Prelude to Democracy: Political Parties before the U.S. Secession Crisis, 1844-1860

PRELUDE TO DEMOCRACY: POLITICAL PARTIES BEFORE THE U.S. SECESSION CRISIS, 1844-18601

Cedric de Leon Assistant Professor of Sociology Providence College [email protected]

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The author would like to thank Jeff Haydu, Jim Mahoney, Rob Jansen, Mills Thornton,

and Dan Slater for their comments on previous drafts of this paper. Also many thanks to the participants of the following writing workshops: the Providence Area Reading Group especially Emily Heaphy and Julia Jordan-Zachary; the Society, Politics and Culture Workshop at Boston University especially Emily Barman, Filiz Garip, Julian Go, and Sigrun Olafsdottir; the Sociology Colloquium Series at Brown University especially Nitsan Chorev, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Michael Rodriguez; and the Comparative Research Workshop at Yale University especially Julia Adams, Marcus Hunter, and Sadia Saeed.

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In this year of both the Arab Spring and the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the American Civil War, we are reminded perhaps more than in other years that the U.S. Secession Crisis was itself a paradigmatic moment of democratic transition. Yet in looking back on the antebellum American case, it is clear that scholars of democratization are somewhat lacking in the tools necessary to makes sense of the twists and turns leading up to that moment. Indeed, during the twenty years just prior to the war, the political allegiances of voters and party leaders appeared to shift erratically. Between 1844 and 1848, for example, Democratic districts were rent by factionalism, while the opposition Whig Party saw local operatives and voting blocs defect to the Democrats. In the next six years, the status quo ante slipped back into place as the erstwhile strongholds of the major parties became strongholds once more. The mid-1850s, however, witnessed a mass exodus of leadership cadres and voters from the major parties into the upstart political organizations that eventually prosecuted the war. The puzzle that guides this paper, therefore, is the following: why did the old parties lose control of their coalitions in the mid-1840s, reestablish their hold between 1848 and 1854, and then squander it so completely by 1860? This feeds into a broader programmatic question, namely, what does the apparently chaotic run-up to the Civil War teach us about the dynamics of democratic transitions and expansions? Any account of this case must explain the rapidly shifting terrain of party politics, but the most prominent studies in the literature trace the origins of democratic change instead to the relative strength of social classes (see for example Moore 1966; O‘Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992; Paige 1997). Perhaps

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the sole exception to this rule is the conclusion to Capitalist Development and Democracy, in which Rueschemeyer and the Stephenses urge further research on political parties, with a mind toward treating ―the political articulation of civil society as a distinct analytical dimension‖ that ―cannot be reduced to the economic and class structure‖ (1992: 287). Social scientists have since demonstrated that political parties mobilize the very coalitions that are correlated with moments of democratic change (see for example Capoccia and Ziblatt 2010; de Leon 2008; Heller 1999; Redding 2003). Although this paper takes political articulation seriously, it suggests that we turn our attention to the back-and-forth or ―reactive‖ logic of party politics, which, in the midnineteenth-century American case, comprised the prelude to the articulation of democratic coalitions. That logic, as I seek to demonstrate, is propelled by sequences of attempts by parties and party factions to manage and exploit unexpected events; the effect of party reactions and counter-reactions, in turn, is to expand, maintain, or disrupt coalitions of leadership cadres and voting blocs. I emphasize that electoral coalitions comprise the effect, and not the uniform driving motive, of partisan reactivity, because party reactions may have little to do with the long-term viability of their political alliances and may even undermine those alliances. The latter may be the primary consideration to be sure, but partisan reactions may also be motivated by revenge, ambition, loyalty, and principle, which can be counter-productive in electoral competition depending on the context.

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Drawing on ward- and beat-level2 electoral returns, the private papers of party leaders, and a content analysis of party newspapers from antebellum Chicago, Illinois and Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, I argue that the contingencies, reactions, and backlash effects that are intrinsic to the reactive logic of party politics escalated into a crisis in which once entrenched leadership cadres and voting blocs defected from the two major parties and became available for mobilization by either side of the revolution against slavery. Specifically, the data suggest that the U.S. Secession Crisis was the endpoint of a reactive sequence that began with the unexpected defeat of Martin Van Buren for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1844. From there, the back-and-forth of party politics led to the replacement of national coalitions based on economic issues and class and ethno-religious cleavages with ―sectional‖ (i.e., northern versus southern) coalitions divided over the issue of slavery extension. Beyond its intervention in the democratization literature, this account challenges the core assumptions of two other bodies of work. First, whereas the literature on realignments envisions long stable periods of party dominance, I propose a more fluid framework in which coalitions of party leaders and voting blocs are always at risk and therefore actively being cultivated. Political parties may remain in power through successive elections, but the abstract mechanical temporality of stability that is assumed in the realignment literature masks the unfolding reactive temporality of politics on the ground. Second, this paper offers a party-centered alternative to those accounts of the U.S. Secession Crisis, which hold that either slavery or inter-elite class conflict were its 2

Local electoral returns were reported by ward number in Chicago and ―beat‖ or polling

station in Tuscaloosa County.

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prime movers. By ignoring the escalation of partisan conflict, I argue that such accounts run into vexing analytical questions. For example, given that slavery had existed since before the revolutionary war, why did the crisis come to fruition in 1860? To address these and other problems the rest of the paper is divided into five sections. The first is a critical overview of the literatures on democratization, the U.S. Secession Crisis, and realignment, as well as the areas of inquiry that inform the framework advanced here. The second justifies my case selection, identifies my sources of data, and enumerates the methodological requirements for establishing a reactive sequence. The data are presented in two narrative sections, one for each case. Both narratives in turn are divided into four sub-sections, which correspond to the logic of party politics described above: contingency, defection, abortive recovery, and crisis. The last section summarizes the paper‘s findings and proposes areas for future research.

DEMOCRATIZATION AND ARTICULATION Prior to Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens (1992) economic elites were understood to be the primary catalysts of democratic transitions and expansions. The canonical example of this claim was Barrington Moore‘s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), which held that democratic change was unlikely in the absence of a strong bourgeoisie. A generation later, O‘Donnell and Schmitter (1986) would likewise argue that democratization was largely the result of bargaining among competing factions of the economic elite. In contrast, Rueschemeyer and the Stephenses found that when the bourgeoisie ―felt acutely threatened in their vital interests by popular pressures, they invariably opposed democracy.‖ Because of this dynamic, the working

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class tended to be the more ―consistently pro-democratic force‖ (1992: 8). In challenging their predecessors, however, Rueschemeyer et al reasserted the broader emphasis on social classes in democratization, so accounts of democratic change continued to be class-driven, albeit with greater emphasis on the positive role of nonelites (see for example Paige 1997 and Collier 1999). Accordingly, Rueschemeyer and the Stephenses‘ insights on political parties have received much less attention than their more famous claim: ―no working class, no democracy.‖ Although they had originally thought that parties were just one of several factors affecting the strength of social classes, they found that ―political parties emerged as a crucial mediating mechanism‖ [emphasis in original]. Parties worked to regulate the perception among the dominant classes that democratic reform necessarily threatened their economic interests. In doing so, they secured the support of elites who would otherwise have opposed democracy: where mediating parties were absent, for instance in South America, they found that elites ―appealed to the military for intervention to prevent or to end democratic rule.‖ Rueschemeyer et al refer to the broader activity of political parties in democratization as ―the political articulation of civil society,‖ which I take to mean the cobbling together of support for democratic reform, particularly among the more affluent sectors of society (1992: 287). More recent studies have addressed the role of political articulation, though they tend to conceive of parties not as mediators, but as organizers of coalitions in general (de Leon, Desai, and Tugal 2009) and pro-democracy coalitions in particular (Capoccia and Ziblatt 2010; de Leon 2008; Heller 1999; Redding 2003). In his critique of the Moore thesis, for example, de Leon (2008) writes that America‘s incipient bourgeoisie was in a

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relatively weak position to arrest the expansion of slavery into the western territories, and in any case tended to align politically with southern slaveowners in the Whig Party. Under these conditions, a revolution against slavery became possible only once a bourgeois mass party – the Republican Party – shattered the planter-industrialist Whig alliance and united northern elites and non-elites in a cross-class sectional coalition. Though these more recent studies have helped to broaden and clarify what Rueschemeyer and the Stephenses posed as the ―political articulation of civil society,‖ they also tend to underemphasize its prelude. In the mid-nineteenth-century American case, I argue that the back-and-forth dynamic of party politics escalated into a crisis that made the articulation of a democratic coalition possible. This framework synthesizes three typically isolated bodies of work: Gramsci‘s insights on contingency and sociopolitical blocs; Emirbayer‘s (1997) call for a ―relational sociology;‖ and Pierson‘s (2000) and Mahoney‘s (2000) work on reactive sequences. Together they offer cues for how to bring contingency and reactivity into comparative and historical analysis.

ON CONTINGENCY AND REACTIVITY A founding member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), Antonio Gramsci learned the importance of mastering contingency during his earlier association with the Italian Socialists (PSI). Gramsci insisted that the PSI was needlessly passive at moments of revolutionary possibility. He once wrote, ―The Socialist Party looks on like a spectator at the course of events‖ (Fiori [1965] 1990: 110-111, 127; Hoare and Smith 1971: xxxiixxxv, xlv). In this, Gramsci shared his fellow communists‘ critical stance toward economic determinism: whereas the PSI assumed that the logic of capitalist development

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would by itself incite proletarian insurrection, the Communists endeavored to exploit ―the course of events‖ and lead the working class. Gramsci, however, privately criticized his colleagues for emphasizing party organization to the exclusion of all other activity. In a crucial letter dated February 9, 1924, Gramsci wrote, ―The error of the party has been to have accorded priority in an abstract fashion to the problem of organization, which in practice has simply meant creating an apparatus of functionaries who could be depended on for their orthodoxy towards the official view‖ (Hoare and Smith 1971: lxii, lxvi). Beyond party organization, Gramsci insisted that the central task of the PCI was to forge and maintain a voting bloc of workers and peasants against potentially damaging contingencies and the opportunism of their adversaries. Thus, at a mass meeting of the Sardinian Party of Action, which sought political sovereignty from mainland Italy, the PCI moved swiftly to infiltrate the gathering and secure the Sardinian peasantry to the Communist cause. Similarly, in his critique of the mainstream parties, he observed that when the Socialists suddenly refused to cooperate with Prime Minister Giolitti after 1910, the latter replaced an ―industrial‖ bloc of employers and workers with a bloc of employers and peasants based on their shared Catholicism (Gramsci [1926] 1957: 34, 39). Voting blocs, then, are intrinsically impermanent because success in party politics depends upon a party‘s ability to adapt to unforeseen events in the maintenance of one‘s own, and the disruption of the opposition‘s, power base. In an article in L’Ordine Nuovo, dated September 25, 1921, titled ―Parties and Masses,‖ Gramsci referred to democratic party politics as a ―process of disarticulation, neoassociation and fusion between homogenates,‖ the end goal of which is ―the conservation or the conquest of the power of

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the State.‖ Moreover, it is precisely when parties cease to do this that we have what Gramsci calls a ―crisis of hegemony‖ in which the people no longer recognize their party as their own in large part because ―parties … are not always capable of adapting themselves to new tasks and to new epochs‖ (Gramsci 2000: 218-219, 262). Gramsci‘s general emphasis on contingency and reactivity is not foreign to sociology and has found expression recently in the so-called ―relational turn.‖ In his ―Manifesto for a Relational Sociology,‖ for instance, Emirbayer takes aim at ―substantialist‖ theories, in which the social world consists of ―things‖ or ―entities‖ (e.g., individuals, structural variables), ―which come preformed‖ and are often assumed to act according to some immutable motive force (e.g., self-interest, internalized norms), the societal impact of which can therefore be quantified and even predicted. These entities and the motives that animate them are abstracted from the relationships in which they are embedded and which give them meaning. As an alternative, Emirbayer urges a ―transactional‖ or ―relational‖ approach, in which ―things‖ are assumed to be in perpetual motion, changing and shifting from moment to moment in a ―dynamic, unfolding process.‖ In a relational sociology, that process ―becomes the primary unit of analysis rather than the constituent elements themselves‖ (Emirbayer 1997: 281, 283-285, 289). The relational turn finds a strong echo in recent theories of path dependence, which have moved away from a pre-existing emphasis on stability and made the ―unfolding process‖ their ―primary unit of analysis.‖ A traditional path dependent explanation is one in which an initial cause is said to produce an outcome that in turn reinforces itself and makes alternative outcomes less and less possible over time (Stinchcombe 1968: 59, 103; see also Mahoney 2000: 508; Pierson 2004: 92). There is

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mounting recognition, however, that path dependence need not involve reinforcement or reproduction. Mahoney (2000), for example, distinguishes between ―self-reinforcing‖ and ―reactive‖ path dependent sequences. In contrast to the former, which ―are characterized by processes of reproduction that reinforce early events,‖ reactive sequences ―are marked by backlash processes that transform and perhaps reverse early events‖ [emphasis in original] (pp. 526-527). It bears mention that this concatenation of reactions does not trigger, as it does in the realignment literature, an ―off-setting‖ mechanism that eventually brings the system back to ―equilibrium‖ after a brief disturbance. Quite the contrary, as Pierson (2000) writes, ―action and reaction shift the system in a new direction, but not one that reinforces the first move‖ (p. 85). Taking the above cues together, I argue that where parties are important institutional actors as they were in the U.S. Secession Crisis, the prelude to democratic transition may take the form of a reactive sequence, the animating logic of which is accordingly that of party politics itself. That logic ensures that no period of ―alignment‖ is actually stable because of the more or less continuous struggle to exploit and neutralize contingent events, the effect of which is to organize and disorganize electoral coalitions. This view of democratization is therefore anchored in a framework of party politics that is more fluid, malleable, and temporary.

ALTERNATIVE HYPOTHESES: CLASS, SLAVERY, AND REALIGNMENT Though political historians might not object to the view that parties were central to the making of the U.S. Secession Crisis, others might insist that I slight the importance of social relations, especially class interests and slavery. In the founding statement of the

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class-based approach, Charles and Mary Beard claimed that ―the fundamental aim‖ of northern ―free-soil advocates‖ was to ―fasten upon the country an economic policy that meant the exploitation of the South for the benefit of northern capitalism,‖ whereas the Democratic Party for its part was the southern slaveholders‘ ―joint stock association‖ (Beard and Beard 1927: 6-7). According to William L. Barney, secessionism in Alabama and Mississippi originated in ―serious dislocations‖ that ―arose as a result of the oligarchic concentration of wealth.‖ ―Elitist domination,‖ in turn, led to ―political unrest,‖ making southerners ―susceptible to the bold, aggressive ideology of the secessionists‖ (Barney 1974: 3-6). And in a controversial Marxist analysis of the period, Charles G. Sellers wrote that sectionalism resulted from the underlying contradiction of American capitalism, which ―took off for global conquest by first propagating and then repudiating slavery.‖ Eventually, ―Northern liberal capital turned against the anachronistic planter capital impeding its political economy‖ (Sellers 1991: 396). A similar emphasis on social relations can be found among historians who contend that slavery and its abolition comprised the decisive cause of the crisis. Thus, James Ford Rhodes wrote, ―The doctrine of States‘ rights and secession was invoked by the South to save slavery, and by a natural antagonism, the North upheld the Union because the fight for its preservation was the first step toward the abolition of negro servitude‖ (Rhodes [1913] 1965: 110). In what is perhaps the definitive statement of the slavery thesis, Richard Sewell held that mid-nineteenth-century political discourse reflected the social conflict over the abolitionist movement: ―Free Soilers and even Republicans held fast to the central idea of … abolitionism that by preventing its spread and by breaking the Slave Power‘s hegemony over the national government, slavery

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might be driven down the road of extinction.‖ He added, ―With good reason, then, Southerners interpreted Lincoln‘s victory as a serious threat to slavery and hence to the region‘s social stability, economic prosperity, and political power‖ (Sewell 1976, viii-ix). These alternative hypotheses run into a number of formidable difficulties, however, some of them empirical, others analytical. First, neither the class nor slavery thesis can explain the class and regional variation in antebellum southern politics. The stiffest opposition to secession in the South came from the Whig Party, which commanded the political allegiance of a majority of plantation owners (Dorman [1935] 1995; Thornton 1977; Morrison 1997; Holt 1999). Moreover, not all southern states seceded. Seven states took the initial leap together, but eight other states chose to remain in the Union. Four others would eventually join the Confederacy, but the question remains: if the planter class or indeed if slavery itself prompted the U.S. Secession Crisis, then why were planters and southerners so divided (Holt 1978: 2)? Second, the clash of plantation and industrial interests predict precisely the wrong outcome. The dispute between the North and South turned on whether slavery should be permitted in the as yet unsettled western territories. If northerners had let the South secede, they could have claimed title to the West and prohibited slavery unilaterally. One might plausibly argue that it was in the interest of northern industrialists to let the South go without a fight. Conversely, in seceding, southerners forfeited their right to the western territories. One might plausibly argue, then, that it was in the interest of planters to remain in the Union, reach a compromise, and thereby ensure slavery‘s expansion into the West.

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Third, interest-based accounts are hard-pressed to explain 1) why some interests prevail politically at a given historical conjuncture, while others do not; and 2) why one particular set of interests prevail in one period, but not in another. A variety of indicators suggest that economic inequality deepened or remained constant throughout the 1840s and 1850s – why then did mainstream politics pivot so precipitously from economic issues, which had dominated much of the antebellum period, to sectional issues? The weakness in Barney‘s analysis, for example, is that the pattern of wealth concentration in Alabama and Mississippi held from 1840 to 1860. As he himself admits, by the end of the 1840s, ―the lower half of farming families owned 8% of the agricultural wealth‖ and by 1860, ―their share fell to 6%‖ (Barney 1974: 3-6). This trend raises two analytical problems. First, if ―elitist domination‖ increased or remained constant throughout this period, it cannot explain the abrupt turn to secessionism among non-planters. Second, and on the other side of the social divide, if planters were doing so well, as indeed they apparently were, the economic explanation is hard-pressed to explain why they defected to the secessionist cause. The slavery thesis may be faulted on similar grounds. As Barrington Moore rightly noted, the long discredited argument that southern slavery by its mere existence set in motion an ―irrepressible conflict‖ of civilizations will not do as an explanation (Cole 1934: 242; Moore 1966: 114). Northern industrialists and southern planters were warm business associates and political allies (de Leon 2008). Moreover, the peculiar institution had existed at that point for more than a century without a civil war. Similar crises over slavery had occurred in 1789, 1819, and 1833, all of which eventually receded

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as economic issues quickly returned to the fore. Why did the system of slavery prompt secession in 1860 but not in these other periods of heightened sectional feeling? The realignment literature is identified here as an alternative hypothesis, not because it offers a different account of the U.S. Secession Crisis per se, but because it offers alternative temporalities of party politics to the reactive one proposed here. There are three such temporalities in the realignment literature. The largest and most diverse set of scholars propose a ―punctuated equilibrium‖ model, in which successive periods of party dominance involve short-term ruptures that have long-lasting effects. These include Key (1955), Schattschneider (1960), Lipset and Rokkan (1967), Clubb et al (1980), Carmines and Stimson (1989), Weed (1994), Nardulli (1995), and Paulson (2000). For example, Lipset and Rokkan wrote that the national and industrial revolutions of early twentieth century Europe gave rise to ―four critical lines of cleavage‖ based on class and ethno-religious differences. Lipset and Rokkan famously characterized the resulting party alignments as ―the freezing of the major party alternatives,‖ in that ―the party systems of the 1960s reflect, with few but significant exceptions, the cleavage structures of the 1920s‖ (1967: 14-15, 50). V. O. Key (1959) and Abramson, Aldrich, and Rohde (2010) are respectively the original and most recent instantiations of the ―secular realignment‖ perspective, which assumes that party dominance is a function of long causes and long effects. Key was the first to observe ―long-term, or secular, shifts in party attachment among the voters.‖ In an apparent correction to his earlier work on ―critical elections,‖ he wrote that the gradual ―rise and fall of parties may to some degree be the consequence of trends that perhaps

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persist over decades and elections may mark only steps in a more or less continuous creation of new loyalties and decay of old‖ (Key 1959: 198). In contrast, Burnham (1970), Sundquist (1983), Brady (1988), and Miller and Schofield (2003) contend that some form of strain or tension gradually increases in intensity until it reaches a tipping point, when at last it erupts in a dramatic gamechanging political event. Sequences of party dominance therefore culminate in what Pierson (2004) calls ―threshold effects.‖ Burnham (1970), in the founding statement of this tradition, wrote that critical realignments ―arise from emergent tensions in society which, not adequately controlled by the organization or outputs of party politics as usual, escalate to a flash point‖ (p. 10). Burnham‘s version of realignment is one tinged by functionalism, in that every thirty to forty years realignments are said to restore equilibrium among the individual homeostatic organs of the social system. Thus, he describes realignment in these terms: ―Historically it has been the chief means through which an underdeveloped political system can be recurrently brought once again into some balanced relationship with the changing socioeconomic system, permitting a restabilization of our politics and a redefinition of the dominant Lockian political formula in terms which gain overwhelming support from the current generation‖ (pp. 181182). While these schools of thought pose divergent time horizons of cause and effect, all of them suffer from the same problem, namely, an abstract mechanical temporality that is removed from the unfolding reactive dynamic of party politics on the ground. In punctuated equilibrium models, putative periods of stability conceal from view the

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precariousness of electoral coalitions and the continuous effort to cultivate them. For example, between 1828 and 1860, the Democratic Party won all but two presidential elections (1840 and 1848), giving the false impression of a nearly uninterrupted period of Democratic hegemony. Scholars of threshold effects avoid this problem by assuming continuous change in the socioeconomic sphere. However, it is Burnham‘s assumption of the cyclical nature or ―periodicity‖ of realignment that is problematic: there is little if any room for parties to defuse or exploit emergent pressures for political advantage; they merely fall prey to, or are the beneficiaries of, the ―changing socioeconomic system.‖ Additionally, because tension takes time to build, threshold effects tend ―to elongate political troubles backward in time without warrant‖ (Mayhew 2000: 462). Burnham‘s version of realignment in other words tends to be insensitive to the impact of proximate events. The secular realignment framework runs into similar difficulties. As in the previous model, political parties are largely passive in the face of long-run trends. Socioeconomic change takes place under the noses of politicians until the latter wake up to find their erstwhile majorities badly compromised by a slow but transformative trickle of, say, new voters (e.g., Latinos, Asians, students). There is no sense in which parties may take advantage of or manage the potentially damaging effects of demographic trends.

METHOD, CASE SELECTION, AND DATA Although the concept of reactive sequencing informs this paper‘s theoretical framework, it also has important methodological implications for the ordering of

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evidence. According to Mahoney, a path dependent reactive sequence must have two features. First, in order to avoid the problem of infinite historical regress, the reactive sequence must begin with a contingent event, ―a ‗breakpoint‘ that could not have been anticipated or predicted.‖ Second, the sequence must have ―inherent sequentiality.‖ There are three dimensions to inherent sequentiality: events in the sequence are ―necessary or sufficient conditions for subsequent events,‖ ―each intermediary event represents a causal mechanism that links an initial breakpoint with a final outcome,‖ and there is ―a clear temporal ordering among events in a sequence‖ (Mahoney 2000: 527, 530-531). This paper features two reactive sequences: one each for the Chicago Democratic Party and the Tuscaloosa Whig Party. Each reactive sequence consists of four links (see Figure 1). Link 1, a contingent event, leads to Link 2, a key choice point (Aminzade 1992: 463) or fork in the road, namely: does the event cause cadres and voting blocs to defect from the party? If it does, then Link 2 leads into Link 3, another key choice point: does the party recover from the defection? If it does not, then Link 3 produces the final link in the sequence: a political crisis, in which defectors may be mobilized into the competing coalitions that prosecute the democratic struggle. In this, the lead-up to the U.S. Secession Crisis meets the aforementioned requirements for establishing reactive sequences. Factionalism is a fixture of party politics to be sure, but the peculiar resolution of factional strife in the Democratic Party in 1844 could not have been anticipated. Moreover, the ensuing narrative is inherently sequential. A contingent event is necessary to prompt a fork in the road between defecting and remaining in the party. Otherwise the conditions under which cadres and voting blocs gave their support to the party would not have changed, and ―politics as

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usual‖ would be sufficient to retain their loyalty. Defection, in turn, is necessary to prompt a choice between recovering and not recovering – absent a defection, the party need not recover from anything. Finally, the inability to recover is a necessary condition for the last event in the sequence, which is political crisis, because a party that recovers by definition regains the support of defectors. Thus, each event in the sequence is a necessary condition for subsequent events. Further, each intermediary event between the initial contingency and the final outcome – namely, defection and the failure to recover – is a causal mechanism. Finally, there is a clear temporal ordering of events, both because each event in the sequence leads logically to the next, and because the events cannot be re-ordered in any other way. The question then becomes ―why choose antebellum Tuscaloosa Whigs and Chicago Democrats to study the U.S. Secession Crisis?‖ Of course, other cases would be well suited to the task, but these have three advantages. First, choosing one party from just one section of the Union would not be nearly as illuminative of the onset of the Civil War as looking at both parties and sections. Second, local ward- and beat-level data as opposed, for instance, to statewide county-level data allows us to make claims about the voting blocs whose defections were critical to the rise of sectionalism in each region. The base of the Whig Party in Alabama consisted of planters in the ―black belt,‖ the most fertile and profitable region for largescale commercial farming in the South. Partly because of their links to the broader national economy, large slaveowners had been the key obstacle to secessionism in that state; it is therefore critical to isolate the factors involved in their defection to the secessionist cause. Likewise in Chicago, the key defectors from the Democratic to the

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Republican Party were immigrant workers. Native-born middle class to affluent voters were already Whigs and eventually Republicans. Finding out when, why, and how working-class Democrats defected will give us insight into the political dynamics that gave rise to sectionalism in the North. As one moves farther away from the local level, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to detect, certainly on the basis of archival secret ballot electoral returns, what any of these groups in fact did, since counties, states, regions, and nations are far more heterogeneous units of analysis than wards or beats. Local level electoral returns track the behavior of voting blocs with more precision, and when corroborated by census data and the speeches and writings of local cadres and voters, these case studies can offer a credible and tight fit between theory and evidence. Third, it would be impossible for several reasons to discuss Tuscaloosa and Chicago politics without also addressing the trajectory of state, regional, and national party politics. Most importantly, antebellum national parties did not have a separate institutional identity as they do today, but were rather collections of local and state party machines. In this, an analyst of the U.S. Secession Crisis could do worse than Tuscaloosa and Chicago at the local level or Alabama and Illinois at the state level. Tuscaloosa was the capital of Alabama for much of the antebellum period, while Chicago was the political epicenter of northern Illinois and that state‘s commercial capital. Illinois and Alabama, for their part, each furnished the political vanguard of their section as the national crisis over slavery unfolded. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, the 1860 presidential nominees of the Republican and Democratic parties respectively, were both from Illinois (indeed, Douglas‘s residence was in Chicago), while the country‘s leading secessionist, William L. Yancey, was an Alabaman. Put another way, if Illinois

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was the ―Land of Lincoln,‖ then Alabama was the ―Heart of Dixie.‖ Because of Illinois‘ and Alabama‘s stature, then, and the importance of Chicago and Tuscaloosa within them, my analysis – out of practical necessity – scales up and down the national, state, and regional levels analysis. To reconstruct the aforementioned reactive sequences, I use the speeches of state and local party elites as well as period newspapers. The public speeches of nineteenth century politicians were florid, highly detailed, and often hours long, and thus reveal the particular contingencies they sought to manage and exploit. For insight into the motives of political elites I rely upon their private papers, especially their letters and diaries when available. Nineteenth century newspapers were the official organs of parties and party factions and were the principle means through which the far-flung political elites of the early republic tied their leadership and the rank-and-file together in a common public sphere (Cornell 1999; Robertson 2004; Starr 2004). To document the defection of voting blocs, I rely principally on county electoral returns by ward and beat from 1844 to 1860. The returns have been cross-checked against manuscript census reports and other data that describe differences in ethnic and socioeconomic makeup, and for the more rural case of Tuscaloosa, soil content and availability of ground water, which map closely onto socioeconomic status. These data show that whereas national coalitions based on economic issues and class and ethnoreligious cleavages animated electoral politics earlier in the reactive sequence, these coalitions were supplanted by cross-class and inter-ethnic sectional coalitions by 1860. Newspaper articles, letters to the editor, and the minutes of local rank-and-file political

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meetings, in turn, offer insight into the reasons that voters and local party leaders maintained or changed their political allegiances in this period.

THE DISRUPTION OF CHICAGO DEMOCRACY Contingency. The northern half of the U.S. Secession Crisis can be traced to an unanticipated struggle for leadership succession in the Democratic Party. A majority of Democratic powerbrokers viewed the 1844 campaign cycle as a chance to avenge Martin Van Buren‘s defeat in the 1840 presidential election. The incoming Democraticcontrolled Congress had elected a Van Buren lieutenant, John W. Jones, Speaker of the House to push through his legislative agenda, and the majority of delegates going into the national convention were pledged to Van Buren. But a new generation of Democrats with national leadership aspirations was eager to replace their party‘s populist opposition to a national bank and other commercial measures with a policy of aggressive territorial expansion. Thus, after Van Buren announced his opposition to the annexation of Texas in April of that year, expansionist ―Young America‖ Democrats called the infamous ―twothirds rule‖ which required that the presidential nominee have the support of at least twothirds of the national convention. Having organized just enough delegates to deny Van Buren a super-majority, the Young America faction then threw their support behind a compromise candidate and the eventual winner of the 1844 presidential election, James K. Polk, who at that point was a washed-up politician (Johannsen [1973] 1997: 127, 143145; Morrison 1997: 13-14, 28-31; Feller 2001: 65; Leonard 2002: 253; Seigenthaler 2003: 3; Eyal 2007: 127; Merry 2009: 1).

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The Chicago Democratic organization was as astonished by this unexpected turn of events as the rest of the party. From December 27, 1843 to as late as May 1, 1844 the masthead of the Chicago Democrat, the local party organ, had prominently displayed an endorsement of Van Buren. But on June 5, 1844, from the floor of the national convention in Baltimore, Illinois Congressman John Wentworth wrote to the Chicago Democrat: ―I never saw such a state of things in my life, and what will be the result time only can develope [sic] … no reliance can be placed on anything coming from letters or newspapers; for changes take place hourly.‖

Defection. White workers had previously been articulated to the Democratic Party together with white farmers as an aggrieved class of common men, whose economic independence had grown precarious with the advent of the factory and the market economy (de Leon 2008). The rhetorical currency of antebellum Chicago politics was what Fraser and Gordon (1994) have called the ―discourse of dependency.‖ Dependency was a state of non-citizenship reserved for sweated wage laborers, slaves, and women, whose current or potential deprivation was said to make them too self-interested to reflect upon the broad interests of the republic as a whole. Conversely, white male subsistence farmers and artisans were the icons of independence, for it was imagined that they lived comfortably enough off their own labor that they could steer the course of the republic without prejudice to their own enrichment. The implications of the discourse were three-fold. First, it served as the ideological justification for a farmer-worker Democratic coalition. Second, captains of American industry and finance, though economically independent, were not to be

22

counted in the same number as farmers and workers, since they were deemed incapable of seeing beyond the horizon of their next speculative scheme. The result is that northern industrialists joined southern planters in the Whig Party (Ford 1988; Thornton 1978; Watson 1981; Wilentz 2005). Third, citizenship was confined to self-employed white men, and as such was inflected by ethnoracial, gender, and class distinctions (Boydston 1990; Fraser and Gordon 1994; Roediger 1991). This broad construal of dependency to include and therefore to stigmatize not only women and blacks, but also sweated white men as unfree, exemplified the dominant brand of Democratic politics in the 1830s and early 1840s. It rendered incipient capitalist institutions such as the Second Bank of the United States the main targets of political attacks (Ashworth 1983; Blau 1954; de Leon 2008; Sellers 1991; Thornton 1978; Watson 1990; Wilentz 2005; Wilson 1974). When Young America Democrats changed the terms of debate in 1844 from domestic economic issues to territorial expansion, they justified the policy shift in ways that continued to speak to the economic independence of white workers and farmers. New territory would allow workers and squatters to move on from places where land had largely ended up in private hands, to new ones where land was cheap and its use by squatters was essentially free. As one Democrat put it, the effect of cheap land in the West, ―would be to invite a large number of individuals who had settled in eastern cities, who were half-starved and dependent on those who employed them, to go to the West, where with little funds, they could secure a small farm on which to subsist and … get rid of that feeling of dependence which made them slaves‖ (Morrison 1997: 17).

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But because of the near solid support of the southern delegation for Polk, northern Democrats, who dutifully supported the party‘s nominee in 1844 yet remained loyal to Van Buren, later challenged the legitimacy of the new leadership by framing each defeat of northern interests as a ―slave power conspiracy,‖ in which the southern wing of the party had once again thwarted the will of the majority. The factional struggle came to a head when Congress took up debate on payment for territories acquired in the settlement to the U.S. Mexican War. David Wilmot, a Pennsylvania Democrat, attached a proviso to the appropriations bill that slavery be prohibited from any such territory. Wilmot, it is important to note, was no fringe abolitionist: he was a vengeful Van Buren Democrat. When Young America had imposed Texas annexation as a litmus test for the 1844 presidential nomination, he used his proviso to show that two could play it that game. Later in the 1848 presidential election, Van Burenites, who styled themselves ―Free Soil Democrats,‖ mounted a third-party challenge to bar slavery from the Mexican cession, since the monopolization of the land by wealthy planters would prevent free white men from escaping wage dependency in the nation‘s cities. Southern Democrats charged that the prohibition would make them second-class citizens, while the new Young America leadership sought to quell dissension with a middle-of-the-road policy called ―popular sovereignty‖ that would have allowed settlers to decide by referendum whether their territory should be free or slave (Feller 2001: 67-68; Leonard 2002: 253-254; Merry 2009: 286-287; Morrison 1997: 39-41). In Illinois, Wilmot‘s proviso pit the Chicago Democratic Party in the North led by John Wentworth, whose base was largely Free Soil, against the state party headquartered at Springfield in Central Illinois and led by Stephen A. Douglas, which favored popular

24

sovereignty. In a letter dated March 17, 1848 to the editor of the Chicago Democrat, one of the city‘s Democratic cadres balked at the state party‘s attempt at party discipline in advance of the 1848 Democratic National Convention: ―As a reason why the farmers and mechanics of the north are to be dragged down to Springfield … or else stay at home and let a few trafficking politicians rule the State, it is said that our delegation must be united … it is said that no friend of Mr. Jefferson‘s Ordinance of 1787 [which prohibited slavery in the Northwest territory] … must be sent to Baltimore. And why not? Because the Central Power wills it … In retaliation for this open outrage and insult among the northern democracy, the north ought to insist upon … the right of each district to nominate its own candidate.‖ Recalling the bitterness of 1844, this northern Illinois Democrat expresses his resentment at being forced to attend the state Democratic convention, where he suspects the leadership will make him knuckle to yet another illegitimate ruling minority, whom he refers to as ―a few trafficking politicians‖ and ―the Central Power.‖ Significantly, the issue of slavery extension is joined to a project of ―retaliation for this open outrage and insult among the northern democracy.‖ Chicago Democrats made good on their retaliatory project in the 1848 presidential election by diverting their votes in Chicago‘s immigrant working class neighborhoods from the state and national party‘s nominee, Lewis Cass, to Martin Van Buren, now running as the presidential candidate of the Free Soil Party. The 1844 and 1848 electoral returns listed in Table 1 were not reported by ward but by polling station and are therefore less precise than the 1852 data as we shall see, but they nonetheless provide

25

evidence of defection from the Democratic Party. The South-East or lakeshore poll was the most affluent section of town. The South-West poll, located just inland from the lakeshore below the mouth of the Chicago River was the next most affluent. Table 1 shows that in 1844 the Democrats carried the city with a comfortable majority and did best in the West and North polling stations, which were in largely immigrant working class neighborhoods, breaking the 60 percent barrier in both cases. In contrast, the Democrats were held to well below that mark in wealthier native-born areas, doing worst of all in the South-East poll. By 1848, the political landscape had changed dramatically. The Democrats were once again strongest in the North and West, but their support had dropped by double digits throughout the city. According to official returns published in the November 11, 1848 issue of the Democrat, Van Buren and the Free Soil Party carried Chicago with just over 40 percent of the vote, whereas Cass, the regular Democratic nominee, came not in second place, but in third behind the Whig nominee, Zachary Taylor. TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE The surviving statements of Chicago workers on the issue of slavery extension explain why the Free Soil message gained traction among less affluent voters. In March 1848, workers organized the Chicago auxiliary of the ―National Reform Association‖ (NRA), which sought to make land an entitlement of free white men (Bronstein 1999: 169; Lause 2005: 99, 100, 102). In the December 8, 1848 issue of their organ, the Gem of the Prairie, the Chicago NRA framed their ―protest against the further extension of the area of chattel slavery and monopoly of the soil‖ in this way:

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―A denial to the mass of mankind of their equal right to a portion of the earth, must, in the course of events, build up a state of society in which the monopolists of the earth will accumulate all the wealth of the country while the toiling millions, who are the producers of that wealth, must become wage slaves, and sink into hopeless destitution and famine.‖ The terms of the NRA‘s opposition to slavery extension are significant in three ways. First, they point to the reason that workers and farmers had been constituents of the Democratic Party in the first place: workers saw themselves as future farmers, since the discourse of dependency had stigmatized and indeed racialized wage work as a form of slavery. In this sense, workers understood their fate to be bound up with the fate of small farmers. But second, it is clear from this passage that whereas in 1844 the Democrats had used the issue of territorial expansion to articulate a national bloc of farmers and workers, by 1848 Democratic factionalism over the status of slavery in the new territories had prompted the same constituents to identify increasingly as northerners and southerners. Third and relatedly, NRA rhetoric was palpably derivative of Free Soil and earlier Jacksonian rhetoric, suggesting that workers came to understand their place in the republic in part by drawing upon partisan discourse. The unanticipated debacle of 1844 and the attendant expansionist turn in public policy had therefore precipitated a defection of local Democratic leaders and constituents. John Wentworth defied the will of Stephen A. Douglas and the state party and mobilized on behalf of the Free Soil Party and his injured former leader, Martin Van Buren. Meanwhile, Chicago workers concluded that slaveholders, if given the chance, would monopolize newly acquired western lands and relegate them to wage slavery in the

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nation‘s cities. Accordingly, NRA Democratic voters threw their weight behind the free soilers.

Abortive Recovery. Division in the Democratic Party led to the Whigs‘ second presidential victory in three election cycles, and for many Democratic cadres, this was a sobering loss. Democrats had consoled themselves with the notion that their defeat in 1840 was merely aberrant, but Zachary Taylor‘s accession to the presidency in 1849 stirred a compulsion – even among the most ardent free soilers – to close ranks and save their party. In an August 26, 1850 editorial in the Democrat titled, ―The Duty of Democrats,‖ John Wentworth himself advised his colleagues ―to avoid a committal to any third party organization,‖ adding, ―The most … that could possibly be done by this proposed third party organization is to divide the democratic party to such an extent as to elect a whig candidate.‖ In the shadow of their defeat, Democrats predicted correctly that if they could put the issue of slavery extension behind them with a grand compromise, their local cadres and rank-and-file would fall back into line. Thus, when a compromise bill seemed doomed, Senator Stephen A. Douglas resuscitated the deal by shepherding a series of votes on the individual components of the bill until the whole compromise was passed. The Democrats thus settled the debate over Wilmot‘s proviso by making California free, pledging ―non-interference‖ in New Mexico and Utah, and referring all future disputes over slavery in the territories to the U.S. Supreme Court (Morrison 1997: 124). With everyone committed to ―finality‖ (the concept that the controversy over slavery extension had been settled), the three wings of the party reunited. Douglas and

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Wentworth, who had been at odds over the proviso, were now on the same team. In the first local test of Democratic unity, a midterm election for state representative, the Chicago Democrat reported on November 14, 1850 that Thomas Dyer, ―the regular nominee of the democratic party for Representative, at the late election, received the largest number of votes ever given to any one man in Cook County.‖ The second column of Table 2 reports a similar result for the 1852 presidential election and suggests that the Democratic Party had reabsorbed the defectors in Chicago‘s less affluent wards. Since the proportion of skilled workers throughout the city remained stable at about 25 percent in the 1850s, working class wards (signified in bold) are those in which unskilled workers comprised at least an additional one-third of the male labor force, giving skilled and unskilled workers together a comfortable voting majority. The resulting ward designations reflect the natural break between Chicago‘s affluent lakeshore communities represented by wards 1 and 2 where unskilled workers comprised less than one-quarter of the labor force, and the interior of the city where the proportion of unskilled workers ranged from more than one-third (wards 5, 6, 8, and 9) to as high as one-half in ward 7 (see Figure 2) (Einhorn 1991: 249, 261). FIGURE 2 ABOUT HERE TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE Only the elite residents of wards 1 and 2 on the ―Magnificent Mile‖ corridor cast a majority of their ballots for the Whigs. In contrast, the residents of all five of the city‘s working class wards and the two middle class wards (3 and 4) gave the Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Pierce convincing majorities ranging from 56 to 95 percent. The Democratic wards consisted mainly of immigrant workers: a) the North

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side‘s 7th through 9th wards were dominated by German workers; b) the West side 6th was predominantly German and Irish working class; and c) the lower portion of the South side‘s 5th ward and increasingly the 4th, were Irish working class neighborhoods. For the time being, it appeared that the Democrats had averted disaster.

Crisis. But what began as a Democratic renaissance quickly gave way to the ascendancy of another sectional party, the Republican Party. Rather than turn to economic or other issues, the Democrats doubled down on territorial expansion believing that the Compromise of 1850 spelled out the terms under which their party might take credit for annexing future territories. Indeed, even as the debate over the proviso raged, Douglas and other Young America leaders had been quietly moving to annex Cuba (Johannsen [1973] 1997: 326). Once the compromise had been finalized, the Democratic leadership was supremely confident that they would once again return to dominance on the twin strength of their appeal for more territories and Douglas‘s role in securing the passage of the compromise. As one Democrat put it, victory was assured ―with Douglas and Cuba inscribed on our flag, as in 1844 we had Polk, Dallas, and Texas‖ (Morrison 1997: 125). Accordingly, the Democrats renewed the country‘s march westward, and in a fateful move that put Chicago and the nation on a course toward crisis, Stephen A. Douglas authored the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 to occupy the large Indian reservation just west of the Missouri River and link it to the lands of the Mexican cession (Douglas [1853] 1961, 270). By leaving the question of slavery in Kansas and Nebraska to popular sovereignty instead of the Supreme Court, the act not only undermined the Compromise of 1850, but also abrogated the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which

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prohibited slavery north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Since slavery could now conceivably be established in the North by popular referendum, the act resurrected the twin specter of the monopolization of northern lands by southern planters and the enslavement of free white men in the nation‘s factories. The Democrats‘ subsequent mismanagement of Kansas statehood then spelled the end of Democratic hegemony in Chicago and throughout the North. By attempting to force the proslavery ―Lecompton Constitution‖ on the people of Kansas, the majority of whom were free soilers, the Democratic administration, then led by President James Buchanan, effectively reversed themselves on the doctrine of popular sovereignty. The Kansas question renewed dissension among Illinois‘ leading Democratic cadres. The act itself shattered the truce between the Wentworth and Douglas wings of the state party. In 1855 Douglas established his own newspaper, the Chicago Times, to compete for votes with the free soil Chicago Democrat, while Wentworth rejoined his free soil colleagues from both major parties in a ―fusion‖ movement that became the modern Republican Party (Fehrenbacher 1957: 131). Then as the battle over Kansas statehood was joined, the controversy over the legitimacy of the Lecompton Constitution pit President Buchanan, who supported the proslavery constitution, against Douglas, who had come out against Lecompton in 1858 and would become the party‘s presidential nominee in 1860. The result was yet another split in the state party to add to the now irreversible break with Wentworth‘s free soil faction. Using his henchman, Isaac Cook, the president established a newspaper called the Chicago Herald to draw Democratic votes away from Douglas (Nichols 1948: 211-212; Johannsen [1973] 1997: 678, 943fn53).

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The backlash of the Chicago Democratic rank-and-file tracks closely with Wentworth‘s final exodus from the Democratic Party. The minutes of a mass meeting of Chicago‘s German north-siders published in the Tribune on March 20, 1854 state that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was condemned for ―reducing the free foreigner to the position now occupied by the slave, who is politically without any rights, depriving him of all influence against the phalanx of slaveholders.‖ The north-siders added, ―we have lost our confidence in, and must look with distrust upon, the leaders of the Democratic party, to whom, hitherto, we had confidence enough to think that they paid some regard to our interests.‖ The 1856 electoral returns demonstrate the political impact of the KansasNebraska Act of 1854, while the 1860 returns show that the Democrats‘ subsequent vacillation on Kansas statehood precipitated a smaller but still consequential defection to the Republican Party. The key finding reported in Table 2 is that by 1860 the Republicans had captured all but two wards in the entire city much as the Democrats had done in 1852, but with one crucial difference: the Republicans had united the elite residents of the lakeshore (wards 1 and 2) with the working class residents of the North and upper West sides (wards 6 through 9) in a cross-class inter-ethnic sectional coalition.

THE PROSTRATION OF TUSCALOOSA WHIGGERY Contingency. Secessionism in Alabama can also be traced to Van Buren‘s defeat at the 1844 Democratic National Convention. The Whig strategy in that year‘s presidential campaign had been built entirely around Van Buren‘s nomination, and they relished their prospects. One Whig likened Van Buren to a steer ―so poor and weak it had to be held up to be shot‖ [emphasis in original]. Another declared, ―If we cannot beat Van Buren, we

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can beat no one.‖ By the Spring of 1844, the Whigs had invested considerable time and money circulating anti-Van Buren speeches, song-sheets, and pamphlets (Johannsen [1973] 1997: 144-145; Morrison 1997: 29). Polk‘s nomination, then, threw the Whig campaign off stride. The Tuscaloosa Democratic Gazette observed on June 13, 1844 that the Whigs were ―taken aback by the name of Polk. They have nothing to say against him.‖ In reference to the anti-Van Buren pamphlets already in circulation, they added, ―We almost pity the whigs that their thousands of stereotyped misrepresentations, and their cart loads of songs can be of no avail to them in this canvass.‖ Tuscaloosa‘s Whig organ, the Independent Monitor, conveyed its party‘s surprise on September 4, 1844 in this way: ―We have never heard any dissatisfaction expressed by the Democracy, in regard to Mr. Van Buren.‖ Later, in a bitter post-mortem of the election published by the Monitor on December 11, 1844, the Whigs described Polk‘s candidacy as so improbable that even the members of this own party were incredulous: ―He is the first President … of whom the people knew nothing until he was packed upon by political jugglers as a scapegoat for their own dissentions. When he was nominated, many of his party believed it a hoax.‖ The 1844 Democratic presidential nomination was therefore as much an unanticipated contingency to Tuscaloosa Whigs as it was to Chicago Democrats. The question remains, though, how leadership succession in the Democratic Party could cause defection among Whig cadres and voters. After all, shouldn‘t the opposition have benefited from Democratic strife?

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Defection. On the contrary, leadership succession in the Democratic Party and the attendant pivot towards territorial policy depleted the local Whig Party of leadership talent and voters. Tuscaloosa Whigs suffered the defection of two of its most illustrious cadres. On September 4, 1844, just two months before the presidential election, the Monitor reported that U.S. Congressman General George W. Crabb performed a ―somerset … from the Whigs to the Democracy‖ at a ―Polk and Dallas dinner‖ by ―condemning [Whig presidential candidate, Henry] Clay‘s views on the annexation of Texas‖ (see also Owen 1921: 411). William R. Smith, whom Crabb put through school and hired to work in his law office, became the mouthpiece of the local Whig Party in 1838 when he became editor of the Monitor, but he, too, left the party prior to the 1844 election over similar disagreements with Henry Clay (Owen 1921: 1597). In addition, the Whigs witnessed an unprecedented erosion of their electoral support due to the defection of planters throughout the county. The third column of Table 3 reports the presidential electoral returns of 1844. County returns in this period were reported not by ward number but by rural beat – the place-name of the polling station, usually a general store, mill, or government building (see Figure 3). The Whigs were generally more powerful in the western half of the county, while the Democrats controlled the less populous East. The beats are further organized into quadrants. The planter strongholds (signified in bold) were concentrated in the southwest quadrant of the county where the town of Tuscaloosa itself (signified by the ―Court House‖) was located. It was here that the best soil in the county could be found. Planters also owned the best farmland in the Northwest portion of the county just beyond the swamps of the Sipsey River. The Whigs‘ Northwest beats were Hughes‘s,

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Springer‘s, and Lexington. The Democratic Party dominated the rest of the county, where the quality of the soil was middling to poor, where access to ground water was limited, and where fewer people, mostly small farmers and herdsmen, lived and worked. FIGURE 3 ABOUT HERE TABLE 3 ABOUT HERE The Democrats carried the county for the first time ever. Whereas most of the Whig strongholds held firm, Young America Democrats used the promise of western lands to good effect and peeled off enough Whig voters – known as ―Texas Whigs‖ – to cobble together a majority with their base in the more rural sections of the county. Although the Democrats also carried one other planter beat (Springer‘s), Northport, the second largest town in the county next to Tuscaloosa, was by far the biggest coup. Whig rank-and-file defections were more widespread than that, however, according to an analysis published on July 27, 1847 in the Monitor. In the 1840 presidential election, the Whig candidate, William Henry Harrison won 1276 votes in Tuscaloosa County, while his counterpart in 1844, Henry Clay, won only 902 votes – a 41 percent a drop that cannot be accounted for by the Democrats‘ slim margin of victory in Springer‘s and Northport.

Abortive Recovery. The Whigs temporarily regained control over their cadres and constituents in Tuscaloosa beginning in 1848 with the presidential candidacy of General Zachary Taylor, whom they strategically framed as the second coming of George Washington. What was needed in the now two-year-long Congressional stalemate over slavery in the Mexican cession, the Whigs argued, was a man who could unite a divided

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country with his capacity to privilege the public good over all private interests, partisan, sectional, and otherwise. Thus, the Tuscaloosa Whig cadre, Robert Jemison, Jr., asserted that Taylor, like Washington, was the embodiment of political independence. The June 29, 1848 issue of the Monitor quotes Jemison as saying, ―Though like the father of his country he inclines to the leading tenets of one of the great political parties, he is not strictly and fully identified with either. He is above all party … Such a man was a Washington, and on such a man the patriots of all parties may unite.‖ The fourth column of Table 3 reports the beat-level results of the 1848 presidential election in Tuscaloosa County. The returns demonstrate that the Whig Party had reabsorbed rank-and-file ―Texas Whigs‖: planter beats went overwhelmingly for Taylor, whereas the small farmers of the eastern half of the county voted for the Democratic candidate, Lewis Cass. In the defecting beats of 1844, Springer‘s and Northport, the Democratic share of the popular vote dropped from the mid- to high-50 percent range to a third. Indeed, the Democratic share decreased in all but two planter beats, Carthage and Foster‘s, As the stalemate over slavery continued, planters remained firmly behind the Whig insistence that southerners should put the sectional debate behind them. Recalling the selfless patriotism of their leader, General Taylor, the Whigs styled themselves ―unionists‖ for the purposes of the 1851 U.S. Congressional campaign and urged their base to disavow Southern Rights principles and commit instead to the Compromise of 1850 and national harmony (Dorman [1935] 1995: 49). The message even brought William R. Smith back to the fold, but this time as a unionist. Table 4 reports that in the 4th Congressional District, planter-heavy Tuscaloosa County gave Smith a 2-to-1 margin

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of victory. Planters tended to frame their support for unionism in terms that not only underscored their identity as businessmen in the wider national economy, but also recalled their alliance with northern industrialists. For example, one planter said, ―Disunion will not give us a better price for cotton—will not increase the value of slave property—will not render them more secure—will not diminish taxation—but will be likely under the best imaginable state of affairs, to double taxation, diminish the price of staples, and reduce the value of negroes and land, fifty per cent‖ (Dorman [1935] 1995: 58-60, 64, 65, 67, 184; Thornton 1978: 183, 186-187, 192-195). TABLE 4 ABOUT HERE Crisis. The Whig resurrection, however, like that of the Chicago Democrats, soon gave way to the ascendancy of a sectional organization, the Southern Rights Democratic Party. Riding the coat tails of a candidate whose principal strength had been that he had no established political views was unsustainable as a basis of political hegemony. Once the Compromise of 1850 had resolved the Proviso stalemate, there was no longer any obvious need for a charismatic non-partisan. Accordingly, in June 1852 the Democratic Party, led by Governor Henry Collier of Tuscaloosa, took control of the Alabama state legislature and, for good measure, gerrymandered the state‘s legislative districts to nullify the most recent Whig gains. Alarmed at the comeback staged by the Democrats after 1851 and the subsequent defection of northern Whigs into the Republican Party in 1854, the Whigs scrambled to unite the northern and southern conservatives of both parties in a national anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant alternative to sectionalism called the ―American‖ or ―Know-Nothing‖ party. The American state platform published in the November 22, 1855 issue of the

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Monitor, included a call for ―a radical change in the naturalization laws … to prevent the transportation and immigration of paupers and criminals of other countries‖ and an allusion to the feared power of the Pope over Catholic immigrants that ―all men … whose allegiance to the Constitution is subject to be absolved by any foreign power on earth, are wholly unfit to hold office in this republican country.‖ The most prominent Whigs and Whig newspapers in the state declared themselves for the American Party. In 1855, all four Whig candidates for Congress, including the prodigal son of the Tuscaloosa Whig Party, William R. Smith, ran under the American banner (Dorman [1935] 1995: 176192). But if the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 precipitated the defection of Chicago working class voters into the Republican Party, then in Tuscaloosa it was the Whigs‘ reorganization as the American Party that led directly to a second and final defection of planters into the Southern Rights camp. Democratic secessionists outflanked the new Whig organization by accusing the American Party, whose northern chapters had known ties to free soil elements, of conspiring with Republicans to divide and weaken the South. Thus, on June 25, 1856, the Advertiser, the Democratic state organ, explained that the late ―discord and dissension‖ among southerners originated ―from the day that Know Nothingism … dragged its slimy length into their midst,‖ adding that ―It came from the North and lapped the blood and warmed itself by the fire of blazing homes in the South‖ until at last it threw off ―its mask of Black Republicanism‖ [emphasis in original]. As their message gained traction and as the political stock of southern rights rose once more, the state Democratic Party as a whole began calling itself the ―Democratic and Anti-

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Know-Nothing‖ Party (Official Proceedings of the Democratic and Anti-Know-Nothing State Convention of Alabama, 1856). Democratic attacks caused one after another Whig cadre to defect from the American Party and thereby prove their credentials as southern men. For instance, Henry Hilliard, the most prominent Whig in the state and a former professor at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, worked to unite the South behind Buchanan‘s Democratic administration after campaigning in 1856 for Millard Fillmore, the American Party presidential candidate. In his published memoirs Hilliard explained his defection in this way: ―The formidable display of strength by the anti-slavery party of the North made it plain that the interests of the Southern people demanded that any differences of sentiment as to other questions should be subordinated to resistance to this threatened aggression upon their rights‖ (Hilliard 1892: 276). Between 1857 and 1860 the Democrats ran unopposed for statewide office. Former Whigs were so utterly stigmatized that no one would accept the nomination of the American Party for any position. Instead some found themselves in the unreal position of accusing Democrats of being weak on southern rights. By the 1860 presidential election the Alabama two-party system was effectively defunct (Dorman [1935] 1995: 141, 170, 173; Thornton 1978: 360-364). The division and defection of the Whig rank-and-file tracked closely with these developments. For example, Tuscaloosa‘s elite benevolent societies, with few exceptions, had functioned unperturbed by sectional politics until 1857 when a religious tract proclaiming the moral evils arising from slavery occasioned protests from southern rights members (Quist 1996: 496). A longstanding feud between Basil Manly and F. A. P. Barnard, the University of Alabama‘s president and most illustrious professor

39

respectively, became sectionalized when Barnard came out publicly as a unionist (Quist 1998: 199-200). As the nativists became increasingly identified with the Republican Party, Tuscaloosa Whig voters drifted to the Southern Rights cause. William R. Smith lost his first congressional race since winning the seat in 1851. Table 4 reports that his home county was a major weakness: landslides in Tuscaloosa County had always helped to put him over the top, but in 1857 Smith carried the county by a razor thin margin (Dorman [1935] 1995: 184-185). Planters had delivered Tuscaloosa County to the Whigs in every presidential election except 1844,3 but the dissolution of the Alabama Whigs by 1857 and their prostration to the logic of southern rights principles gave the secessionists free reign to monopolize political discourse and competition. As Table 3 reports, the Southern Rights presidential candidate, Vice President John C. Breckinridge, carried the county despite the candidacy of John C. Bell, a prominent national Whig and southern unionist, running as the presidential nominee of the Constitutional Union Party. Just as the Republicans had forged a cross-class sectional coalition between the wealthy lakeshore and the immigrant working class wards in the interior of Chicago, so too did Southern Rights Democrats unite the small farmers and herdsmen of the eastern half of the county with the planters of the once staunchly Whig southwest. The planter strongholds of the Court House, Lexington, Foster‘s, Carthage, and Hughes‘s gave majorities to the Southern Rights Democratic Party for the first time ever.

3

Unfortunately, beat returns for 1852 and 1856 are unavailable. 40

CONCLUSION By addressing the puzzle of the U.S. Secession Crisis in this way, the present paper makes several contributions. First and foremost, it adds to the growing body of work on the role of political parties in democratic transitions and expansions. Whereas that body of work has conceived of parties as either organizers or mediators, the foregoing data suggest that the reactive logic of party politics comprised an important prelude to the articulation of democratic coalitions in the antebellum American case. As a result of the reactions and counter-reactions stemming from the defeat of Martin Van Buren for the 1844 Democratic presidential nomination, leadership cadres and voting blocs defected from their traditional parties and became available for mobilization by the sectional alternatives of North and South. Although the dominant parties in my two cases re-exerted a temporary hold over their renegade functionaries and constituents, each organization made mistakes that fueled a backlash. Rather than shift the terms of political discourse away from territorial policy, a resurgent Democratic Party pressed for further territorial expansion and set the stage for another debate over the status of slavery in the West. Similarly, rather than hold to the cause of unionism, a triumphant Whig Party panicked in the face of the Democratic comeback in 1852 and reorganized as the American Party, hoping that nativism would provide a common cause upon which the conservatives of both sections could unite. Instead, the nativist strategy led to the destruction of the Alabama two-party system. Each move therefore precipitated a second and final defection of cadres and voting blocs from the major parties. Second, studies that emphasize slavery and competing elite interests as the primary catalysts of the U.S. Secession Crisis overlook the fact that these had been

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permanent fixtures of the polity since the beginning of the republic. We are therefore left to puzzle out why these factors escalated to the point of secession in the 1860s instead of any earlier moment in American history. It is within these gaps that a focus on the reactive logic of party politics offers more analytical purchase. Why 1860 and not earlier? The reason proposed here is that until 1860 national electoral coalitions based on economic issues and class and ethno-religious cleavages had defused earlier moments of sectional feeling. The unexpected struggle for the 1844 Democratic presidential nomination not only shifted the terms of debate to territorial policy and then to the status of slavery in the Mexican cession, but also eroded the organizational and rhetorical basis of the American two-party system. Two of the resulting factions, the southern and Van Burenite wings of the Democratic Party, became the respective nuclei of the Southern Rights and Republican parties after 1854. Last and in a related vein, this paper challenges the abstract mechanical temporality of the realignment literature. It questions the assumptions of political stability and dominance and suggests on the contrary that electoral coalitions are always at risk and therefore being continually cultivated. The threshold effects model in which socioeconomic pressure builds up to a flash point comes closest to the framework sketched out here, but it is different in important ways. First, the reactive logic of party politics need not build up to a crisis. It did in this instance, but parties may also react in ways that effectively defuse mounting political pressure. Second, and because of this, reactivity assumes no regular cycle or periodicity to party dominance. Third, the pressure in the threshold effects model comes principally from socioeconomic change, rather than from party politics, which are assumed to be static. Indeed, Burnham depends on the

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assumption of a do-nothing party system – otherwise there would be no reason for the system to reset every thirty to forty years. The framework proposed here shifts the analytical focus to the back-and-forth of political parties and the resulting organization and disorganization of electoral coalitions. Future research should first undertake systematic comparison of the reactive logic of party politics in other cases of democratic transition. Analysts might begin with cases similar to that of the United States. A settler colonial society with a racial hierarchy of political citizenship, South Africa is perhaps a logical first choice. One might ask, for example, what reactive dynamic if any obtained among the African National Congress, the Communist Party, and the Afrikaner National Party in the period immediately prior to the end of apartheid. Research might then move on to more dissimilar cases. How important was the back-and-forth between the political establishment and extra-legal parties in the transitions from authoritarianism in Latin America and now the Middle East? As an adjunct to the foregoing, analysts should clarify the interaction of parties with other institutions of civil society. In this paper, the reactive logic of party politics led to the establishment of the National Reform Association in Chicago and the polarization of elite benevolent societies and universities in Tuscaloosa. Rueschemeyer and the Stephenses anticipated room for growth in the study of political articulation. These three areas of inquiry may comprise its horizon.

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