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Chris Masone
His 141
Blog Post
In our discussion in class on Tuesday, we raised the point that when President Harrison died in office a month after his inaugural address, both parties were seemingly in shock and, for a moment, the country experienced a brief constitutional crisis over presidential succession. Even more surprising, in the Whig moment of triumph after defeating incumbent Martin Van Buren, the party suddenly collapsed. To add insult to injury, Harrison’s vice president, John Tyler, suddenly turned against the Whigs and vetoed Clay’s bank bill along with other Whig-backed measures. The political climate, much to the joy of the Jacksonian Democrats, had abruptly flipped and now the Whigs were once again struggling to maintain power. Even though the Whig party was in shambles, the democrats had not yet fully recovered from Van Buren’s defeat. Rather, they may have been worse off than before due to new divisions over banking, internal improvements, and the complicated issues of slavery and interpreting the constitution. The Democratic Party was split into multiple sub-parties, like the Hunkers, the Locofocos, the Barnburners, the loyal Jacksonians, and most surprisingly the Democratic Calhounites.
Although I discussed briefly John C. Calhoun in my last blog post, I would like to revisit him because of his interesting career and his strong platform. Because he hated Andrew Jackson and Jacksonian Democracy Calhoun did not know which party to conform to. While the Whig party was anti-Jackson and pro-banking, Calhoun chose against running for president in 1824 under the Whig ticket. After the flip-flop after Harrison’s death, Calhoun switched sides and sided with the democrats. As Wilentz describes on page 279, “The most surprising development within the Democracy was a growing enthusiasm, among some of the most radical northeastern hard-money advocates, for, of all people, John C. Calhoun.” As Sarah put it, “specifically [Wilentz’s] vilification of John C. Calhoun,” is interesting to note because, “It is clear that Calhoun was not Wilentz’s ideal political representative.” Just from Wilentz’s diction, it is obvious that he was surprised at Calhoun’s sudden support from radical democrats. Wilentz’s bias against Calhoun from the last section bleeds into this chapter, as Sarah noted. I think that Wilentz’s, as I would put it, political favoritism shows as he clearly does not like the idea of Calhoun running for the Democrats after attacking previous democratic presidents like Jackson and Van Buren.
Wilentz’s bias makes it difficult to take an objective view of Calhoun in chapters 17 and 18. His account of Calhoun’s ideas and policies feels sardonic, for example on page 280, “Calhoun’s brilliant essential perception- that in modern societies, aggregations of whole interests and classes, and not individuals, had become the basic unites of politics- was offset by his favoring some interests over others.” In this quote, he seems to be patronizing the ideas in Calhoun’s summary view of politics, “Disquisition on Government.” Wilentz seems angry that the deepening divisions among the various sub-parties of the Democracy were complicating the chances of a clear democratic candidate for the next presidential election.
As a side note, Wilentz introduces the Dorr War in the same chapter. After discussing what happened with Thomas Dorr and Rhode Island’s government under the colonial charter of 1663, Wilentz concludes “the Dorr War was an exceptional case in the history of American democratization before the Civil War.” I believe the juxtaposition of the Dorr War with the fragmentation of the Democratic Party into sub-parties like the democratic Calhounites in this chapter could be an attack on the Whig Party. I believe that Wilentz attempts to argue that because of the Whig’s interference with Jacksonian Democracy, the Whigs were eventually responsible, or at least played a large role in, the civil war.