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  And tumbled off his horse.”

  —Whig campaign song

  Wow, those Whigs—they sure know how to kill a good party! Just a few years after William Henry Harrison became the first president to die in office, Zachary Taylor became the second. “Old Rough and Ready” gave his inauguration address on a raw, windy day in March 1849 and then settled in for about sixteen months worth of presidenting. On July 9, 1850, Taylor died of gastroenteritis supposedly brought on by eating tainted fruit and chugging iced milk and water after a blazing hot Fourth of July ceremony. Rumors lingered for years that he had been poisoned with arsenic, but these were disproved in 1991 when Taylor’s body—now much more rough than ready—was exhumed, and samples of his hair and fingernail tissue tested negative for large amounts of the toxic substance.

  During his brief tenure, Taylor faced issues regarding new American territories that would permeate presidential politics for the next ten years. The Gold Rush began in 1849, the population of California swelled, clamoring for admission to the Union. Henry Clay introduced his famous Compromise of 1850, which suggested that California be admitted as a free state, that New Mexico (which included present-day Utah and Arizona) be admitted “with no mention of slavery,” and that a more vigorous Fugitive Slave Law be enacted.

  Clay’s Compromise pleased neither Northern radicals, who abhorred the Fugitive Slave Law, nor Southern ones, who were already talking about secession. After Taylor died, his vice president, Millard Fillmore, took over and supported the Compromise measures. Big mistake. In June of 1852, the Whigs held their national convention in Baltimore. A splinter group of more than sixty delegates opposed to the Clay Compromise threw their votes to the Virginian and Mexican War hero General Winfield Scott. Chaos ensued. It took fifty-three ballots, but, in the end, Scott triumphed over both Millard Fillmore and Nathaniel Webster. Secretary of the Navy William Graham would run as his VP.

  Typically, the Whigs did not run firmly on an antislavery platform but waffled, saying they would support the compromise “until time and experience shall demonstrate the necessity of further legislation.”

  Things were equally chaotic on the Democratic side when the party met, also in Baltimore, to pick its nominee. This time, delegates bypassed party warhorses like Lewis Cass and James Buchanan and, after much boisterous debate, picked the little-known Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire. His running mate was Senator William King of Alabama. The Democrats came out firmly in favor of the compromise.

  THE CANDIDATES

  DEMOCRAT: FRANKLIN PIERCE Pierce, the son of a New Hampshire governor, was a good-looking and well-liked congressman and senator. He had fought in the Mexican War and, at forty-eight years old, was a relatively youthful presidential candidate. Yet he was dogged by alcoholism and tragedy, which (at this point) included the deaths of two of his three children. Pierce pledged, along with his party, to execute all the provisions of the compromise, including the Fugitive Slave Law.

  WHIG: WINFIELD SCOTT The good general was sixty-six years old, six-feet-five-inches tall, and looked every bit the Mexican War hero he was. Scott was essentially against the compromise but waffled on his public pronouncements. Like Clay before him, and many a presidential candidate after, he would pay the price for being afraid to come down clearly on one side or the other of an important issue.

  THE CAMPAIGN

  Everyone is quick to congratulate a war veteran for bravely serving his country, until that same war veteran decides to run for president. Once your name appears on a ballot, all your so-called heroism is suddenly questionable. Franklin Pierce was attacked with as much vehemence in 1852 as John Kerry was excoriated by Bush supporters in 2004.

  The attacks centered on an apparent “fainting fit” that Pierce had suffered during a battle in Mexico, after which he had to be carried to safety. Ignoring the fact that Pierce was in severe pain from a knee injury he had suffered the previous day, the Whigs had a field day. They called Pierce the Fainting General and asked voters if they wanted a coward for a president. In a Whig cartoon, General Scott rides a proud cock, Pierce a goose, while Scott sneers at his rival, “What’s the matter, Pierce? Feel ‘Faint’?”

  The Democrats, for their part, assailed Scott as “Old Fuss and Feathers,” a nickname given to the general by his officers, who saw firsthand that Scott was, to put it mildly, a bit of a pompous ass. Using his waffling on the compromise issue, they also took him to task for supposedly being a puppet of New York Senator William H. Seward, a radical antislavery Whig.

  With the growing number of Irish immigrants in the country, Catholicism had also become a campaign issue. Democrats laughed at Scott’s attempts to curry favor with Irish Catholics by telling them that one of his daughters, now dead, had been a nun. (The story was true, but it was such blatant pandering that it sounded like a lie.) The Whigs retaliated by digging up a clause in the New Hampshire constitution that prohibited Catholics from holding public office—and then they accused Pierce of writing it.

  Scott went a step further by embarking on a speaking tour (still not common practice for candidates) to address crowds of immigrants. He spoke to his listeners with all the unctuousness of the most politically correct twenty-first-century presidential candidate: “Fellow citizens. When I say fellow citizens I mean native and adopted as well as those who intend to become citizens.” When Scott heard an Irish accent, he would exclaim: “I hear that rich brogue. It makes me remember the noble deeds of Irishmen, many of whom I have led to battle and victory.”

  THE WINNER: FRANKLIN PIERCE

  Scott’s wearing of the green did him little good. In the end, Americans preferred someone who at least said what he thought—and perhaps some wished that Henry Clay’s compromise might put an end to the battling over slavery in America. With thirty-one states voting, Franklin Pierce took all but four, receiving 1,607,510 votes to Scott’s 1,386,942. At his inauguration, the new president said: “I fervently hope that the question [of slavery] is at rest, and that no sectional or ambitious or fanatical excitement may again threaten the durability of our institutions.”

  THE WELL-FOUGHT BOTTLE Franklin Pierce was known to have a drinking problem, which he kept at bay as a congressman and senator by joining the Temperance League. But his alcoholism was fair game in the election campaign, just as Senator Thomas Eagleton’s alcoholism and “nervous exhaustion” became an issue in 1972. The Whigs called Pierce the “hero of many a well-fought bottle” and kept at the issue ferociously during the entire campaign.

  Ultimately, Pierce’s well-fought bottle was a losing one—he died of cirrhosis in 1869.

  IT HELPS TO HAVE A GREAT AMERICAN AUTHOR ON YOUR SIDE. OR DOES IT? Franklin Pierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne were college buddies from Bowdoin and lifelong friends. In 1852, Hawthorne—thrown out of work by the Whig victory in the last election—wrote a campaign biography for Pierce, who rewarded him with the job of consul to Liverpool. Unfortunately, having the dark and self-doubting Hawthorne write a campaign biography is a little bit like hiring Franz Kafka to pen press releases for the Junior League. Below is an excerpt from the preface to The Life of Franklin Pierce:

  “THE AUTHOR of this memoir—being so little of a politician that he scarcely feels entitled to call himself a member of any party—would not voluntarily have undertaken the work here offered to the public. Neither can he flatter himself that he has been remarkably successful in the performance of his task, viewing it in the light of a political biography … intended to operate upon the minds of multitudes, during a presidential canvass. This species of writing is too remote from his customary occupations—and, he may, add, from his tastes—to be very satisfactorily done, without more time and practice than he would be willing to expend for such a purpose.”

  Uh, thanks, Nathaniel.

  During the War with Mexico, Franklin Pierce fainted in the heat of battle—and his political opponents never let him forget it.

  JAMES BUCHANAN

  VS.

  JOHN FRÉMONT<
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  “I did not intend to kill him, but I did intend to whip him!”

  —South Carolina Congressmen Preston Brooks, after nearly beating to death Massachusetts Senator Sumner in the Senate chambers

  Pierce was sworn in on a biting and blustery March day, with snow swirling through the air. Only weeks before, he and his family had been in a train accident. The only casualty was his eleven-year-old son, Bennie, the last of his children, who died in front of his eyes. His wife, unable to recover from the blow, did not accompany him to Washington, and Pierce, though deeply religious, became the only president in U.S history who refused to place his hand on the Bible during the swearing-in. Pierce’s vice president—elect, William King, was not at the inauguration either. He was in Cuba, ill with tuberculosis, and died a month later.

  Pierce took to drinking again, hard, and soon revealed himself to be a weak president who was unable to hold his party together. Democrat Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois—interested in pushing through a transcontinental railroad that would please his powerful Chicago constituency—persuaded Pierce to go along with a bill that reorganized land west of Missouri into the Kansas and Nebraska Territories (soon to be divided into two states, Kansas and Nebraska).

  In his desire to accomplish his goal, Douglas made the mistake of bowing to powerful Southern interests. At their behest, he pushed through what became known as the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which completely abrogated the Missouri Compromise (wherein slavery was kept to a line below latitude 36°30′). Instead, the states of Kansas and Nebraska would decide by “popular sovereignty” if they would be free or slave-holding.

  All hell broke loose. The political parties split along slavery and antislavery lines. In fact, the Whig party simply disintegrated. Disgusted by election losses and the party’s inability to take a firm stance against slavery, dissident Whigs and antislavery Democrats met in February 1854 in Ripon, Wisconsin, and formed a new political organization known as the Republicans, named in honor of Jefferson’s old party. Gaining strength as more former Whigs (mainly from the North and West) joined them, the Republicans held their national convention in Philadelphia in June of 1856. For president they nominated John C. Frémont, hero of Western exploration, with Senator William L. Dayton of New Jersey as his running mate. The Republican platform was based on admission of Kansas as a free state and opposition to any new slave states.

  The Democrats met in Cincinnati in June and ruled out any possibility of reelecting the current president (one popular campaign slogan at the convention was “Anyone but Pierce!”). Instead, they eventually settled upon James Buchanan, secretary of state under James Polk and Pierce’s minister to England. Buchanan, helpfully, had been out of the country during most of the Kansas-Nebraska Act fight, and thus the public did not associate him with it.

  THE CANDIDATES

  DEMOCRAT: JAMES BUCHANAN Buchanan was a sixty-five-year-old bachelor and a frequent presidential contender. He had been a possible candidate for president in 1844, 1848, and 1852, but each time someone else had gotten the nod. This time he was, as one prominent Democrat said, “the most available and most unobjectionable choice.” His VP was Kentucky Senator John C. Breckinridge.

  REPUBLICAN: JOHN C. FRÉMONT Frémont was forty-three, handsome and dashing, and a former army officer whose pioneering exploration of the West earned him the nickname “The Pathfinder.” The Republicans were determined to make Frémont into a political matinee idol; they sold poster-size colored lithographs of him for a buck apiece. John Greenleaf Whittier even wrote an adoring poem called “The Pass of the Sierras.” His vice president was William Dayton, a former senator from New Jersey.

  THE CAMPAIGN

  The campaign of 1856 revolved around the very serious matter of slavery—not until the Vietnam War would one single issue so polarize presidential politics. The subject aroused so much passion among Americans that outbursts of violence were common. Proslavery forces had made a bloody raid on an antislavery newspaper office in the town of Lawrenceville, Kansas, killing five men. In response, John Brown and his men attacked a proslavery town, killing five more—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

  Republicans held mass meetings and marched through the streets. They were joined by Northern thinkers and writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Abraham Lincoln, who had been a potential Republican candidate for vice president, beat the drums for the party.

  The Democrats responded by hurling the usual assortment of insults at Frémont. They said he was a drunkard, a slave owner, guilty of brutal treatment of California Indians, and that he had lied or exaggerated certain of his discoveries in the West. They parodied his election slogan of “Free Soil, Free Men, Fremont, and Victory!” chanting: “Free Soilers, Fremonters, Free Niggers, and Freebooters!”

  But one thing they said about Frémont made sense to a lot of people: He was a polarizing candidate, too radically antislavery, and that his election would cause the South to secede from the Union.

  THE WINNER: JAMES BUCHANAN

  Almost 80 percent of eligible voters participated in this election, the third highest turnout in American history (1876 holds the record with 81.8 percent, followed by 1860 and 81.2 percent). James Buchanan won with 1,836,072 votes, compared to Frémont’s 1,342,345. For the new and underfunded Republican Party, however, Frémont’s very respectable tally suggested that 1860 might hold great promise.

  GAY BASHING, NINETEENTH-CENTURY-STYLE James Buchanan never married. His longtime roommate in Washington (then, as now, many congressmen shared apartments to cut down on costs) was Senator William Rufus King of Alabama. As far back as the Jackson administration, rumors circulated about a possible homosexual liaison between Buchanan and King. Andrew Jackson called Buchanan “Miss Nancy,” and the nickname stuck. (Buchanan was a Jackson supporter, but Jackson disliked him in the extreme. He made him minister to Russia only because, he told a friend, “it was as far as I could send him out of my sight.”) And Henry Clay liked to taunt fellow senator Buchanan to his face, saying, “I wish I had a more ladylike manner of expressing myself.”

  THE CRIME OF CATHOLICISM William T. Seward once said that John C. Frémont was “nearly convicted of being a Catholic.” Frémont’s wife (the daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton) was a Catholic, and in fact, Frémont had allowed a priest to marry them—for want of any other clergyman available. But Frémont himself was a staunch Episcopalian.

  But in pamphlets like Frémont’s “Romanism Established,” the candidate was attacked as a secret Catholic, one who would surface after his election with allegiances to the Roman Pope. At the time, these were serious charges, and they hurt Frémont in certain political circles. But he felt that to respond to the slurs would be to give them credence, and thus he suffered in silence.

  HANG IT ALL! James Buchanan suffered from congenital palsy that caused his head to tilt slightly to the left. Frémont supporters claimed the tilt was really a result of Buchanan’s bungled attempt to hang himself—and a man who couldn’t even do away with himself could not be president, could he?

  Republicans claimed that James Buchanan had attempted suicide but was too incompetent to finish the job.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  VS.

  STEPHEN DOUGLAS

  “The conduct of the Republican party in this [Lincoln’s] nomination is a remarkable indication of a small intellect, growing smaller.”

  —New York Herald

  In 1860, the U.S. population was just over thirty-one million—and every man, woman, and child was waiting for the coming storm of a terrible war.

  From the beginning, James Buchanan’s administration was effectively held hostage by the boiling factional dispute over slavery. Two days after his inauguration, the Supreme Court handed down its judgment in the Dred Scott case, in which it declared that a freed slave who had moved back to Mississippi could be legally enslaved.

  This meant that when it came to new states, all bets were off. No more Missouri
Compromise, no more “popular sovereignty.” If a man in Kansas or Nebraska wanted to own a slave, he could—no ifs, ands, or buts. The South was ecstatic, the North enraged, and political debate became tinged with violence.

  The Democrats held their convention in Charleston, South Carolina, in April. Senator Stephen A. Douglas from Illinois—proponent of popular sovereignty, famous for his 1858 Senate race debates with his old buddy and adversary Abraham Lincoln—was the leading candidate of moderate Democrats. He refused to put a proslavery plank in the party platform. But the radical Southern delegates vowed that they would not apologize for slavery—in fact they would “declare it right” and “advocate its extension.” Refusing to support Douglas, the delegates of Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Texas, and most of Louisiana, South Carolina, Arkansas, Delaware, and Georgia withdrew from the convention—45 delegates in all.

  Without the two-thirds majority required to elect a candidate, the Democrats were forced to adjourn the convention until June, when they met again in Baltimore. This time, they nominated Douglas for president, with Herschel Johnson, former governor of Georgia, as his running mate. The Democrats would run on a relatively moderate popular sovereignty platform.

  When the Republicans met in Chicago—at the “Wigwam,” a massive two-story wooden structure that could accommodate ten thousand people and was the first-ever building constructed especially for a political convention—they knew they were in a great position to win the election, thanks to all the disarray among the Democrats. As the convention began, the chief contender was William Seward, the former governor of New York and a powerful antislavery speaker, who had the backing of New York City boss Thurlow Weed and his Tammany machinery. So sure of victory were Seward’s supporters that a cannon had been set up on Seward’s lawn in Albany, ready to blast a celebratory shot at the right time.