10
NC
TN
15
15
AR
SC
Disputed
3
11
GA
MS
AL
F
Area
11
u
4
7
tur
TEXAS
e Boundary
REPUBLIC LA
5
FL
TERR.
Electoral Vote
Popular Vote
Number %
Number %
Van Buren
(Democrat)
170
57.8
764,176
51
Harrison
73
24.8
550,816
36
(Whig)
White
26
8.8
146,107
10
(Whig)
Webster
14
4.8
41,201
3
Learning
(Whig)
Mangum
11
3.7
----------
----
(Independent Democrat)
Cengage©
MAP 11.4 Presidential Election, 1836
In 1836, the Whigs tried to beat the Democrats’ national organization with an array of sectional candidates, hoping to throw the election into the House of Representatives.
The strategy failed. Martin Van Buren, with significant support in every section of the country, defeated the three Whig candidates combined.
did business in the United States. As a result, British demand for American cotton fell sharply, and the price of cotton dropped by half. With much of the speculative boom tied to cotton grown in the Southwest, the economy collapsed. The first business failures came in March 1837, just as Van Buren took office. By May, New
York banks, unable to accommodate people who were demanding hard coin for
their notes, suspended specie payments. Other banks followed suit, and soon banks all over the country, including Nicholas Biddle’s newly renamed Bank of the United States of Pennsylvania, went out of business. The financial and export sectors of the economy suffered most. In the seaport cities, one firm after another closed its doors, and about one-third of the workforce was unemployed. For those who kept their
jobs, wages declined by 30 to 50 percent. It was the deepest, most widespread,
and longest economic depression Americans had ever faced.
Whigs blamed the depression on Jackson’s hard-money policies, particularly his
destruction of the Bank of the United States and his Specie Circular. With economic distress the main issue, Whigs scored huge gains in the midterm elections of 1838, even winning control of Van Buren’s New York with a campaign that castigated
the president as “Martin Van Ruin.” Democrats blamed the crash on speculation,
luxury, and Whig paper money. Whigs demanded a new national bank, but Van
Buren proposed the complete divorce of government from the banking system.
Under his plan, the federal government would simply hold and dispense its money
The Second American Party System
409
without depositing it in banks. He also required that customs and land purchases
be paid in gold and silver coins or in notes from specie-paying banks, a provision that allowed government to regulate state banknotes without resorting to a central bank. Van Buren asked Congress to set up the Independent Treasury in
1837, and Congress spent the rest of Van Buren’s time in office arguing about it.
The Independent Treasury Bill finally passed in 1840, completing the Jacksonian
separation of bank and state.
The Election
Whigs were confident that they could take the presidency
of 1840
away from Van Buren in 1840. Trying to offend as few
voters as possible, they passed over their best-known leaders,
Senators Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, and nominated William Henry Harrison
of Ohio as their presidential candidate. Harrison was the hero of the Battle of
Tippecanoe (see Chapter 7) and a westerner whose Virginia origins made him pal-
atable in the South. He was also a proven vote-getter: As the Whigs’ “western”
candidate in 1836, he had carried seven states scattered across the Northwest, the mid-Atlantic, New England, and the Upper South. Best of all, he was a military
hero who had expressed few opinions on national issues and who had no political
record to defend. As his running mate, the Whigs chose John Tyler, a states’-rights Virginian who had joined the Whigs out of hatred for Jackson. To promote this
baldly pragmatic ticket, the Whigs came up with a catchy slogan: “Tippecanoe and
Tyler Too.” Philip Hone, a wealthy New York City Whig, admitted that the slogan
(and the ticket) had “rhyme, but no reason in it.”
Early in the campaign, a Democratic journalist, commenting on Harrison’s
political inexperience and alleged unfitness for the presidency, wrote, “Give
[Harrison] a barrel of hard cider, and settle a pension of two thousand a year on him, and my word for it, he will sit out the remainder of his days in his log
cabin.” Whigs, who had been trying to shake their elitist image, seized on the statement and launched what was known as the Log Cabin Campaign. The log cabin,
the cider barrel, and Harrison’s folksiness and heroism constituted the entire Whig campaign, while Van Buren was pictured as living in luxury at the public’s expense.
The Whigs conjured up an image of a nattily dressed President “Van Ruin” sitting
on silk chairs and dining on gold and silver dishes while farmers and workingmen
struggled to make ends meet. Whig doggerel contrasted Harrison the hero with Van
Buren the professional politician:
The knapsack pillow’d Harry’s head
The hard ground eas’d his toils;
while Martin on his downy bed
Could dream of naught but spoils.
Democrats howled that Whigs were peddling lies and refusing to discuss issues,
but they knew they had been beaten at their own game. Harrison won only a nar-
row majority of the popular vote, but a landslide of 234 to 60 votes in the Electoral College.
The election of 1840 signaled the completion of the second party system—the
most fully national alignment of parties in U.S. history. Andrew Jackson had won
410