The Election of 1840

The Amistad Africans reached the United States just as a presidential election was gathering momentum # an election that was shaping up to be like none that Americans had experienced before. The race between Martin Van Buren and William Henry Harrison in 1840 represented a turning point in American political history. This was the first national election in which a president addressed crowds directly to appeal for their votes; it marked the first time a party campaigned on an official party platform; and it brought partisan tactics such as parades, barbecues and image-making to new extremes.

The Electorate. The states controlled who could and could not vote in 1840. Most had eliminated property requirements over the previous few decades: in all but three states # Rhode Island, Virginia and Louisiana # the suffrage had expanded to include all white males over twenty six years old. Women could not vote. Most states also excluded African Americans and Native Americans; free blacks could vote only in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts. New York and Pennsylvania had recently withdrawn voting rights from their free black populations. So the expansion of white suffrage under Jacksonian democracy had come at the expense of men of color: America was in the midst of transforming itself from a polity defined by property to one defined by race.

Parties and Candidates. The two main parties of this era were the Democrats and the Whigs. The Democrats had formed around Andrew Jackson in the 1820s and were electioneering in 1840 under the banner of Jackson's party lieutenant and Vice President, Martin Van Buren. The Whigs were just coalescing as a party, having originally defined themselves in opposition to Jackson, and only by 1840 taking on a more permanent and positive shape. To oppose Van Buren, they put forward "Old Tip," namely William Henry Harrison, who had won national military glory at the battle of

Tippecanoe

The Liberty Party. On the margin of the political spectrum, another party formed as the election approached. In 1839 abolitionists convened to assemble the Liberty Party, running on the candidacy of James G. Birney, who was the executive secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society. This effort at party politics was peripheral: abolitionism was still viewed by most Americans, including most northerners, as a fanatical and dangerous movement, and the Liberty Party stood no chance of attracting much in the way of votes. Still, it did generate considerable attention and intensified southern anxieties about northern abolitionism. This was the first time in American history that abolitionists organized themselves not just as a cause, but as a political party.

Electioneering. The election of 1840 was about style, not substance. The Whigs promoted their candidate by mobilizing an impressive battery of campaign machinery. They massed party faithful by the thousands in rallies and marched them through towns across America in parades, wheeling floats that carried log cabins and cider barrels # symbols of "Old Tip" that for the first time popularized and nationalized the symbols of party politics. The Democrats' campaign was equally spirited but less convincing. In an effort to cloak Van Buren in something like Harrison's man-of-the-people image, Democrat campaign managers dubbed their candidate "Old Kinderhook" (which is where we get the expression "O.K."). But this effort could not undo existing images of Van Buren as the "Red Fox" and the "Little Magician" # in other words, as a political master manipulator.

Southern Politics. Up to 1840, the Democrats had dominated southern politics. Andrew Jackson had commanded broad southern support, especially in his campaign for reelection in 1832. But in 1840, the Whigs managed for the first time to mount a serious challenge to Democratic dominance. Before Harrison locked up the nomination, southern Whigs fielded a strong regional candidate in Hugh White of Tennessee, a former ally of Jackson and a strong states-rights man. The Whigs touted White’s southerness, and engineered a campaign that avoided discussion of economic issues in favor of more generalized and sectionalized rhetoric about southern institutions and the protection of Southern (meaning white) liberties. Even after Harrison beat out White for the Whig nomination, southern support for Van Buren remained suspect. Van Buren was a New Yorker, meaning a northerner, and had a reputation as a "trimmer" who changed his course to follow shifting political winds.

In the Exploring Amistad Library: To get a feel for the intensity of Southern feeling on slavery and abolition as political issues, see the series of reports from the Charleston Courier in January 1840 fretting over whether or not Harrison was sufficiently strongly opposed to the abolitionists: January 8 ("... in order that the South especially may judge of every thing connected with his position on the slave question..."); January 11 ("We are not satisfied with Gen. HARRISON's present attitude..."); and January 15 ("We again recur to the sentiments of Gen. HARRISON on the subjects of slavery and abolition, to render him all the justice in our power..."). This kind of thing went on and on, back and forth, in Southern newspapers.

The Democratic Platform. Partly to counter the effectiveness of Whig electioneering, the Democracy used its national convention in May 1840 to craft an official national platform, the first of its kind. This platform laid down nine planks, including several designed to shore up its southern base: an explicit rejection of abolitionism, and an endorsement of the gag rule (which prevented debate in Congress over petitions calling for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia) that denounced any efforts "to induce Congress to interfere with questions of slavery."

In the Exploring Amistad Library: The Platform.

The Amistad as a Political Issue. The campaign was already swirling as the Amistad made its way into U.S. waters. Van Buren was not in Washington when the schooner was (re)captured: he was on a campaign tour of upstate New York # also the first of its kind # so it was his cabinet members who formed the Administration's initial response, with Secretary of State John Forsyth (a southerner and a slave owner) playing an especially prominent role. When he returned to Washington, Van Buren at least implicitly endorsed Forsyth's measures, which favored Spanish claims and worked to send the Africans back to Cuba as murders, pirates, and escaped property. This cynical response probably reflected a political calculation on Van Buren's part: he needed to secure his political support among southern slave owners, and figured he could count on little support from the northern abolitionists, who represented, in any event, only a small majority of the northern voting population. The case did not figure directly in the election as a campaign issue. But to the extent that prominent abolitionists took up the Africans' cause # and thereby at least implicitly sanctioned the strategy of slave revolt # the Amistad hovered just off the horizon of presidential politics.

In the Exploring Amistad Library: Gauge, for example, the Richmond Enquirer's report in early September 1839 that Lewis Tappan and other "pestilent Abolitionists have seized upon it at once as the means of raising capital for their association...."

The Outcome. The intense electioneering of 1840 generated an unprecedented turnout: nearly 80 percent of the electorate voted, up from 58 percent in 1836. The race was tight in every region. The Whigs carried the election, Harrison outpolling Van Buren by a popular vote of 1,275,612 (just under 53 percent) to 1,130,033 (just under 47 percent). James Birney and the Liberty Party won only 7,053 votes (0.3 percent). In the South, the Whigs carried Georgia, Tennessee, Maryland and Kentucky, and took 49.3 percent of the popular vote # the first time in southern history a second party polled substantial numbers.

In the Exploring Amistad Library: "Libertas," the Washington correspondent for the Colored American, reports on Harrison's inauguration.

Further Reading: William Nestbit Chambers, "Election of 1840," in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968 (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1971).

William J. Cooper, Liberty and Slavery: Southern Politics to 1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), chap. 8.