
Political "stump speaking" during the mid-19th century
The Second Party System was a period of American history which lasted from 1828 to 1854, during which the major parties competing for political power were the Whigs and the Jacksonian Democrats. The era began immediately after the collapse of the First Party System with the disintegration of the Democratic-Republican Party in 1828, and it continued until the downfall of the Whigs in 1854 and the rise of the Republican Party and the Third Party System.
The Second Party System was marked by contention over modernization, industrialization, immigration, the power of the federal government, the role of special interest groups in politics, the National Bank, and, later, over slavery. The two main parties were:
The Democrats were a populist and classical liberal political party founded in 1828 by supporters of Jacksonian democracy, a political movement led by the popular war hero and former Democratic-Republican presidential candidate Andrew Jackson. The Democrats were strongest along the frontier and in rural America, as well as among Catholic immigrants (mostly Irish and German) and poor urban laborers. The Democrats generally favored the Jeffersonian ideals of limited government, individualism, and opposition to banking and the business elite, and they opposed the reform movement (which promoted a stronger central government) and opposed the advent of public education due to the loss of parental responsibility and their undermining of religious freedom due to their secular nature. While Jacksonian Democrats were liberal/populist in their support for univeral manhood suffrage for whites (through the removal of property requirements for voting) and in their tolerance of Catholic immigrant laborers, they were socially conservative due to their support for the traditional agrarian lifestyle and their resistance to modernization, their support for expansion south and west to make room for more farmlands, and their lack of concern for humanitarianism (notably exemplified in the Trail of Tears and the Southern Democrats' support for the extension of slavery). The Democrats were fiscally conservative in that they were staunchly pro-free trade and anti-tariffs. The Democrats saw themselves as the "party of the common man", while they accused the Whigs of being aristocrats.
The Whigs were a liberal-conservative and pro-business political party founded in 1835 as the amalgamation of the anti-Jacksonian National Republican Party and the Anti-Masonic Party. Led by John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, the Whigs were the spiritual successors of the classical conservative Federalists, as they also supported a strong central government. The new party was supported by economic modernizers, bankers, businessmen, commercial farmers, evangelical Protestants, Scots-Irish and English immigrants, and Southern planters opposed to Jackson's handling of the Nullification Crisis, and it took its name from the British Whigs due to their shared goal of supporting the supremacy of elected representatives over the head of state. The Whigs favored economic expansion through an interventionist state, supported a national bank and paper currency, supported moralistic humanitarian reforms (such as public schools, the abolition of capital punishment, prison and asylum reforms, and temperance) due to the influence of the Second Great Awakening (which also resulted in their staunch opposition to Catholic immigration), supported the chartering of corporations, and supported a high tariff on imported goods to stimulate the creation of new factories. The Whigs held progressive views when it came to the reform movement, held classical liberal economic views, held traditionalist conservative views on support for a strong central government, supported the Whiggish ideal of support for the supremacy of the US Congress over the presidency, and held moralistic views when it came to opposing Catholic immigration and support for Protestantism as the dominant faith. The Whigs saw themselves as the party of moral progress and modernization, adopting the term "conservative" to refer to their support for law and order, social caution, and moral restraint, while they saw the Democrats as supporters of uneducated mob rule under "King Andrew".
The Jacksonians held the presidency from 1829 to 1841 and from 1845 to 1849, with Jackson himself serving as President from 1829 to 1837 and his vice-president Martin Van Buren serving from 1837 to 1841. Jackson successfully destroyed the Second Bank of the United States in the "Bank War" and attempted to affirm the predominance of the executive branch, notably challenging the US Supreme Court by quipping, "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it." While Jackson was generally in favor of states' rights, he took exception to South Carolina's nullification of the federal "Tariff of Abominations", forcing South Carolina to back down after threatening to send in the military in the "Nullification Crisis" of 1833. Jackson also oversaw the Trail of Tears, the mass deportation of Native Americans living to the east of the Mississippi River to the Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma; this was done in order to vacate native lands for unopposed white settlement. Jackson left office in 1837, and his vice-president Van Buren was forced to deal with the Panic of 1837, the result of Jackson's anti-bank and anti-paper money policies; nicknamed "Van Ruin", he lost re-election to Whig candidate William Henry Harrison in 1840. Harrison died a month into his term in April 1841, and his vice-president John Tyler, a former Democrat, refused to adopt his party's tariff and national bank proposals, leading to his cabinet's resignation and his nickname "His Accidency". He endorsed Democrat James K. Polk in the 1844 presidential election, in which Polk defeated Whig candidate Henry Clay. Under Polk, the Democratic government annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845 and conquered the rest of Texas and the entirety of the American West from Mexico in the ensuing Mexican-American War of 1846-48. The war's end in 1848, in addition to the previous United States v. The Amistad case, resulted in the shift in national focus towards the growing slavery debate as the Democrats and Whigs argued over whether to extend slavery into the "Mexican Cession" territories. The Whigs were deeply divided over the issue, with the northern Conscience Whigs supporting anti-extensionism and the southern Cotton Whigs supporting popular sovereignty and the right of the people to decide the legality of slavery in the new territories. As a result of the Whig Party's internal divisions, the abolitionist Free Soil Party emerged with the goal of abolishing slavery and the nativist Know Nothings emerged to oppose Catholic immigration and to focus on preserving the union. The death of the Whig Party in 1854 and its replacement by the Republican Party - a coalition of Free Soilers, northern Know Nothings, and anti-slavery former Whigs and Democrats - and the Democratic Party's new focus on defending states' rights and slavery led to the advent of the Third Party System and the start of the American Civil War in 1861.
Party affiliations[]
Industrialization and rising tensions[]
While America's Industrial Revolution transformed the county into a world-class mercantile power, not all of America's workers supported industrialization. Skilled artisans formed trade unions and workingmen's parties, which attained considerable strength in the 1830s, when tensions caused by the transition from a localized craft economy to an expanding capitalism were more accute. Disputes about wages and control over work process provoked strikes and other forms of conflict. Worker activism declined after the Panic of 1837, which generated unemployment. After recovery from the depression, vastly increased immigration intensified religious and ethnic divisions in the working class as nativism, temperance, and sectionalism took precedence over the bank dispute. Frictions persisted in the workplace and occasionally erupted into strikes, caused by machines replacing the work of unskilled workers (though mechanization created new skilled occupations such as steamboat pilots, railroad men, and telegraphers), periodic economic downturns, and, most importantly, the controversy over wage labor. The concept of wage labor, in which workers were dependent on employers for income and were "slaves to the clock", violated the Jeffersonian tradition of republicanism, which stated that a dependent class could not constitute the basis for a republican government (thus excluding women, children, and slaves from government). Jeffersonianism championed farmers and artisan producers who owned their means of production and did not owe their living to an employer; however, skilled craftsmen were gradually drawn into a relationship where they sold their labor, earning wages determined not by the value of their labor, but by market demands. The relationship between a journeyman and a master - through which a journeyman would apprentice under a master with the hopes of one day becoming one - was replaced by the relationship between an employer and employee, a relationship in which employers sought to maximize profits through controlling the costs of production and wages, and in which employers became dependent on the boss for wages and the means of production. The emergence of industrial capitalism from 1815 to 1860 forged a new system of class relations between capitalists (who owned the means of production) and workers (who owned only their labor power). Journeymen artisans and their spokesmen critiqued capitalism as robbing a wage laborer of his independence and his liberty, and they compared wage labor to wage slavery, as bosses determined the hours of toil, the pace of work, the division of labor, the level of wages, and hiring and firing at will. The pre-industrial artisan could labor as much as he pleased, working by the job rather than the clock, and being at liberty to drink with friends. In the new regimen, workers were transformed into machines, and manufacturers encouraged the post-1830 temperance movement for its Protestant ethic virtues of sobriety, punctuality, reliability, and thrift; some employers banned drinking on the job, and even off the job. For men who considered their right to drink three times a day a right, they saw wage labor as a form of slavery. Capitalism also degraded virtue, commonweal, and equality, as individuals came to care more for profit than for the community, the granting of charters and the appropriation of money to found banks, build canals and railroads, dam streams, and preside over internal improvements benefited certain classes over others, the creation of monopolies fostered a growing inequality of wealth in the form of real and personal property, the wealthiest 5% of the population came to own 70% of the East's taxable property by the 1840s, and ownership of property became an elusive goal for lower-class Americans.
Democratic agrarianism versus Whiggish commerce[]
Republican rhetoric attacked wage labor as extending slavery to free laborers, as the factory bound its workers through petty despotism. Radicals proposed schemes to equalize wealth and property or establish producers' cooperatives, while communitarian experiments such as the transcendentalist experiment at Brook Farm and the "free love" Oneida community proliferated during the 1830s and 1840s as a protest against capitalism. At the political center, the anti-monopoly Jacksonian Democrats united trade unions and labor spokesmen with yeoman farmers in the Upland South and Lower Northwest, who stood at the edge of the market revolution. The Jacksonians argued that all generated wealth should belong to its producing classes, who did not exclude bankers, lawyers, merchants, speculators, and other capitalists who benefited from the toil of laborers. Banks were especially detested by the Jacksonians. State and local governments funded roads, canals, and education, with state-chartered banks becoming a growing source of capital and proliferating during the 1830s, and their assets doubling from 1840 to 1860.
The Jacksonians portrayed the concentration of wealth in banks as a threat to liberty and as a form of "baronial usurpation", aristocracy, and the artificial inequality of wealth, while the Whigs ridiculed anti-bank sentiments as reactionary, arguing that the credit system was the offspring of free institutions and had brought unprecedented prosperity to all Americans. The Whigs desired the development of the great resources of the country, and Northern Whigs and their Republican successors championed the "free labor ideal", arguing that greater efficiency benefited both workers and employers by raising both wages and profits. The Whigs argued that the banker who mobilized capital, the entrepreneur who put it to capital, the merchant who organized markets, and the laborers who created wealth each participated in, and benefited from, economic growth. Additionally, the Whigs believed that economic growth and public education would allow for hard-working, self-disciplined, self-improving, and sober young workers to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and either become self-employed or a successful employer himself, believing in the concept of the competent and affluent "self-made man". Abraham Lincoln saw "wage slavery" as a contradiction of terms, as laborers could transform into employers and hire other laborers, prevented from doing so only through providence, folly, or singular misfortune. Meanwhile, he criticized Southern slavery for preventing laborers from becoming employers and enjoying capitalistic social mobility. The "gospel of success" produced a wealth of self-improvement literature advising young men on how to get ahead, creating a culture of materialism distinct from European values.
Whigs supported improvements such as internal improvements in the form of roads, canals, and railroads, tariffs to protect American industry and labors from low-wage foreign competition, a centralized banking system, temperance in order to sober up the American population and produce better workers, public schools as the great lever of upward mobility ("leveling all to the association of the wise and good", in the words of William H. Seward, and disarming the poor of their hostility to the rich through eliminating poverty, in the words of Horace Mann). Whigs tended to be those who succeeded in the market economy or aspired to; Whigs did best among upwardly mobile Protestants in white-collar and skilled occupations, and among farmers who lived near transportation networks that drew them into the market economy.
Insiders versus Outsiders[]
The Whigs were "insiders" who welcomed capitalism and benefited from it. While some Democrats in the South were "insiders", their greatest support came from "outsiders" such as workers who resented the deskilling of artisan occupations and the dependency of wage labor, Catholic immigrants at the bottom of the status and occupational ladder who opposed temperance and public schooling, heirs of the Jeffersonian-Jackson tradition of opposing concentrations of wealth as threats to republican liberty, and yeomen farmers in the upcountry or backcountry who disliked "city slickers", merchants, banks, Yankees, or anybody else who might interfere with their freedom to live as they pleased. These generalizations were often qualified, as the tiny number of marginalized Black voters in the North formed a solid Whig bloc, as the Democrats' professed egalitarianism was for whites only. The Democrats' commitment to slavery and racism was blatant in both the North and the South, while Whiggism grew from evangelical reformism, which had generated the abolitionist movement. Democratic leaders in New York included many bankers and merchants who had nothing in common with the Irish-American masses and the tenements apart from their allegiance to the same party.
In the older states of the Northwest - Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois - most of the original settlers had come from the Upper South and Pennsylvania, and populated the southern part of the region and evolved a corn-hog-whiskey economy, selling their small surplus in the markets along the Ohio River and Mississippi River. Dressing in homespun clothes dyed from butternut trees, they were nicknamed "Butternuts". They remained rural, Southern, and localist in their orientation, hostile to the New Englanders who settled in the northern portions of their states, made accessible by the Erie Canal after 1825. These Yankees established a wheat-cattle-sheep-dairy farming economy linked to Eastern markets by the railroads, and the multiplying Yankee banks, industries, towns, and cities caused these parts of the state to develop faster than the Butternut areas. By 1850, the Yankee areas were positively correlated with the production of wheat, cheese, and wool, banks and pro-bank sentiment, urbanization, population growth, schools, literacy, Congregational and Presbyterian churches, and temperance and anti-slavery societies. The Butternut areas were positively correlated with corn, sweet potato, and whiskey production, anti-bank and anti-Black sentiments, illiteracy, and Baptist churches. The Butternut districts were overwhelmingly Democratic, while the Yankee counties voted Whig and, after 1854, Republicans.
Immigrants formed another Democratic voting bloc; while immigration from the 1780s to 1820s was little more than a trickle of British immigrant skilled or white-collar workers (two-thirds of immigrants were Protestants), thousands of British, Irish, and German workers, facing population growth and resource strain in Northern Europe, flocked across the Atlantic to seek higher wages and cheap land in the New World. Despite the economic depression of the early 1840s, immigration rapidly increased, and economic recovery in America coincided with the Irish Potato Famine and the Revolutions of 1848, and 3 million immigrants arrived in the United States from 1845 to 1855. The religious and occupational mix of the new wave of immigrants changed from the first wave, as two-thirds were Catholics from Ireland and Germany, and, while many Germans became farmers, most of these immigrants were unskilled and semi-skilled laborers, while the Irish came to make up half of America's unskilled workers. Anti-Catholic and ethnic riots occurred across the Northeast during the 1830s and 1840s, including the 1844 riots in Philadelphia, during which a three-way battle broke out between the Irish, nativists, and the state militia. Nativist political parties sprang up in various cities, with the goals of lengthening the period of naturalization before immigrants could become citizens and voters, and restricting officeholding to natives. These "Know Nothings" managed to elect a Mayor of New York City and three congressmen from Philadelphia. Nativism was mostly anti-Catholic rather than anti-immigrant, and most Protestant immigrants (especially from Northern Ireland) became nativists themselves. While the movement was led by the middle-class, its main base of support was skilled Protestant workers, and they aborted the Jacksonian birth of workers' solidarity. The Whiggish overtones of nativism cemented Catholic immigrants' Democratic affiliations.
Rise of the Slavery Debate[]
The rise of the abolitionist movement in the late 1840s transformed slavery into a political issue. Supporters of the free labor ideal saw slavery as inhibiting economic development, discouraging education, and creating a dominant economic class bent on preserving the interests of its backward institution as the rest of the country adopted free market economics. Slavery produced an exhausted soil, old and decaying towns, wretchedly decaying, roads, and an absence of enterprise and improvement in the South, proving to be incompatible with free labor. Seward saw free labor and slavery as rivals in an "irrepressible conflict", arguing that free labor must destroy slavery. Yankees and Southrons spoke the same language, but, by the 1850s, clashing economic systems and differing laws created differences between the North and South. The Methodist and Baptist denominations split into Northern and Southern churches over slavery, and Presbyterianism split along both sectional lines and slavery. Republicanism was interpreted by Northerners in a "free labor" mode, while Southerners cherished the republican right to property, which they saw as including slaves.
To 19th-century Americans, Westward expansion represented the future, as, so long as the slavery debate focused on the morality of the institution where it existed, the Whig-Democratic two-party system could continue; once the question of extending slavry into the new territories emerged in the late 1840s, the Second Party System began to collapse. The West offered the promise of new life, virgin land, and the continued development of the United States, and the lands west of the Mississippi River were rapidly populated due to the economic depressions of the 1840s and the Gold Rush. Thousands of Americans sold their Eastern property at depression prices and headed west over the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails to a new future on Mexican- or British-claimed lands they saw as theirs under "Manifest Destiny".
Manifest Destiny[]
Starting with Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase, the Democrats championed the expansion of American institutions across the whole of North America, whether the Spanish, Indian, and Canadian residents wanted them or not. Democrats saw the original thirteen states as the great center from which civilization, religion, and liberty would radiate until the whole continent would bask in their blessing, believing in the fulfillment of America's national destiny to cover the whole continent. Whigs were not averse to spreading American liberty, but looked askance at doing so by force; they placed their faith in mission more than annexation, supporting the inculcation of the ideals of true republicanism by example rather than by conquest. While the Democrats' ideal of progress was the spread of American institutions over space, the Whig idea envisaged the improvement of those institutions over time, opposed to the instinct of boundless expansion in favor of internal improvement. American settlers in Oregon and California sought annexation to America in 1846, resulting in the Mexican-American War and nearly in a war between Britain and America; President James K. Polk sought to extend American law to these American settlers' homes, by force if necessary. American settlers in California, led by the glory-hunting captain John C. Fremont, needed little convincing by their consul to support annexation, and Fremont assisted the settlers in the "Bear Flag Uprising", resulting in the creation of the California Republic; this republic was annexed by the USA shortly after. By the fall of 1847, a Democratic movement to annex all of Mexico, or at least additional provinces of Mexico, had emerged due to the ease of American conquests. However, Polk's envoy to Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo before Polk could press for further conquests, resulting in the Mexican Cession being added to the USA. The Whigs provided enough votes to ratify the treaty, paying Mexico for the annexation of California and Mew Mexico to make such a land-grab appear less brazen; this did not satisfy some of the more expansionist Democrats, and the anti-war minority of Whigs who wanted no new territory.
Ralph Waldo Emerson warned that Mexico would poison America, as the expansion of America would create an empire of slavery rather than Jefferson's ideal "Empire of Liberty". Northern Whigs saw the Mexican-American War as part of a Slave Power plot to expand the peculiar institution through the annexation of Texas and expansion into the American West, as most of the territory wrested from Mexico was located south of the Missouri Compromise line. While many leading Whigs agreed with Polk that slavery was an abstract issue because natural conditions would exclude slavery from much of the West, numerous Southerners noted that cotton was already grown in Mexico's river valleys, that slaves would prove ideal miners in the West, and that the right to have slave property in the territories was not a mere abstraction. The Southern Democrats saw the extension of slavery to the West as a means of expanding the slave states' political power. Northern congressmen voted for the "Wilmot Proviso" to prevent the expansion of slavery into these territories, in case slavery could take root in the deserts and mountains. David Wilmot and other Northern Democrats were hostile to the increasing Southern control over their party, marked by the South's support for James K. Polk over Martin Van Buren in the 1844 Democratic primary and Polk's granting of patronage jobs to New York's anti-Van Buren "Hunkers" over Van Buren's "Barnburners". Polk's veto of internal improvements angered Democrats from Great Lakes and Western river districts, and the administration's compromise with Britain over the Oregon Country incensed more expansionist Democrats. The Northern Democrats argued that, since the South had fixed boundaries for free territories, the North had the right to fix boundaries for slave territories. Gideon Welles called for the Northern Democracy to take a stand against Southern dominance, and to satisfy the Northern people through refusing to extend the institution of slavery as a result of the war. The Wilmot Proviso vented the anger of Northern Democrats at the Southern domination of the party, and Northern Whigs were delighted to support the Proviso as part of a bipartisan Northern coalition, opposing Southern Democrats and Whigs. The normal pattern of division in Congress over the tariff, the bank, and federal aid to internal improvements was shaken by the emergence of the slavery issue as a dividing question.
The Free State cause[]
The anti-slavery cause was championed by a core of abolitionists who saw slavery as a violation of human rights and should be immeditately expiated, people who saw bondage as politically harmful to the interests of free states (Whigs and some Democrats from the Yankee belt, who saw slavery as the most important issue in American politics), moderates who were open to compromise (Abraham Lincoln argued that the promulgation of abolition doctrines would unite the South in defense of the institution), Van Burenite Democrats who cared little about slavery and had been allied with the Slave Power until it had blocked Van Buren's nomination in 1844. All of these Free Soilers believed that free labor was more efficient than slave labor because it was based on the incentives of wages and upward mobility rather than the coercion of the lash, that slavery undermined the dignity of manual work by associating it with servility, that slavery inhibited education and social improvements and kept both poor whites and slaves in ignorance, that all Southerners (apart from the slaveowning gentry) were mired in poverty and kept from experiencing a diversified economy, and that slavery must be kept out of the West so that free labor could flourish there. Many of these anti-slavery advocates were motivated to oppose the extension of slavery into the territories to reserve a section of the country for white capitalism and to keep out both free and enslaved Blacks. Southern defenders of slavery saw the system as civilizing African "savages", providing them job security rather than the miserable poverty of the North and Britain, saving white labor from the degrading tasks fulfilled by Black slaves, preventing the South from being destroyed by class conflict, as preserving republican institutions by preventing the formation of a caste system, and as creating an upper class of gentlemen to dominate the arts and public service in opposition to the social-climbing system in the North. Even those who did not expect slavery to flourish in the West saw the Wilmot Proviso as an affront to Southern honor, as it argued that the Southern man was not the equal of the Northerner due to carrying a "moral taint." The South had furnished most of the soldiers who participated in the Mexican war, causing them to feel slighted at the notion that the homeward-bound Southern veteran would find that he could not bring his slaves into the territory he had conquered. The Wilmot Proviso would also bring ten new free states into the Union, enabling the North to proclaim freedom for the South's slaves and reduce the South to the state of Haiti, in which white children would be consigned to the flames. John C. Calhoun argued that the territories were the common property of the states, and that Congress could prevent men from bringing slaves into the territories no more than it could prevent men from bringing their hogs west.
By the 1848 presidential election, the ailing Polk proposed extending the Missouri Compromise line west to further divide the country along free and slave lines. Another policy put forward was Lewis Cass' idea of "popular sovereignty", maintaining that settlers and territories were equally capable of managing their own affairs as states, and that settlers should decide for themselves if they desired slavery in their territory. Most contemporaries presumed that settlers could decide the question during the territorial stage, even before the drafting of a state constitution; this rejected both the free-stater Wilmot Proviso and the pro-slavery Calhoun resolutions. The Democrats and Whigs both attempted to pursue sectional unity, and the Whigs chose the apolitical general Zachary Taylor as their presidential candidate. Many voters preferred rough types as presidential candidates, resulting in Taylor beating out the more refined general Winfield Scott for the Whig candidacy. Taylor's victory at the Battle of Buena Vista made him a national hero, enabling him to surpass even the "American System"'s champion and longtime Whig Party leader Henry Clay, a three-time loser in presidential contests. Taylor's campaign was designed to have a distinctly Southern appeal, as Taylor was a Louisiana slaveholder, thus enabling the Whigs to compete in the South as well as the Whiggish North. Charles Sumner and Northern Whigs opposed Taylor's candidacy due to his ambivalence towards slavery, and he and the anti-slavery "Conscience Whigs" attacked the textile manufacturer-dominated "Cotton Whigs" for their lukewarm position on the extension of slavery and their support for Taylor. Conscience Whigs bolted the party rather than support the alliance between the "lords of the loom and the lords of the lash", supporting the creation of a Northern party of freedom.
In New York, the Van Buren faction of Democrats was ready for revolt, and the Barnburners sent a separate delegation to the Democratic National Convention. Rather than be seated alongside the Hunkers, the Barnburners nominated Van Buren as their presidential candidate on a Wilmot Proviso platform. At the same time, the abolitionist Liberty Party debated future strategy, with a radical faction seeking to proclaim a new doctrine that the Constitution empowered the government to abolish the government in the states, and a more moderate faction led by Salmon P. Chase sought to form a coalition with anti-slavery Whigs and Democrats. The Libertyites, Barnburners, and Conscience Whigs formed the "Free Soil Party" as anti-slavery men were propelled out of their old allegiances. 15,000 fervent delegates met under a huge canopy in Buffalo and cursed the Slave Power, while an executive committee of 465 men met in a church and fused a party together in spite of its members' disagreements over banking, tariffs, and other issues. Van Buren endorsed the exclusion of slavery from the territories and the abolition of slavery in Washington DC, and his Barnburner backers saw slavery as a relic of barbarism which must be swept away in the progress of Christian civilization. Sumner called on Conscience Whigs to vote for the Van Buren of 1848, and the Buffalo convention was stirred by the party's Liberty-inspired platform. Both major parties abandoned their strategy of abandoning the slavery question; Democrats circulated different campaign biographies of Cass in the North and South, portraying him as a supporter of popular sovereignty in the North and as an opponent of the Wilmot Proviso in the South. Whigs had an easier time appearing to be all things to all men, telling Northerners that Taylor refused to veto anti-slavery legislation, and Southerners that Taylor was a cotton and sugar plantation owner (as opposed to the Michigander Cass). Taylor carried 8 of the 15 slave states with a majority of 52%, and 7 of 15 free states (though the Whig popular vote in the North dropped to 46% due to Free Soil inroads). The Free Soilers supplanted the Democrats as the second party in Vermont, Massachusetts, and New York, though they failed to win a single state, and spoiled the election in New York for Cass and Ohio for Taylor. Free Soilers hoping to realign American politics around slavery were pleased with the election, which brought the Second Party System to its breaking point.
Compromise of 1850[]
The California Gold Rush of 1848 led to an influx of settlers and immigrants to California; by 1850, the territory's population surpassed both Delaware and Florida. California's mining camps were governed by elected officials and enforced a rough justice through vigilantism, but the largely male population of the territory, from every hole and corner of the world, was inclined to defend personal rights through revolvers and the hangman's rope. The lure of gold caused many US Army soldiers in California to desert, sabotaging the territory's efforts at attaining law and order. Both California and the Hispanic-dominated territory at New Mexico were in sore need of territorial governments, creating a new sectional crisis. Congress would have none of Polk's proposed extension of the Missouri Compromise line, and fistfights and threats of Southern secession broke out in Congress as Northerners stood by the Wilmot Proviso and called for the abolition of slavery in DC. Southerners in the Senate quashed the Northerners' proposed bills, and the Southern leader Calhoun read out a long list of Northern aggressions to reiterate his doctrine of the constitutional right to take slaves into all territories. Calhoun's address misfired; Southern Whigs did not want to undercut their party before Taylor took office, and refused to endorse Calhoun's secessionist manifesto.
However, Taylor betrayed their expectation with his plan to admit both California and New Mexico as free states, and, in October 1849, Californians adopted a free stater constitution. New Mexico proved more problematic, as Texas claimed half of New Mexico and parts of Colorado, and the only English-speakers in the region were anti-government Mormons. Additionally, Taylor sought to win Free Soilers back into Whig ranks by assuring Northerners that they need have no apprehension about the extension of slavery. As a result, Southern Whigs took a beating in the 1849 off-year state elections, as Taylor was perceived as abandoning the South and alienating the Whig Party there. 12 Free Soilers held the balance between 112 Democrats and 105 Whigs in the lower house, and the House failed to elect a speaker after several ballots as Southern Democrats and Whigs alike threatened disunion over the question of extending slavery to California. Both the House and the Senate were caught up in fistfights until the House agreed to allow the Speaker to be elected via a plurality, and moderate Democrat Howell Cobb was elected on the 63rd ballot. Taylor, who previously regarded the Northerners as the instigators of sectional disputes, came to see the Southerners as the true antagonists, with his son-in-law Jefferson Davis their chief conspirator. Calhoun assembled Southern rights advocates at the Nashville Convention, and the Lower South cotton states and Virginia elected delegates, while the Whig states in the Upper South held back. In January 1850, Henry Clay presented a series of concessions to the Senate, including the admission of California as a state, the settling of the Texas-New Mexico boundary dispute in exchange for the federal assumption of the Republic of Texas' debts, the abolition of the slave trade in DC and the preservation of slavery in DC, the denial of congressional power over the interstate slave trade, and the adoption of a Fugitive Slave Act. The Compromise of 1850 emerged after seven months of debates and cloakroom bargaining, averting a great crisis, but also merely postponing the civil war. During the debates, however, both sides' spokesmen made sectional cases: William Seward argued that Americans answered to a higher law, the law of God, with regard to slavery, while John Calhoun argued that it was up to the North to make up for its past efforts to restrict Southern property rights by enacting a Fugitive Slave Law.
In June 1850, 8,000 citizens in New Mexico voted to adopt a free state constitution, sparking a new crisis. The Governor of Texas threatened uphold with force his state's claim to Santa Fe and the state east of the Rio Grande, and a confrontation between the Texan militia and the US Army loomed. Alexander H. Stephens warned that the days of the republic would be numbered once Southern troops crossed the "Rubicon" of the Rio Grande, threatening civil war. However, Taylor's death that same year marked a turning point in the crisis, as the new President, Millard Fillmore, was hostile to the Sewardite Whig faction in his state and favored the South. Fillmore shelved New Mexico's application for statehood, and the Senate defeated Clay's measure to admit both California and New Mexico; only California would be admitted, as per the Compromise of 1850. Northerners of both parties and border state Whigs secured the votes for the compromise, and many Northern Democrats joined Southerners from both parties in organizing New Mexico and Utah as territories without restrictions on territory. Only Sewardites and Calhounites viewed the compromise with suspicion, while jubilation swept Washington DC. Meanwhile, the Fire Eaters of the Nashville Convention affirmed the South's right to secede and called for another Southern convention. South Carolina's delegation determined that, in the case of another Northern infraction, they would secede first, expecting other Southern states to follow. In 1852, Utah governor Brigham Young legalized slavery, while New Mexico adopted a pro-slavery constitution in 1859; however, slavery was distant from both territories, and New Mexico was never home to a single slave.
Fugitive Slave Law[]
The Fugitive Slave Law was the only "big government" policy the South was in favor of; any person held to service or labor in one state who escaped to another was to be delivered up on claim to the party to whom their labor or service was due. This law also forced Northerners to cooperate with slave patrols in recapturing escaped slaves in the North, amounting to an invitation for kidnappers to seize free Blacks. The Christiana riot and several other incidents of abolitionist resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law further stoked sectional tensions. South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi held conventions in 1851 to calculate the value of the Union, and the Fire Eater William Lowndes Yancey toured Alabama to stir up support for similar action, while the Governor of South Carolina expressed his firm belief that the state would secede. By then, a reaction was setting in as the highest cotton prices in the decade and the largest cotton crop ever caused many a planter to rethink secession. Old party lines temporarily dissolved as a minority of Democrats in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi joined Whigs to form Constitutional Union parties and advocated cooperation with other states rather than secession by individual states. Unionists won the Georgia and Mississippi governorships, and the legislatures of Georgia and Alabama elected 14 of the 19 congressmen from these three states, and, in South Carolina, the separatists suffered a setback. Unionists proclaimed themselves no less ardent for the safety, rights, and honor of the slaveholding states than Southern rights democrats, however, as they swore that the South would abide by the Compromise of 1850 so long as the North similarly abided, and that any action by Congress against slavery in Washington or a refusal to admit a new slave state or to recognize slavery in the territories would cause Georgia and other states to resist with secession as a last resort. Southern Unionism would last only so long as the North remained on good behavior, neutralizing the apparent triumph of Southern Whiggery in the 1851 elections. The Democratic tail of the Unionist coalition wagged the Whig dog, and, with Fillmore in the White House, the situation seemed stabilized. Northern Whigs, however, had a hard time swallowing the Fugitive Slave Law, and sent several radical anti-slavery men to Congress, threatening to take control of the Whig Party. Southern Whigs had barely survived Taylor's apostasy, and another such shock would shatter them.
Democrats, conservative Whigs, mercantile associations, and other forces of moderation organized public meetings throughout the North to affirm support of the Compromise, including the Fugitive Slave Law. These same forces, aided by widespread racism in the North, went further; Indiana and Iowa banned Black immigration in 1851, followed by Illinois in 1853, in an expression of Butternut racism and a show of support for the Fugitive Slave Law. The Census of 1850 alarmed many Southerners, as lack of economic opportunity in the South (and competition with slave labor) caused seven-eighths of immigrants to settle in the North, and the North experienced greater population growth and infrastructural development than the South. With 42% of the population, slave states possessed only 18% of the country's manufacturing capacity, and nearly half of the South's industrial capital was located in the four border states. However, cotton prices were rising, and the slave states exported 70% of their cotton abroad and the remainder to Northern mills while importing clothing from the North or abroad. Nevertheless, the South's export-import economy saw a drain of money into Northern or British firms, and nearly all of the ships carrying cotton to and from the South were owned by Northern or British companies.
Southern economic nationalism[]
The South's degrading vassalage to the North contributed to rising anti-Northern sentiment, with some Southerners comparing their system of slavery to their "financial slavery" to the North (even the slaves wore Northern clothing and worked with Northern farming implements). A series of conclaves held since the 1830s attempted to bring about the creation of Southern shipping lines to trade directly with Britain, and these advocates for economic independence also called for the establishment and patronage of Southern publishers, magazines, authors, professors, and colleges to rebel against the North's provision of the South's books, economic middle-men, manufactured goods, and other daily implements. During the 1850s, the slave states quadrupled their railroad mileage, and capital invested in Southern manufacturing rose 77%. However, the South's improving economic fortunes belied its continued slow pace in comparison to the North's booming infrastructure and industry. While the light of Jeffersonian egalitarianism had dimmed by the 1850s, agrarianism continued to be strong, as planters generated as much wealth through slavery as they would have through industry. The South's agrarian cultural climate created an unfriendly environment for industrialization, as rural life promoted a generous hospitality and a lofty spirit of independence, as opposed to the capitalistic greed brought about through the arrival of industry.
By the 1850s, Southern politicians had taken over the commercial conventions and advocated for the reopening of the Atlantic slave trade, as the slave population of the states would overflow into the territories and expand naturally. However, the planters of the Upper South opposed this reopening, as the high demand for slaves from the Upper South in the Lower South provided Upper South planters with an incentive to control the supply of slaves. In 1858, the lower house of the Louisiana legislature passed a law allowing the importation of African "apprentices", but the state senate defeated it.