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 3 Union among Ourselves, 1849-1856 Zachary Taylor’s election was a false dawn for America’s Whigs. Although they remained wedded to economic growth, the issues that had once been so central to their identity—protective tariffs, banking, and internal improvements—had declined in salience owing to the country’s returning prosperity (further boosted by the discovery of California gold in 1848). In Maine, as in other northern states, the Jacksonians had stolen their clothes by supporting developmental projects like the Atlantic & St Lawrence Railroad. After the election of yet another Democratic governor the Portland Advertiser described the Democrats’ abandonment of their “old humbugs” and embrace of the Whigs’ pro-market “doctrines” as a compliment.1 However, there was precious little compensation in this. Maine Whigs still faced the seemingly intractable problem of how to destroy the opposition’s grip on state power. William Pitt Fessenden and many of his co-partisans would find a solution to this problem in the so-called realignment process that modern political scientists have adjudged responsible for the destruction of old parties and the making of new ones in American history. Whereas scholars once identified the issue of slavery expansion as the sole destroyer of the Whig Party and the rise of the Republicans, historians such as William Gienapp and Michael Holt have developed a more sophisticated explanation for these developments, one that incorporates nativism, temperance, and factionalism as at least secondary factors (secondary, that is, to slavery) in the demise of the second-party system.2 Fessenden secured national power in February 1854 by winning election to the U.S. Senate as the representative of an embryonic Republican coalition straddling antislavery, temperance, and nativism. He would not have been successful, moreover, without a serious split in the ranks of the Maine Democracy. In this respect, his ascent to high office can help us make greater sense of what Gienapp aptly calls “the confusion of fusion,” the labyrinthine changes that remade the political landscape of the United States in the early 1850s.3 Though his 71 union among ourselves, 1849–1856 path was fraught with danger, for himself and the republic, he negotiated those changes with great skill. Having secured the high office that he had long craved, he attached his rising star to the Republican Party, a determined opponent of southern power whose raison d’être was not prohibition or nativism but vigorous opposition to slavery expansion. Thereafter he would rank as one of the staunchest advocates of northern rights in Washington. Only when the Union was controlled by northern men committed to free-soil principles, he insisted, would the republic be safe from the corrupting influence of aristocratic southern slaveholders. As events unfolded in the mid 1850s this undeniably self-serving yet sincerely held remedy for national degeneration became ever more compelling for northern voters. In 1856 the Republicans cemented their position as the main opposition to the proslavery Democracy by challenging hard for the presidency. Southern politicians, who had begun to doubt whether the Union provided sufficient security for slavery and were equally adept at exploiting sectional issues for their own ends, had every reason to be afraid. Carpe Diem Because Fessenden had opposed Taylor’s nomination, he did not expect to enjoy significant influence with the new administration. Nonetheless, he took the opportunity , while arguing a case before the U.S. Supreme Court during the winter of 1848–49, to press the appointment of his fellow Maine Whig, Senator George Evans, to the cabinet. Taylor’s appointing policy, however, was designed to further the president’s plan of building a new conservative party on an almost no-party basis and Evans, a Webster loyalist, was soon passed over. Fessenden, still a committed Whig, was unimpressed. “I have some fears that the Genl. will get none but second rate men about him,” he informed Ellen from Washington. With useless advisers, the inexperienced Taylor was bound to “break down.”4 When not attending court, the Portland lawyer enjoyed monitoring debates in Congress. “This is, evidently, the day of small things, as any one can see with half an eye, on looking at the Senate,” he observed witheringly.5 After dining at four, he sat in his room and read, wrote, and ruminated contemplatively in the relaxing glow of a roaring fire. Lonely as he often was on these trips, he told his unavailable cousin Lizzy Warriner (with transparent yearning) that he wished “I had somebody...

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