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Evangelicals, Whigs and the Election of William Henry Harrison

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Richard Carwardine
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Extract

Few American presidential elections have engaged the passions of contemporaries or exercised the imaginations of later generations more than the ‘log cabin’ campaign of 1840. By their parades, slogans, symbols and songs party managers deliberately played down questions of public policy likely to divide their ranks, reasoned discussion was overwhelmed by an organized torrent of feeling, and the carefully cultivated images of candidates obscured the reality of their outlooks. Unscrupulous propagandists, especially of the Whig party, undoubtedly manipulated the emotions of the electorate. The excitement carried a massive 80·2 per cent of voters to the polls, a huge increase in turnout over previous presidential elections and a level of participation exceeded in no subsequent campaign. William Henry Harrison was indeed, as Philip Hone put it, ‘sung into the Presidency’

Yet style alone did not create the passion. The economic distress consequent upon the Panic of 1837 allowed the Whigs to act as a focus for those who blamed the Democrats for the hard times and who looked for a more vigorous stimulus to capitalist development than Martin Van Buren was likely to provide.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , April 1983 , pp. 47 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

Richard Carwardine is Lecturer in American History at the University of Sheffield, Sheffield Sio 2TN. He wishes to thank the British Academy and the University of Sheffield Research Fund for financial assistance in the preparation of this essay.

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2 The classic statement of the view that socio-economic questions lay at the heart of the Democratic–Whig divide is Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr, The Age of Jackson (Boston, 1945)Google Scholar. The ‘ethnocultural’ approaches to the Jacksonian period, most particularly Benson, Lee, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, 1961)Google Scholar, and Formisano, Ronald P., The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan 1827–1861 (Princeton, 1971)Google Scholar, argue conversely that voting behaviour was determined principally by loyalty to ethnic and religious groups and that the socio-economic rhetoric of politicians and policy-makers scarcely influenced the electorate at large. That socioeconomic interests, couched in terms of the economic experience and needs of communities rather than classes, did have a considerable influence on voting patterns is the persuasively argued thesis of Ratcliffe, Donald J., ‘Politics in Jacksonian Ohio: Reflections on the Ethnocultural Interpretation,’ Ohio History, 88 (1979), 5–36Google Scholar. In order to square an ethnocultural analysis of voting behaviour with party leaders' attention to banking and other economic issues in their political rhetoric, Shade, William G., Banks or No Banks: The Money Issue in Western Politics 1832–1865 (Detroit, 1972), pp. 18–19, 173–4, 253Google Scholar, offers a cultural explanation of economic conflict. The present essay, though drawing on many of the insights of the ethnoculruralists, is not intended as a vindication of that school, some of whose shortcomings are identified in McCormick, Richard L., ‘Ethno-Cultural Interpretations of Nineteenth-Century American Voting Behaviour’, Political Science Quarterly, 89 (1974), 351–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and in Latner, Richard B. and Levine, Peter, ‘Perspectives on Antebellum Pietistic Politics’, Reviews in American History, 4 (1976), 15–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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6 I use the term ‘evangelical’ to refer to those whose Christianity impelled them to seek the conversion or the regeneration through grace of themselves and their fellow men. In addition to those denominations whose guiding theological principles were uncompromisingly evangelical – Methodists and New School Calvinists in particular – other bodies, including the Episcopalian and Unitarian churches, contained men and women of this outlook. My definition is much broader than Formisano's, who curiously omits from the fold the largest denomination of all, the Methodists. In referring to an evangelical ‘community’ I do not mean to imply an absence of tension between and within evangelical denominations: poisonous ecclesiastical and theological conflicts were a feature of the age. Rather I am arguing that the preoccupations of these groups acted as a centripetal force in conditioning their response to secular events. A degree of concurrence in political philosophy across the denominational divide is a premise of Hood, Fred J., Reformed America: The Middle and Southern States, 1783–1837 (Alabama, 1980)Google Scholar.

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14 For the character of the Whig party and the place of evangelicalism within it, see Howe, Daniel W., The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago, 1980), pp. 150–70 and passimGoogle Scholar. See also Heale, M. J., The Presidential Quest: Candidates and Images in American Political Culture, 1787–1852 (London, 1982), pp. 182–3, 222Google Scholar.

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22 AA, 20 and 28 May 1840; PCJ, 28 May 1840; E. W. Chester to L. Burnell, 27 July 1840, Finney Papers, Oberlin College Library; Wheeler, John, A Discourse Occasioned by the Death of Gen. William Henry Harrison… (Burlington, Vt, 1841), p. 22Google Scholar; White, Charles, A Sermon, Delivered … on Friday, May 14, 1841 …; (Owego, N.Y., 1841), p. 9Google Scholar; L. Beecher et al. to W. H. Harrison, n.d., Harrison Papers.

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34 Peck, John M., Forty Years of Pioneer Life… (Philadelphia, 1864), pp. 293–94Google Scholar; Harrison Medal Minstrel, pp. 3, 21, 65; AA, 28 May 1840; Formisano, pp. 129–31; White, , Sermon, p. 30Google Scholar; Colton, Calvin, The Crisis of the Country (Philadelphia, ca. 1840), p. 16Google Scholar.

35 For the Democrats' promotion of a ‘negative liberal state’, see Benson, , Concept, pp. 86–109Google Scholar. Benson regards the Jacksonian/anti-Jacksonian alignment in New York as having been determined in the first instance by reactions to the Antimasons – the Christian party in politics and the forerunners of the Whigs. The party allegiances then established were maintained until the 1850s. In that state at least ‘the Whigs were the “religious party” and the Democrats the “free thought party”’. Ibid., pp. 193–97, 300–12.

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38 Gunderson, p. 132; Word in Season, p. 7; Harrison Medal Minstrel, pp. 65, 126; Moore, p. 11; Hawkeye and Iowa Patriot, 29 Oct., 12 Nov. 1840; OSJ, 27 May, 17 June, 23 Sept. 1840; Colton, Calvin, American Jacobinism. By Junius (New York, 1840), passimGoogle Scholar.

39 Billington, Ray Allen, The Protestant Crusade: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York, 1938)Google Scholar still provides the best treatment of the subject.

40 Benson, pp. 187, 321–22; he estimates (p. 171) that by 1844 in New York state 95% of the Catholic Irish voted Democrat.

41 Letters of Douglas, pp. 85, 95–96; B. Maguire to J. England, 3 Sept. 1840, Martin Van Buren Papers, Library of Congress; OSJ, 28 Oct. 1840; Orestes Brownson, A., An Oration Before the Democracy of Worcester and Vicinity… (Boston, 1840), pp. 20, 35Google Scholar; AA, 16 May 1840. Cf. Heale, , Presidential Quest, pp. 195–196Google Scholar.

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