15
10
NC
TN
15
15
SC
AR
GA
11
Disputed
3
MS
AL 11
Fu
4
7
tu
Area
r
TEXAS
e Boundary
REPUBLIC LA
5
FL
TERR.
Electoral Vote
Popular Vote
Number %
Number %
Harrison
(Whig)
234
80
1,275,612
53
Van Buren
60
20
1,130,033
47
Learning
(Democrat)
Birney
----
----
7,053
----
(Liberty)
Cengage©
MAP 11.5 Presidential Election, 1840
In 1840, the Whigs united under William Henry Harrison, the one Whig candidate who had won national support four years earlier. Borrowing campaign tactics from the Democrats and inventing many of their own, Whigs campaigned hard in every state. The result was a Whig victory and a truly national two-party system.
in 1828 with Jefferson’s old southern and western agrarian constituency; in 1832, he had carried his old voters and had won added support in the mid-Atlantic states and in northern New England. In 1836, Whigs capitalized on southern resentment
of Jackson’s defeat of nullification and on southern mistrust of the New Yorker
Van Buren. They broke the Democratic hold on the South, carrying Kentucky,
Georgia, South Carolina, and even Jackson’s Tennessee. Jackson had won 8 in 10
southern votes; Van Buren carried barely half. The election of 1840 completed the transition: Harrison and Van Buren contested the election in nearly every state and they received nearly equal levels of support in the slave and free states. Van Buren’s dream of a national party system that transcended sectional differences was realized. Ironically, the final pieces fell into place in an election that cost him the presidency.
The election of 1840 also witnessed the high-water mark of voter turnout.
Whig and Democratic organizations focused on presidential elections, and prospec-
tive voters met a quadrennial avalanche of oratory, door-to-door canvassing, torchlight parades, and party propaganda. Democrats or Whigs could take no state in
the Union for granted. (In 1828, winning candidates carried individual states by
an average of 36 percent; by 1840, that figure had dropped to 11 percent.) Whigs
and Democrats maintained organizations and contested elections in nearly every
neighborhood in the country, and the result was increased popular interest in politics. In 1824, about one in four adult white men had voted in the presidential election. Jackson’s vengeful campaign of 1828 lifted the turnout to 56.3 percent, and it Conclusion
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stayed at about that level in 1832 and 1836. The campaign of 1840 brought out 78
percent of the eligible voters, and the turnout remained at that high level for the rest of the 19th century.
In every part of the country, Whigs presented themselves as the party of
active government and economic progress. They promised good roads, public
schools, stable currency, and social harmony. In the North, the wealthiest men
were Whigs (8 in 10 of the merchant elites in New York and Boston, for exam-
ple). But the Whig Party received its core northern support among the market
farmers, local merchants, and manufacturers created by the new market economy
and the fires of middle-class revivals—supporters not only of Whig nationalism
but of roads and canals and a wide array of reforms in their own neighborhoods.
In the South, Whigs ran well in plantation districts and in county-seat towns—
the centers of southern wealth, commerce, and gentility. Many southern leaders
came to dislike Jackson, and they took their personal followings into the Whig
Party. Whigs also won votes in areas—eastern Tennessee and western North
Carolina are examples—where farmers wanted to be brought into the flow of
commerce. Put very simply, Whigs tended to be persons who were or wanted to
be beneficiaries of the Market Revolution, and who embraced its attendant social
and cultural transformations. They saw themselves as “improvers.”
The Democrats, on the other hand, posed as defenders of the common (white)
man and the old republic. They tended to be persons who had been hurt or
bypassed by the Market Revolution, who belonged to conservative, otherworldly
churches, and who distrusted Whigs who talked about progress, big government,
and social homogeneity. In the South, Democrats were strong in districts with
small farms, few slaves, and limited market activity. The northern Democrats
were a coalition of small farmers, working people, and small businessmen, along
with cultural minorities (Irish immigrants, for instance, were almost unanimously Democratic). North and South, Democrats were localists. They argued for the limited national government that since Jefferson’s day had been a bulwark of the revolutionary republic, of white male democracy, and of chattel slavery.
CONCLUSION
Thus the party system answered the questions of slavery and economic devel-
opment that had helped bring it into being. Nationally, Democrats stopped the
American System. They dismantled the Bank of the United States, refused fed-
eral support for roads and canals, and revised the tariff in ways that mollified
the export-oriented South. As a result, the stupendous growth of the American
economy between 1830 and 1860 became a question of state and local—not
national—government action. Neither the national commercial society envi-
sioned by the Whigs nor the return to Jeffersonian agrarianism favored by
many Democrats came into being. Instead, the United States experienced an
almost inadvertent experiment in laissez faire capitalism, with results that
reflected the aims of the most ambitious states. Trade and transportation net-
works linked the Northeast, mid-Atlantic, and Northwest and isolated the
export economy of the South—a result that few politicians had intended. On
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