The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1828–1856

William J. Cooper

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 1980
• ISBN:
  9780807142660
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The politics of slavery consumed the political world of the antebellum South. Although local economic, ethnic, and religious issues tended to dominate northern antebellum politics, The South and the Politics of Slavery convincingly argues that national and slavery-related issues were the overriding concerns of southern politics during these years. Accordingly, southern voters saw their parties, both Democratic and Whig, as the advocates and guardians of southern rights in the nation.
William Cooper traces and analyzes the history of southern politics from the formation of the Democratic party in the late 1820s to the demise of the Democratic-Whig struggle in the 1850s, reporting on attitudes and reactions in each of the eleven states that were to form the Confederacy. Focusing on southern politicians and parties, Cooper emphasizes their relationship with each other, with their northern counterparts, and with southern voters, and he explores the connections between the values of southern white society and its parties and politicians. Based on extensive research in regional political manuscripts and newspapers, this study will be valuable to all historians of the period for the information and insight it provides on the role of the South in politics of the nation during the lifespan of the Jacksonian party system.

1 The South and the Early Jackson Party

I

ANDREW JACKSON STRODE across southern politics like an Olympian among mortals. Men flocked to his banner simply because he carried it. Professing devotion to Jackson personally, Virginia’s Henry Wise announced, “I would have voted for him against all odds.” One of Jackson’s young followers in Mississippi recalled that he “found [him]self a democrat without being able to explain why [he] was of that party.” “I began,” he exclaimed, “as a follower of Jackson knowing nothing of the Force Bill, regarding ‘nullification’ as a heresy without knowing what it meant.” Jackson’s electoral triumphs in the South sometimes challenge credulity. In 1828 he received 81.4 percent of all popular votes cast; four years later, though he lost ground in the nation as a whole, he swept the southern states with an astonishing average of 88 percent of the popular vote.¹

Even though Jackson stood as a hero for the entire country his southern image was special. After all, the Battle of New Orleans catapulted him to national fame. The political power of the Democrats in Louisiana stemmed not from “issue or principle” but directly from “the strength of Andrew Jackson”—a strength founded on the great victory and personal ties formed by Jackson at that time. A public rally in New Orleans in 1832 underscored the direct link between military victory and political success: “Resolved, that as citizens of Louisiana, we owe a special debt of gratitude to the leader of the band of citizen soldiers, who on the 8th of January, 1815, repulsed the invader from our shores.” White men in the old Southwest remembered that Jackson had destroyed Indian braves as well as British soldiers; he had made their hearths safe and to him they owed fealty. A visitor in Alabama reported that Jackson and his chief military aides were “worshipped as Deities.” The chairman of the Mississippi State Democratic Convention of 1834 described Jackson as the one man who during the time of Indian danger “gallantly flew to our relief.” For white Mississippians, Jackson “ha[d] fought every foe; ha[d] conquered in every field.” George Gilmer, a governor and a congressman, remembered that “All in Georgia were Jackson men whilst General Jackson was in office.”²

Besides saving the South from redcoat and redskin, Jackson was a southerner. That he was born in South Carolina, reached maturity in Tennessee, and early began to accumulate two possessions dear to white southerners—land and black slaves—clearly identified him as one of them. That personal identity, easily spilling over into politics, assumed striking importance. Announcing the election of Willie P. Mangum as the new United States senator from North Carolina, Marshall Polk told his brother James that Mangum was “a most thorough and uncompromising friend of General Jackson” and “a genuine and unblushing Southron in feeling and principle.” To Marshall Polk the two went hand in hand. Carrying the Jacksonian message to Louisiana sugar planters, a group inclined toward the administration of John Quincy Adams and its tariff views, the energetic Democratic organizer John Slidell emphasized the intimacy between sugar and slavery and then pointed out that Jackson was a slaveowning southerner. In Alabama, Jackson was idolized as the “hero of the South.”³

Jackson’s southern identity underlay not only his popular appeal in the South but also the strategy used by the builders of the Jackson or Democratic party in the South between 1825 and 1828. Jackson himself made no overt use of that identity; in fact his role in party building was largely passive. But his southern organizers and supporters invoked his name as the new apostle of the South, the new Jefferson, the new sentinel of southern power and prerogative in the nation. These southern Jacksonians, believers in the Old Republican faith, were concerned with getting back to their conception of first principles—a small federal government that had severely limited powers, strict construction of the Constitution, states’ rights, the doctrines professed in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions. Belief in this faith identified “a Democrat of the Jackson School.” Such a Democrat, as the youthful William Gilmore Simms described himself, was “a States rights man, opposed to Tariffs, Banks, Internal Improvements, American Systems, Fancy Railroads, Floats, Land Companies, and every Humbug East or West, whether of cant or cunning.”⁴

Most southern political leaders believed that their creed had been endangered in the whirlwind of nationalism following the War of 1812 that culminated in the grand national vision of John Quincy Adams. Faced with Adams’ administration, southerners had to embrace Jackson, in John C. Calhoun’s view, to forestall the total triumph of an Adams-type nationalism inimical to the South. Likewise the Old Republicans of Virginia and the seaboard South viewed Jackson as a bulwark against the nationalism that threatened their political and social world. Virginians especially acted on this premise. The controlling force in Virginia politics, the Richmond Junto dominated by Thomas Ritchie and his Richmond Enquirer, considered itself the guardian of ideological purity. For Ritchie and the junto the Jackson party promised redemption. These seaboard men often thought of the national government as their private preserve. From the birth of the nation they had contributed most of the men and the ideas that governed the new republic. If the purity of the faith had been diluted after 1812, and many thought it had, still the men in charge were seaboard men totally identified with the South and with Jeffersonian politics. Symbolically as well as realistically the passing of the Virginia dynasty signaled that the seaboard men could no longer think of the national government as their particular province. Fearful of the nationalism that seemed to herald their declining importance, they canonized the Republican dogma of the 1790s systematized in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, which declaimed against national power. To them any transgression against that dogma denied the sanctity of their exegesis of the Jeffersonian gospel. Alexis de Tocqueville caught their mood exactly when he spoke of the “melancholy uneasiness” affecting southerners facing this nationalism.⁵

Southerners felt no aspect of this nationalism more keenly than what they called its tampering with slavery. Between the ratification of the Constitution and the War of 1812, outside hands had made no serious effort to touch slavery. But after 1815 came the American Colonization Society and its efforts to gain congressional funding, the Missouri crisis, and John Quincy Adams’ proposed mission to the Panama Conference, each, in the minds of southerners, an unwarranted and dangerous attempt to involve the national government in slavery. When John Quincy Adams became president, certain southerners believed that in order to maintain his office he would attempt to array the nonslave states against the slave states; a few excitable souls even saw his encouraging slave rebellions to put down southern power.⁶ Thus the Jackson party would protect not only Republican ideology but also southern guardianship of slavery, because by shackling the central government the ideology guaranteed local or southern control of all local questions, including slavery.

The organization of the early Jackson party certainly allowed, and even encouraged, southerners to think of it as their special party. Andrew Jackson headed a loosely knit and decentralized party, one which local leaders could define as a bastion defending their own interests and views. Even though Jackson’s hero image and personal appeal dominated the party, he did not build it up in an organizational sense. Leading organizers of the Jackson party such as Martin Van Buren of New York in the North along with Old Republicans and Calhoun in the South used Jackson’s name and popularity but they did the building, not he. In fact, when Jackson tried to work with the details of organization, he failed disastrously even in his own Tennessee.⁷ Because southerners were so prominent in the creation of the party, they had every reason to think of it as a vehicle designed to carry them to their goals. Van Buren’s firm belief in the Virginia doctrine and ready acknowledgment of southern political and ideological domination in the new party reinforced the southern conception of the party’s identity and purpose.

Nothing in Jackson’s own view of the party contradicted this assumption. For Jackson, party and politics, like everything else, became intensely personal. Loyalty was the key. Jackson simply transferred to politics his military requirement of loyalty to himself as commander—his party became his new army. He did not view politics through the eyes of the rising professional politicians. In Jackson’s time politics became a profession, one in which numerous southerners excelled. And as Richard Hofstadter has noted, the new professional separated political and personal relationships. But not Jackson; he always referred to political enemies with such phrases as “infamous, dastardly and vilainouss [sic],” “demagogues and apostates,” “apostates and traitors,” “Jesuitical hypocrites and apostates,” “odious and unnatural.” When his old Tennessee associate Hugh Lawson White turned against his insistence on Van Buren as successor, Jackson assailed White as a man who “ha[d] been acting the hypocrite all his life and individually to me.” Jackson simply tolerated no disagreements; to him personal and political loyalty could not be divided. Jackson’s longtime and valued friend, John Coffee, advised Jackson’s nephew and personal secretary, young Andrew Jackson Donelson, “to make it a point not to mingle or associate with anyone who the General believed, was either personally or politically unfriendly to him, although he may have unfounded jealousies against individuals on that subject.”⁸

Prior to Jackson’s first administration, adherence to the Jackson party demanded no specific creedal loyalty other than a general support of original Jeffersonian principles and an opposition to the Adams regime. Thus, for southerners, belonging to the Jackson party meant loyalty to a venerated and self-protecting ideology and to a fellow southerner and slaveowner who was a recognized worshipper at the Jeffersonian church altar. Loyalty to party, then, became crucial to three basic loyalties—to section, to social system, to nation.⁹ As southerners viewed national politics in the late 1820s, only the success of the Jackson party insured sectional safety, social security, as well as a proper direction and attitude in the national government. All loyalties focused on and stemmed from the political loyalty. For the South, political paradise seemed to have returned.

II

The southern unity forged by the Jackson party shone brilliantly in 1828. Adams made a respectable showing only in Louisiana, where he gained 47 percent of the vote. Elsewhere southerners expressed their preference for their candidate with dramatic unanimity—Georgia led with 100 percent of its vote for Jackson; Tennessee gave him 95 percent; Alabama and Mississippi over 80 percent; North Carolina 73 percent; Virginia 69 percent; and though South Carolina had no popular vote, its eleven electoral votes went for Jackson.¹⁰ Only Jackson himself possessed the power to break the front of his southern phalanx, for only by his action or inaction could southerners see him as other than their political savior. The possibility of disappointment did exist precisely because southerners expected so much from their new redeemer. And in fact during his first term, tremors of dissatisfaction rumbled within the South.

The most doctrinaire ideologues of the Old Republican group first found Jackson wanting. These purists identified the tariff of 1828, the hated Tariff of Abominations, as the most heinous manifestation of the nationalist policy they abhorred. That protective tariff violated their constitutional theory, for, as they interpreted the document, it gave no permission for a protective tariff. Moreover, they saw protection as benefiting the North and hurting the South. When Jackson failed to strike a smashing blow at the tariff during his first two annual messages, these ideologues, mostly Virginians, began to wonder whether or not they had misplaced their trust.¹¹

Additionally these Virginians looked to John C. Calhoun as the ideological preceptor of the new administration. Wary of Jackson’s military background and impressed both with Calhoun’s experience in statecraft and his intellectual power now turned with vehemence toward Old Republican doctrines, they expected Calhoun to provide guidance and character in Washington. His loss of favor and final break with Jackson caused great anguish among this group of Virginians. Now they saw Jackson repudiating virtue and ability as well as Old Republican tenets. Their spokesmen, Governor John Floyd and United States senators Littleton Waller Tazewell and John Tyler, turned to the South Carolinian.¹²

The term Old Republican is an inclusive one for Virginia Democrats of this period. Both leaders like Floyd and Tazewell who looked to Calhoun and those like Ritchie and his fellows in the Richmond Junto who opposed Calhoun identified themselves as Old Republicans. Although both groups professed loyalty to their conception of the doctrine of 1798, they differed on political matters both before and after the creation of the Democratic party. The Junto men were much more concerned about party in general and about loyalty to the Democratic party in particular than the men who went with Calhoun, none of whom belonged to the Richmond Junto.

Both politics and personalities doomed Calhoun.¹³ Because of political pressures from his native South Carolina and his own personal conviction, Calhoun had moved to an intransigent position on the tariff; protection must be abandoned and promptly. If not, then extreme measures—nullification or as Calhoun preferred, state interposition—were in order. Jackson, aware that he had more than doctrinaire South Carolinians and Virginians in his party, retained greater flexibility. Moreover, he denounced any remedies that seemed to threaten the Union as did the much discussed doctrine of nullification. Although Calhoun kept secret his intimate association with nullification until the summer of 1831, Jackson did not trust his vice-president. The confrontation at the Jefferson Day dinner in April, 1830, when Jackson pronounced his famous toast, “Our Federal Union—it must be preserved,” served as public notice that the alliance between president and vice-president was indeed tenuous.

By the spring of 1830 Jackson had also come to believe that Calhoun had misled him in a personal matter, and that decision dictated a full and final break with Calhoun. Back in 1818 Jackson’s activities in Florida had caused difficulties for him with some members of James Monroe’s administration. Jackson thought that Calhoun, then secretary of war, had supported him in cabinet debates when in fact Calhoun had not. Since 1827 the two men had carried on an intermittent correspondence devoted to clarifying Calhoun’s role in the events of 1818. By 1830 with the assistance of several close associates and an 1818 letter purloined from Calhoun’s files Jackson convinced himself that Calhoun had been disingenuous and, even worse, personally disloyal—in Jackson’s code the ultimate sin. The president reacted in typical Jackson fashion; Calhoun immediately became not simply an opponent but an apostate.

Calhoun’s demise led to the ascendancy of Martin Van Buren. Van Buren had brought the southern Old Republicans to the Jackson standard and more than anyone else he had built the Jackson party. From the beginning of the coalition he and Calhoun hoped to succeed Jackson. With the Jackson-Calhoun break the way seemed open for Van Buren. Still both he and Jackson wanted to eliminate all Calhoun influence from the administration. To Van Buren’s acute political eye such a purge ought to include cabinet reorganization. Accordingly he suggested a plan that included his own resignation as secretary of state followed by Jackson’s requesting the other members to follow suit. By this method the cabinet was reorganized.

In the reshuffle, southerners John M. Berrien of Georgia and John Branch of North Carolina found themselves among the politically outcast.¹⁴ Although neither had been, strictly speaking, a Calhoun man, each fell as a casualty in the Jackson-Calhoun feud. Not unexpectedly, their banishment engendered anger at Jackson and at Van Buren, whom they recognized as the villain in their piece. Angry, both Berrien and Branch went home to stir up opposition to the administration. Thus they joined the small but growing number of southerners who found Jackson and the Jackson party a bit less than saintly.

These dissidents found themselves in the political wilderness. The National Republicans comprised the only organized anti-Jackson group. That party had demonstrated its political impotence back in 1828, and nothing since that date indicated any upsurge in strength for the party of Adams and Henry Clay. Aside from its chronic political weakness the National Republican party offered no ideological warmth to the banished Jacksonians. Generally these exiles prided themselves on their Old Republican purity and orthodoxy. The nationalism of National Republicanism repelled and frightened them. In fact it had spurred their support for the Jackson party during the Adams presidency. The National Republican party simply did not provide an acceptable political alternative to the Jackson Democrat party.

But any move toward a new party both southern oriented and ideologically safe ran head-on into the powerful force of Andrew Jackson. A party had to have followers as well as leaders. And these former Jacksonian leaders recognized that if they challenged Jackson directly, they would have few to lead. Jackson’s personal popularity, according to one of his North Carolina...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Prologue: An Election
• 1 The South and the Early Jackson Party
• 2 The Arena of Southern Politics
• 3 The Flowering of Southern Sectional Politics
• 4 Tippecanoe and Tyler and Slavery, Too
• 5 The Great Aberration
• 6 The Explosion of Texas
• 7 Advent of the Territorial Question
• 8 Parties in Crisis
• 9 Victory and Defeat
• Epilogue: Toward 1860
• Appendix A John C. Calhoun and the Pakenham Letters
• Appendix B Southern Whigs and the Preston Bill
• Appendix C Seward, Southern Whigs, and Kansas-Nebraska
• Bibliography
• Index
• Footnotes