by a great business panic in 1837, yet when he unexpectedly died at the end of a single short month after his inauguration, the Vice-President elected with him and who succeeded him, Mr. Tyler of Virginia, originally a Democrat, was found to be opposed to the rechartering of a United States Bank; and a bill passed by both Houses for that purpose, which had been indeed the main purpose of the leading Whigs in promoting the election of Harrison and Tyler, was twice vetoed by him. This was the first lesson given to the American people of the potential importance of the Vice-Presidency in case of the death or disability of the President. Curiously enough, the same lesson, which has been repeated several times since, has, in every instance, with one exception, followed upon the election of a President by Anti-Democratic votes.
Henry Clay, who was enthusiastically nominated and supported by the “Whig” party for the Presidency at the close of President Tyler’s administration in 1844, was defeated by the Democratic nominee, Mr. Polk of Tennessee, under whom the annexation of the magnificent Republic of Texas to the United States was consummated, with its inevitable corollary of a war with Mexico, that republic refusing to acknowledge the right of the people of Texas to sever their connection with the Mexican States. This war led immediately to the cession by Mexico to the United States of New Mexico, California, and the Northern Pacific coast of the old Spanish dominions in North America, and ultimately to the settlement of the boundary lines on the Pacific between the dominions of Great Britain and the United States. At the close of President Polk’s administration, the “Whigs,” who had been disheartened and “demoralised” by the defeat of their “magnetic” leader, Henry Clay, in 1844, made a second effort to capture executive power. The occasion was offered to them by a schism in the Democratic party, which had begun on personal grounds when Ex-President Van Buren, who desired a renomination, was set aside in 1844 for Mr. Polk, and which was intensified on broader issues by the determination of many Northern Democrats not to permit the extension of slavery into the vast and splendid territories acquired under President Polk.
It is far from being true, as I shall presently show, that the “Republican” party, so called, of our own times, which has just been defeated under Mr. Blaine, originated the political action in the United States which finally led to the extinction of slavery as an act of war by President Lincoln. The “Republican” party of our own times, deriving its origin from the “Federalists” of the last century, through the “Whigs” of 1840, has been recently and not unfairly described by Mr. John Bright as the “party of Protection and Monopoly.” This is so far true that it represents those tendencies to a plausible paternalism in government, and to a consolidation of the Federal power at the expense of Home Rule and State sovereignty, which found expression in Federalism at the beginning of our history; which threatened the secession of New England and the establishment of an “Eastern Empire” when Louisiana was purchased from France under President Jefferson; which waged the “war of the banks” against President Jackson; and which founded the “Whig” party of Henry Clay upon the doctrine that the Federal Government might lawfully and constitutionally levy taxes upon the consumers of imported goods for the express purpose of enhancing the profits of domestic manufacturers.
Governor Wright, a Democratic predecessor of Governor Cleveland in the executive chair of the “Empire State,” who had supported the renomination of Ex-President Van Buren in 1844, led, until his sudden and lamented death in 1847, the opposition of Northern sentiment, after the annexation of Texas, to any extension of slavery beyond the limits assigned to it by the famous “Missouri Compromise” of 1820. The Whig forerunners of Mr. Blaine were discreetly silent on the subject, and the question was thrown into the arena of political discussion and agitation by a Democratic Member of Congress from Pennsylvania, Mr. Wilmot, who, during the boundary negotiations with Mexico, introduced and moved the adoption of a “proviso,” that “no part of the territory to be acquired should be open to the introduction of slavery.”
This “proviso” was obviously unnecessary to the exclusion of slavery from any “part of the territory to be acquired,” for negro slavery had been long before abolished in New Mexico and in California under Mexican law; and the Democratic party of the United States had laid it down as a cardinal principle of Democratic policy, involved indeed, as many Democrats thought, in the principle of Home Rule, that there was “no power in Congress to legislate upon slavery in the Territories.” The introduction of the “proviso” therefore led, and could lead, solely to an immediately sterile, but eventually most dangerous, inflammation of the public mind on the question of the relations of slavery, as an institution already existing within the Union, to the politics of the country. The “proviso” was defeated in Congress; but the discussion had aroused the abolitionists of the North on the one hand, and the extreme pro-slavery men at the South on the other side, into loud and angry debate; and the opportunity of “forcing an issue” was seized by Mr. Calhoun of South Carolina, a man of the highest character and of keen intellect, who honestly believed that the South must be sooner or later driven in self-defence to withdraw from the Union, and who had brought his State and himself in 1832, on the question of the right of a State to “nullify” a Federal law, within striking distance of the executive authority wielded by the iron hand of President Jackson.
Mr. Calhoun introduced into the Senate, on the 19th of February, 1847, a series of resolutions denying the right of Congress to pass any law which would have the effect of preventing any citizen of a slave State from carrying slaves as his property into any territory. No vote was taken on these resolutions, but they served Mr. Calhoun’s purpose of awakening public sentiment at the South to the threatening attitude of the anti-slavery sentiment at the North.
The “Whigs,” with whom Mr. Lincoln then acted, profited adroitly by this excitement in both sections. They avoided the subject of slavery altogether, and nominated for the Presidency in 1848 General Taylor, a slaveholder of Louisiana, who had won a wide and well-deserved popularity as a military commander in the Mexican war, and a man of “moderate” views on all subjects. With him they associated Mr. Fillmore, a respectable citizen of New York. The friends of Ex-President Van Buren united in that State with the anti-slavery men in an independent nomination of Ex-President Van Buren and Mr. Charles Francis Adams, as the candidates of a new third party which took the name of the “Free Soil” party. This party declared that Congress had no right to interfere with slavery in the States in which it already existed; that it was the duty of Congress to prohibit slavery in the Territories; and that Congress had a constitutional right to abolish slavery in the Federal district of Columbia, which is the seat of the Federal Government. The result of all this was the election of Taylor and Fillmore, who received 163 votes in the electoral colleges against 127 cast for Cass and Butler, the Democratic candidates, and a popular plurality over those candidates of less than 150,000 in a total of somewhat less than 3,000,000 votes.
But the “Whig” triumph was short-lived. The gold discoveries in California gave such a sudden and tremendous impetus to the settlement of the new Pacific empire of the Union as “forced the hand” of the new Administration; and General Taylor dying in July 1849, while Congress and the country were hotly contending over the social and political organization of that new empire, his successor, Mr. Fillmore, with Daniel Webster as his Secretary of State, threw the weight of the Administration against the anti-slavery agitation and in favor of what were called the “Compromise Measures” of 1850. These measures admitted California without extending to the Pacific the boundary line between free and slave territory fixed by the “Missouri Compromise” of 1820, and left slavery untouched in the Federal district. Of course such a compromise neither quieted the alarms of the slaveholding South nor satisfied the aggressive abolitionists of the North. But the country accepted it, and at the next Presidential election, in 1852, the Democratic candidate, General Pierce of New Hampshire, was elected by an overwhelming majority, carrying four of the New England States, the great Middle States of New York and Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois at the West, all the Southern States, excepting Kentucky and Tennessee, and the new State on the Pacific, California. He received 254 electoral votes against 42 thrown for his Whig antagonist, General Scott, who had led the armies of the Union to their crowning victories in Mexico, and who had been a conspicuous military personage in the United States ever since the second war of 1812 with Great Britain.
There could scarcely have been a more decisive proof than this election gave that the Democratic party of the United States is really the permanent and enduring “party of the people,” without distinction of sections; for the tremendous victory won by General Pierce was distinctly due to the general, though, as it proved, the mistaken, impression of the masses of the people, that the irritating question of slavery in its Federal relations had been taken out of the arena of politics by the “Compromise Measures” of 1850. This was so clear that the opponents of the Democratic party, representing the shattered elements of the Whig party and the friends, as Mr. Bright would say, of “Protection and Monopoly,” changed front suddenly and concentrated all their efforts on a revival and extension of the anti-slavery agitation, as being the only program which offered them a hope of breaking down again, even for a time, the ascendency of Democratic principles. In this effort they were naturally seconded not only by the Northern abolitionists, but by the extreme partisans of slavery at the South. The value of slave property had been enormously increased by the sudden development of trade and manufactures all over the world, and especially in Great Britain and the United States, which resulted from the gold discoveries in California and Australia, and from the adoption, first in the United States under a great Democratic Secretary of the Treasury, Robert J. Walker, in 1846, of a liberal tariff, and then, in Great Britain, of what is not perhaps with perfect accuracy called the “Free Trade” policy of Mr. Bright and Mr. Cobden. One might almost say that the cotton manufacturers of Lancashire and New England fell into a conspiracy to delude the slaveholders of the South into those dreams of a vast slaveholding empire surrounding the Gulf of Mexico, which began, at the period of which I now write, to shake the foundations of the Union by fascinating the minds of grasping and ambitious men in that part of the United States.
In February, 1853, before the inauguration of President Pierce, a Democratic Senator, Mr. Douglas, of Illinois, who had been an unsuccessful candidate for the Presidential nomination in the preceding year, took the occasion presented by a bill for organizing a new Western Territory, Nebraska (which included the two now existing States of Nebraska and of Kansas), to propose a repeal of the old “Missouri Compromise,” to which I have more than once alluded. By this measure – a “Federalist,” not a Democratic measure – adopted in 1820, it was provided that slavery should never be carried into any Territory north of the fixed line of 36° 30´ north latitude. I have already mentioned that Congress refused to extend this line to the Pacific during the discussions which attended the admission of California in 1850; and I am sure that no one who knew Senator Douglas will differ from me now, when I say that he undoubtedly hoped by urging the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which was voted by Congress the 25th of May, 1854, to get the whole question whether slavery should or should not be introduced into new Territories, and so into the new States of the Union, relegated from the domain of Congressional action into that of “popular sovereignty.” It was not the purpose either of the small minority at the South who desired disunion as the first step towards the founding of a “semi-tropical empire,” or of the more considerable minority at the North who preferred the risk of disunion to the toleration of slavery under the American flag, that this question should be taken out of the domain of Congressional action, and the expectations of Senator Douglas were disappointed. The repeal of the “Missouri Compromise” simply turned Kansas into a battle-ground. It led rapidly up to a succession of armed conflicts within that Territory between organised bands of Northern and of Southern “emigrants,” which set fire to the popular passions in both sections of the country, “swamped” the attempt of a section of the now disbanding “Whig” party to capture power by organising the prejudices of race and of religion into a secret political order of “Native Americans” or “Know-nothings,” and gave vitality and success to the more serious and sustained efforts of a much larger section of the “Whigs,” who devoted themselves to founding a new party which should combine the permanent objects “of Protection and Monopoly” with the temporary and immediate object of restricting slavery within the limits of the then existing slave States. Thanks to this section of the “Whigs,” the modern “Republican Party” was formed in 1854, which, after precipitating the country into civil war by the election of President Lincoln (against whom it revolted, as I shall show, when he had carried through to victory the terrible task it imposed upon him), after retarding the pacification of the Union for years by its policy of military “reconstruction” at the South, and after inflicting upon the taxpayers of the United States burdens undreamed of by the original “Whigs” in their most extravagant days of “paternalism,” has now finally come to the ground under the candidacy of two of its most thoroughly representative leaders, Mr. Blaine and General Logan.