Election 2024 - Deja Vu
The small town of Pierce, NE carries the faint echo of a Presidential election 150 year past that offers a prophetic vision of our own in 2024.
I’m not like most people – I’m a Cornhusker. I admit I’ve spent most of my life desperately trying to be cool and maybe that’s just what Nebraska’s misfits do. Perhaps if I’d been born in a more sophisticated state, Texas or Wyoming for example? Even worse than the stigma associated with my Nebraskan roots, a large share of my posterity, kids and grandkids, hails from California, and to them I extend a sincere apology. I know that God forgives, I hope they do as well.
But a great blessing from my beginnings in the Cornhusker State is a beloved wife from that same obscure corner of the world. And while I harken from its hardscrabble windy western prairies, she was nurtured in the deep silted hills left by the last ice age’s retreating glaciers on a farm outside the City of Pierce in the County of Pierce, tucked into Nebraska’s northeast corner.
As is common to Nebraska, my wife’s hometown of Pierce is a community founded by German immigrants. One can trace the waves of German immigration to America in the 19th Century by the founding dates of Nebraska’s towns, moving east to west.
Importantly, the City of Pierce is of the Lutheran communion rather than of the Catholic persuasion. To those benighted souls whose historical awareness is shaped by the Reformation and Thirty Years War rather than the more consequential intersections of medieval transgender discrimination and climate change, this religious divide provides insight into the different character of Nebraska’s various communities.
I was raised in a third strain of Christianity common to old Nebraska, the Congregational communion. Somewhat of an outlaw sect, the existence of Congregational churches in a sea of Lutherans & Catholics demonstrates that even the tractable German psyche can be perverted by exposure to malign unorthodox influence, in this case spending a century in the bosom of Holy Mother Russia.
As it happens, German is a nebulous term, both ethnic and nationality, encompassing immigrants from older polities now represented by Germany, Poland, Austria, and the various Baltic/Slavic countries. In fact while my better half’s ancestry was believed to be Germany proper, knowledgeable outsiders have made a strong case for a Polish or Baltic ancestral home based on patronymic spelling.
Pierce was settled in 1870 just after the American Civil War and therein lies a tale. For Pierce, both county and “city”, were named in honor of Franklin Pierce, 14th President of the United States, a man frequently named by numerous modern historians as the worst President in US history. But those long gone citizens of Pierce county and town decided to honor Franklin Pierce for the very circumstances of his downfall.
There is much about Franklin Pierce and his times that brings to mind our own. At the very least, our two recent Presidents must be considered strong contenders to unseat President Pierce in the eyes of future historians for the sobriquet of America’s Worst President. Absent the black swan’s appearance, either Joe Biden or Donald Trump will win a second term this November, an event promising to elevate the winner into the dunce’s chair.
While either Donald Trump or Joe Biden are almost certain to displace Franklin Pierce for this dubious honor, they have very little in common with him. While Trump/Biden are uber-partisans, dispensing Kool-Aid in throat choking draughts, Franklin Pierce was nothing of the kind. Looking back from the emotionless and safe distance of closing in on 200 years, I would say that Franklin Pierce is a good illustration of former Secretary of State George Schultz’s point –
“He who walks in the middle of the road gets hit from both sides.”
In a polarized age where emotions run high, the smart and sensible course is to drink the Kool-Aid. Always the more astute political operation in the modern era, the Democratic Party has been purging its ranks for a generation or more. But the coming of Trump has inaugurated a like purification in the Republican, a relentless and inexorable Kristallnacht targeting that contemptible species known as a RINO.
Franklin Pierce was a moderate Democrat from New Hampshire, a state next to the seething volcano of antebellum abolitionists – Massachusetts. His Presidency and subsequent reputation bear witness to the unpleasant truth of moderation being not a virtue but a vice in times of virulent partisanship.
Also, Franklin Pierce had the misfortune to be a “Jacksonian Democrat” a generation after Andrew Jackson. Proving this time gap to be a hazard common across our history, he is a cousin of today’s political relics, “Reagan Republicans” - a species now being purged by the orange headed man and his minions.
Andrew Jackson, 7th President and man who gave his name to Jacksonian Democracy, was a force of nature, a man of mythic proportions, a frontiersman in an era of the frontier. His father died in a logging accident three weeks before he was born. Living with his widowed mother in South Carolina during the American Revolution, he served as a courier for the rebels and was captured.
When a British officer demanded the preteen Jackson polish his boots, he refused. The officer drew his saber, slashing him across the face. He was then thrown into a prison camp where he nearly died from smallpox. Released to his mother in a prisoner exchange, she nursed him back to health, but died soon after, making Jackson an orphan at the age of 14. Making his own way thereafter, Jackson wore the saber’s scar as a badge of honor the rest of his life.
After the war, he moved to Tennessee and in common with other young men in the early 19th Century of great ambition but little means apprenticed himself in law. Passing the bar, he was appointed to a district attorney’s position and tried his hand at land speculation. A consummate networker during this time, he made powerful friends and entered politics.
Invested with military command as well as his nickname “Old Hickory” during the War of 1812, he commanded the American forces at the Battle of New Orleans, a lopsided American victory in a war notably devoid of American victories. The battle and Old Hickory’s part in it was immortalized in catchy song 150 years later by Johnny Horton, a favorite of my bygone and largely misspent youth. The song charted at No. 1 on Billboard magazine for 1959
.With apologies to our English cousins and good grammar, the lyrics of the song provide a window on the great changes in popular music as well as our culture’s historical awareness over my lifetime:
“In 1814 we took a little trip
Along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip’
We took a little bacon and we took a little beans
And we caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans
…….
Old Hickory said, We could take “em by surprise
If we didn’t fire our muskets ‘til we looked ‘em in the eye
We held our fire til we see’d their faces well
Then we opened up our squirrel guns and really gave ‘em”
To be honest, In spite of his Democratic Party membership there is more than a little bit of Donald Trump in Andrew Jackson, including his frequent brushes with bankruptcy. In fact, it is reported to be Andrew Jackson is Donald Trump’s favorite President. It seems The Donald is a real fanboy.
Like Trump, Jackson was a hot tempered man who took everything very personally, fighting a number of duels in his life. But unlike Trump, he was a man of considerable personal courage as evidenced by his war time bravery and willingness to defend both his own and his wife’s honor - mano a mano a duelo.
Running on a platform as “the voice of the people”, he defeated three other candidates for the presidency in 1828 and in so doing became the founder of the Democratic Party. His was an enormously popular Presidency during its two terms and his political philosophy, known as “Jacksonian Democracy”, embodied the spirit of the age.
In almost a 180o from the present day Democratic Party, Jacksonian Democracy was a 19th Century version of libertarianism overlaid with a strong dedication to the idea of Manifest Destiny. It was a laissez-faire approach to government but contained a broad streak of the idea that “to the victor go the spoils”. Known as “patronage”, civil service positions were in the power of local politicians to appoint rather than being awarded on merit. Not surprisingly this idea strongly appealed to local politicians, somewhat of a Democratic Party trademark - a fact explaining their dominance in urban machine politics through the history of the Republic.
Jacksonian Democracy generally favored extending voting rights while adopting a studied neutrality toward slavery, believing that time would render the practice of slavery both abhorrent and uneconomic. It was also marked by a visceral hatred of banks and “paper money”. Andrew Jackson’s portrait on the $20 bill is the very definition of irony.
Jacksonian Democracy was wildly popular, from Jackson’s presidency until the Civil War. But by the time of Franklin Pierce, it was growing long in the tooth and changing attitudes had weakened its political dominance, chiefly around neutrality on the issue of slavery and the unmistakable smell of corruption that was part and parcel of the Democrat’s patronage system.
The increasingly bitter fight over slavery was strongly played out in national politics, driven by balance of power issues and economic concerns. In the antebellum United States, the northern and southern states were almost two separate countries with very different economies and very different cultures.
Some twenty-five years ago one of the 20th Century’s most prescient political strategist’s, Kevin Phillips, explored this issue in depth with his book “The Cousins War”. He made a convincing argument that the American Civil War was actually the final episode in the long running English Civil War between the Puritan Roundheads of Oliver Cromwell and the aristocratic Cavaliers of the Catholic Stuarts that began in mid-17th Century England . This 250 year long struggle had included the American Revolution as well.
Both North and South were fearful that as the country grew any increase in the political power of the other would allow them to enact economic policies supporting their own economies/cultures at the expense of the other. One can see its faint echo in the red/blue state divide over today’s emotional issues of abortion/climate change/immigration coupled with pocketbook issues surrounding “free” trade/protectionism.
Since the founding of the Republic, the practice of slavery in America had always been a hot button political issue. Just as the issue of abortion today, public attitudes toward its morality ran the gamut. But its political consequences during our nation’s founding were hotly debated during the negotiations leading up to the U.S. Constitution, chiefly around the effect of slave populations on political representation.
Shortly after the Revolution and 60 years before the Presidency of Franklin Pierce - just prior to the ratification of the Constitution, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had recognized this dichotomy when laying out the groundwork for the development of the vast “uncivilized” lands claimed by the United States. The Ordinance limited the practice of legal slavery to “slave states only”, with the number of slave states balanced by an equal number of “free states”. Since each state had two senators irrespective of population, this guaranteed that neither North nor South could impose their will on the other.
The ratification of the Constitution in 1787 provided that for the purposes of determining representation, each slave would count as 3/5 of a person. Census statistics carefully delineated slave numbers separate from free citizens until the passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868. This provided a significant electoral advantage to the “slave” states for the purposes of apportioning seats in the House of Representatives,
But quite early in US history, population growth in the urbanizing North quickly outstripped the agrarian South resulting in a growing imbalance in the House of Representatives anyway permanently cementing Northern political power along with a strong anti-slave bias. But as the number of slave and free states remained equal, a balanced Senate protected the South from any predatory action by the North.
During the next fifty years, various crises arising over the admission of new States were each met with compromise to keep the precarious balance of political power intact. But Texas statehood followed by the Mexican War combined with the vast new territories ceded by Mexico to the US, coupled with the irresistible force of westward expansion driven by the Manifest Destiny of Jacksonian Democracy were making that balance increasingly precarious.
Franklin Pierce was the candidate of the Democratic Party in 1852. The Franklin Pierce nomination as Democratic Party candidate in 1852 was a template for Joe Biden’s nomination in 2020.
Joe Biden was nominated in 2020 because Democratic party leaders feared a radical and broadly unpopular candidacy – that of Bernie Sanders. So too Franklin Pierce. Pierce was a compromise candidate, a vote for avoiding a hard line candidate - either free or slave partisan - who would split the party on the issue of slavery, alienating swing voters and insuring defeat.
Like Joe Biden, Franklin Pierce was a lifetime politician, reputed to be a moderate voice, a peace maker open to compromise. He had a reputation as someone with a bias toward reform of the obvious malpractices within the “patronage system”, but not someone who would rock the boat on the hot button issue of slavery.
The other major political party in 1852 was the Whigs and their candidate was Winfield Scott, hero of the Mexican War and the army’s senior serving general. Known as “Old Fuss and Feathers” because of his love of ostentatious display, Winfield Scott was widely held to be the finest American military officer since George Washington.
Scott’s flanking capture of the port city of Vera Cruz, subsequent drive on and capture of Mexico City thereby ending the Mexican War was studied in Europe’s military academies as a virtuoso example of operational maneuver. He mentored the brilliant Civil War general, Robert E. Lee, championing the idea to the newly elected Abraham Lincoln of offering command of the Union armies to that same Robert E. Lee. Winfield Scott’s Anaconda Plan put in place the Union Army’s overarching and winning strategy in the Civil War. There is a certain echo of Winfield Scott in the career of Douglas MacArthur, excessive personal vanity and prickly personality coupled with strategic brilliance.
But Scott was also an outspoken opponent of slavery with a high public profile and just as there are anti-Trumpers who refuse to vote for Trump under any circumstances, there were many moderates in northern states who felt the same way about Winfield Scott. Of course his well known views on slavery made him anathema in southern states.
In addition as is true of Robert F. Kennedy’s looming candidacy in 2024, there was a serious third party, the Free Soil Party. The narrowly focused Free Soil Party platform consisted primarily of an absolute refusal to allow slavery into any new states or territories - thus the name of the party.
The emergence of the short lived Free Soil Party signaled the onset of the Whig Party’s imminent demise. Founded two years later in 1854, the Republican Party would replace the Whig Party, incorporating Free Soiler’s ideas and voters.
Franklin Pierce was a dream candidate in 1852. He had served with honor as a general in the Mexican War, nullifying the perceived advantage of Winfield Scott’s military reputation. Large numbers of Whig voters repulsed by Winfield Scott’s anti-slavery rhetoric found Franklin Pierce attractive. The Free Soil Party’s radical and uncompromising stance on slavery appealed to the large numbers of abolitionist voters in New England, leaching even more of Scott’s support away.
And so in the Presidential election of 1852, Franklin Pierce won the popular vote as well as taking 254 electoral votes to Scott’s 42. The Democratic Party would not win a victory of this magnitude until FDR’s victory nearly a century later in 1932.
And so in 1853, Franklin Pierce took his oath of office in much the same situation as Joe Biden in 2021, though with a much larger mandate than Biden’s razor thin majority. Pierce, like Biden, was elected to be not a man of passion but of compromise, seeking a middle road through the raging slavery controversy.
But unlike Joe Biden, Franklin Pierce was not a Trojan Horse. Elected as a moderate candidate open to compromise, Biden has pursued a very partisan agenda even with a split Congress. In contrast, Franklin Pierce actually did pursue a path of compromise even though he possessed overwhelming congressional majorities.
But once in office Pierce found that compromise just made everyone mad. Nevertheless he remained true to his campaign promise and made efforts to reform civil service patronage, balancing impartial job standards against politicians’ ability to award lucrative government jobs to supporters. Not only did his efforts largely fail, but it infuriated his own supporters in the Democratic Party who rightly enough expected their traditional place at the trough.
But it was around the issue of slavery where things became tense. Halfway through President Pierce’s term things came to a head. Joe Biden has immigrants pouring across the Rio Grande. Franklin Pierce had a similar problem at the Missouri River.
Immigrants in search of their own piece of the American Dream were pouring across; not Hispanics at the Rio Grande but poor white trash crossing the Missouri River. But while this land belonged to the United States - part of the territory obtained from France in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, it was still a nebulous region not yet partitioned into territorial administrative units that could begin the process of becoming states. Thus this immigration was illegal but it was happening on a large scale anyway, inflaming partisan sensibilities. While no one proposed building a wall on the west bank of the Missouri River, it was just one more echo of 2024.
The land west of the Missouri River was known to be a hardscrabble wilderness, suitable for neither cotton nor traditional plantation style agriculture. The United States Army had sent a survey party headed by Maj. Stephen Long through the area thirty years before in 1820. One of the three 14,000’ peaks of Colorado’s Front Range, Long’s Peak, is named for the Major who first saw it from a creek encampment near the present location of Ft. Morgan. But in his final report Major Long called this area “the great American desert”, a term seized upon and used promiscuously by map makers, newspaper editors and politicians.
The immigrants themselves crossing the Missouri River were largely poor seeking a freehold; farmers not prosperous planters. They were a marginal people left to seek their future in a marginal land. The “great American desert” was no one’s idea of desirable property. Also these free white folk, mostly recent immigrants from Northern Europe had a visceral hatred of slavery. They had left their homes in Europe to escape the servitude of lord and manor. Both geography and culture necessitated that as states, they would almost certainly become “free states”.
And as states they would get two senators, overturning the precarious peace of the times born of the Missouri Compromise. But time was running out, with thousands of people already there and tens of thousands flooding across the Missouri River, something had to be done.
The stage had been set for Franklin Pierce’s great crisis some 35 years before he took office. Once before the fragile peace between North and South had nearly ruptured over the need to admit a new state, a slave state. The original Missouri Territory had been settled primarily by immigrants from Louisiana, people seeking to put in place a plantation economy worked by slave labor.
While the land in Missouri was not suitable for cotton plantations, its new settlers had adapted slave agriculture to raise cash crops such as hemp and tobacco. The territory had grown in population such that it qualified for admittance as a state, a slave state. But the northern states were vehemently opposed as a newly admitted State of Missouri would upset the balance of power in the Senate. Tensions rose, tempers flared.
But some two centuries ago, the Congress of the United States actually contained politicians with diametrically opposed beliefs but who were able to compromise with each other. “Influencers” were still a mirage on the far horizon, while MTG and AOC were but a gleam in their great-great-grandfather’s eye.
After lengthy debate and log rolling, a compromise was reached in the Congress, known as the Missouri Compromise. Maine would be admitted as a free state, even though not yet qualified, and Missouri would be admitted as a slave state thereby preserving the status quo in the Senate. It also set a future template for admitting new states, Arkansas and Michigan would be admitted as a pair, followed by Texas/Iowa and Florida/Wisconsin.
The entrance of Missouri into the Union as a State ushered in by the Missouri Compromise signaled a new chapter in the political history of the United States. It was taken as a foregone conclusion that the great western territories long claimed by the United States, even “the great American desert”, would someday become states and a path forward was now being forged. This was the whole idea behind “Manifest Destiny”. The existence of the new states born of this barren land must be accomplished within the balance of free and slave necessary for peace.
As a first step, the great land mass of the Missouri River’s watershed, the “great American desert”, was gathered into an administrative unit. This administrative unit, a reborn Missouri Territory, included the future states of Kansas and Nebraska as well as most of Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas.
Importantly, the Missouri Compromise dictated that slavery would never be permitted north of the 36o 30’ parallel, roughly the southern border of today’s State of Kansas. And so there was a peace of sorts hammered out between North and South, allowing the country to get on with the business of Manifest Destiny.
But some 35 years later, events overtook the Missouri Compromise. The territories acquired during the Mexican War a few years before Franklin Pierce took office had strained the agreement almost to the breaking point. But a short term settlement was once more reached in the Compromise of 1850. California was allowed to come in as a free state while Utah and New Mexico were organized as future state territories that allowed for slavery. As a further inducement to the South to agree to the admission of California, the Fugitive Slave Act was passed requiring law enforcement in the free states to apprehend and return escaped slaves to their owners.
Perhaps one might see this as akin to the Supreme Court’s recent Dobbs decision in emotional impact. And indeed just as the Supreme Court’s Dobbs Decision poured gasoline on partisan fires, the Fugitive Slave Act ignited a firestorm for the Pierce Administration. Again, rather than provide executive branch lip service, that political moderate Franklin Pierce in a spirit of good will and compromise, was diligent in using federal offices to actually enforce the law.
And strict federal law enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act infuriated his northern supporters. The legally required use of northern sheriffs and police to apprehend escaped slaves traveling the Underground Railroad aroused a howl in the northern press. But even more emotionally charged was the sight on the main streets and neighborhoods of northern towns of the now legal bounty hunters trolling northern neighborhoods in search of escaped slaves. Their bold requisitioning of the local sheriff’s assistance while brazenly parading recaptured slaves in their chains down the streets caused a furious emotional backlash, making hitherto fence sitting northern citizens outraged anti-slavery partisans.
And now the advent of transcontinental railroads was on the horizon, supercharging the economic intensity of westward expansion. Omaha and Kansas City became boom towns on the promise of the railroads building west. Settlement on the western bank of the Missouri River was growing so rapidly that some accommodation needed to be made for this “unorganized territory’s” eventual statehood.
But all of this land was north of the 36o 30’ parallel. While Utah would be both north of the line and a slave state, the distinctive Mormon character of the area made it sui generis, a mutant growth outside the bounds of the slave/free debate. To maintain the needed balance in the Senate, slavery must be allowed in a state other than Utah north of that line thereby repudiating the Missouri Compromise.
And so my home state of Nebraska, today a fly over land of sober unassuming people, entered the historical record of our fair country with a notoriety never to be repeated. In 1854, midway into Franklin Pierce’s presidency, another compromise was worked out in the Congress; the Kansas – Nebraska Act. Two sections of this “great American desert” would be apportioned into new territories, the Nebraska Territory and the Kansas Territory. In due time they would become states.
The political compromise embodied in the Kansas-Nebraska Act worked out was that neither territory was officially designated “slave” or “free”. The citizens of each territory through their elected legislature would vote on the question. There was no question that Nebraska Territory would vote to be “free”, but Kansas Territory, just across the Missouri River from the slave State of Missouri, would most likely vote to be “slave”. President Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas – Nebraska Act into law on May 30, 1854, essentially repealing the Missouri Compromise.
Activists from Missouri whipped up passions, recruiting immigrants to move to Kansas Territory. Armed gangs of pro-slavery thugs calling themselves “bushwhackers” roamed the countryside, intimidating farmers and townspeople. In the first territorial election in November of 1854, thousands of pro-slavery citizens of Missouri, known as “border ruffians”, crossed the river to vote - illegally - resulting in a decidedly pro-slavery legislature for Kansas. Déjà vu!!
Anti-slavery partisans were incensed, declaring the election stolen and thereby illegal, déjà vu. A parallel pro-free legislature was formed. Calling themselves “jayhawks” they armed themselves and decided to fight fire with fire. Irregular fighting, ambush and skirmishing between armed groups in the days following gave rise to national newspaper headlines trumpeting “Bleeding Kansas”.
The Pierce Administration refused to recognize the illegal “Jayhawk legislature”, standing behind the duly elected pro-slavery legislature. Tensions continued to rise as time went on.1856 was an election year and in May some 800 armed men, led by the county sheriff who no doubt owed his job to “patronage”, rode into the town of Lawrence, KS - the seat of the “Jayhawk Legislature”. They raided through the town burning and looting, in the process generating newspaper headlines that sensationalized it as the “Sack of Lawrence”.
Three days after the “Sack of Lawrence”, one of the most radical anti-slavery activists in Kansas, John Brown, along with his sons and fellow travelers made a late night raid on a house where “professional slave hunters and militant pro-slavery activists” were staying. They took five of these men out into the night and hacked them to death with swords. Three years later, John Brown would go on to lead a raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, VA, where he was captured by a Marine detachment hurriedly sent from Washington DC.
He was then tried and executed, the resulting publicity exciting passions on both sides even more. John Brown’s image was everywhere in the North. He was the image of an Old Testament prophet calling God’s wrath, fire and brimstone, down on the sinful South.
Interestingly enough, the Marine unit capturing John Brown was commanded by Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee of the 2nd US Cavalry, with Lt. J.E.B. Stuart acing as his adjutant. The well regarded Lee was nearby at his home in Arlington, VA, on leave from his Texas duty station at the time and hand picked for this delicate task by the Army’s commanding general, “Old Fuss and Feathers” Scott.
The dashing Jeb Stuart was in Washington on leave from Ft. Leavenworth in “Bleeding Kansas” negotiating with the War Department for the rights to Stuart’s patented “saber hook”. During the stand-off at Harper’s Ferry, Jeb Stuart handled surrender negotiations with John Brown and his partisans because they knew each other. Both Lee and Stuart would go on in the Civil War to become outstanding Confederate combat generals.
It is hard to look at the events in the time of “Bleeding Kansas” and not see similarities with our own times, the George Floyd riots and civil disobedience that followed balanced by such events as the Charlottesville Riots and Jan. 6 insurrection. Activists, once known as radicals, go from one escalation to another while most everyone else just wants to live their lives in peace.
The Presidential election of 1856 promised a referendum on the Franklin Pierce Administration, having the same types of issues framing our own upcoming 2024 election. The inflamed partisan passions electrified by the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854 were the central issue. Franklin Pierce had won a historic victory in 1852 by promising compromise. Since then the Whig Party had torn itself apart over the issue of slavery and was on the ash heap of history. Would the election be a replay of 1852 with Franklin Pierce the Compromiser vs a hard line anti-slavery candidate put forward by the newly formed Republican Party?
But things worked out differently. In a great upset the Black Swan appeared and Franklin Pierce was not renominated. It turned out that compromising, getting things done i.e. the Kansas Nebraska Act, didn’t make friends or get the votes of the party’s heavy hitters. Despite a historic victory in 1852, pretty much all of Pierce’s supporters abandoned him at the nominating convention in 1856. Franklin Pierce became the only President in American history seeking re-election not to be renominated.
The fruits of Franklin Pierce’s compromises came home to roost at the Democratic Convention held in Cincinnati, Ohio that June. Disgruntled local politicians, remembering his threatening actions to the patronage system, were lukewarm in their support of Pierce. But it was Bleeding Kansas on everyone’s mind. Lurid details about the Sack of Lawrence only days before figured prominently on newspaper front pages. The Kansas – Nebraska Act was a millstone around Franklin Pierce’s neck and it would drag him down. His lawful enforcement of The Fugitive Slave Act was the coup de gras finishing the job.
The candidate nominated, James Buchanan, was another familiar face, known to be a supporter of states rights i.e. neutrality on slavery. He was a popular politician from Pennsylvania, a northern state, but was also well regarded in southern circles. Buchanan was another compromiser much like Franklin Pierce but having spent the past 3 years in England as the US Ambassador he was free of the Kansas – Nebraska Act’s odium.
His Vice-Presidential running mate, John Breckinridge, was from Kentucky, a border state but a “slave” state. Four years later, Breckinridge would run against Abraham Lincoln in 1860 as a Southern Democrat. With the onset of war, Breckinridge went on to serve as a general in the Confederate Army, commanding at New Market - one of the few Confederate victories in Phil Sheridan’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864. With the retirement of James Seddon in the waning months of the Civil War, President Jefferson Davis appointed Breckinridge as his Secretary of War.
James Buchanan’s opponent in the 1856 Presidential election was the newly formed Republican Party’s candidate, Senator John Fremont from California, the leader of many expeditions into the western lands primarily in search of viable railroad routes. Fremont was popularly known as “The Pathfinder”, a 19th Century celebrity explorer, Indian fighter, politician.
The Republicans campaigned against Buchanan and what they called the “Slave Power” with the slogan “Free Soil, Free Men and Fremont”. But in 1856 the nation was still in the mood for compromise, not yet willing to face the slave issue head on and James Buchanan was duly elected though by a much smaller margin than had Franklin Pierce in 1852. The Republican Fremont lost largely because of another 3rd party, the Know-Nothings – a populist patriotic party largely composed of Protestant’s frightened by the threat posed by the Catholic faith of immigrant Irish and Italians to the nation’s “traditional values and morality”. Déjà vu indeed!
Interestingly enough, Colorado’s mountain ski town of Breckenridge, named after a dissolute member of John Fremont’s 1848 expedition into the area, had the spelling of the town’s name changed to Breckinridge. In an example of the Democratic patronage system at work, a local developer with political connections by the name of George Spencer changed the town’s spelling from Breckenridge to Breckinridge in honor of Vice President John Breckinridge. Mr. Spencer did in fact receive his reward, becoming the postmaster. But with the coming of war the town’s citizens changed the spelling back into its original spelling.
Franklin Pierce went into retirement as a private citizen, often raising his voice against the growing confrontation between North and South. His was a voice crying out in the wilderness, a prophet without honor. Always a heavy drinker, he died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1869 at the age of 64.
For those historians not assigning Franklin Pierce the title of Worst President Ever, his successor, James Buchanan, is their choice for much the same reasons. Buchanan spent his administration trying to walk a tightrope between the pugnacious Cavaliers of the patrician Deep South and the self-righteous Puritans of the North’s New England.
But during his administration “push came to shove” with the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision and Kansas’ application for admission to the Union as a “slave” state. Fighting with unrepentant Mormon settlers in the Utah War along with the Financial Panic of 1857 did not help. During Buchanan’s Presidency, the Democratic Party effectively split into a northern party represented by Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois and a southern party represented by President Buchanan.
President Buchanan declined to accept renomination in 1860. The Democratic Convention was a stalemate resulting in a split party with Stephen Douglas and John Breckinridge both running on separate tickets. Abraham Lincoln was the Republican nominee. Lincoln had gained national prominence in a series of nationally covered debates with Stephen Douglas in his 1858 re-election campaign
Lincoln’s election victory against the badly split Democratic Party in 1860 resulted in the secession of South Carolina, setting off a rapid chain of events resulting in the Civil War.
In a final note, scurrying deeply into a rabbit hole of little moment, President James Buchanan, other than his competitive position in the race for the Presidential dunce chair holds a possible “first” of some moment. I suspect Colorado’s current governor, Jared Polis, has his eye on the tile of “First Gay President”. But most historians would award that “honor” to Franklin Pierce’s successor in the Oval Office; James Buchanan.
Jackson owned 160 slaves was active in slave trade. He took some of his slaves to Washington to White House
Biden was told no for student loan forgiveness but keeps doing it. Jackson was told no on Indian removals, but he did it anyway Trail Tears most known. No wonder the Dems want to replace him on $20 bill!