In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

63 Soon after the upheaval of Paris in February 1848, a coterie of American journalists gathered in Old Fellows’ Hall in the national capital. The Washington press wished to issue an “appropriate” statement, to be transmitted to the new French government. Attending the meeting were William Seaton, the publisher of the Daily National Intelligencer, a Whig organ; James Robinson, a reporter for the Whig New York Tribune, edited by Horace Greeley; the editor Thomas Ritchie of the Democratic Washington Union; and Gamaliel Bailey of the antislavery journal the National Era, which soon would endorse the new Free Soil Party. Arrangements for the meeting and its resolutions were reported across the country.1 The occasion placed William Seaton in an awkward position. The Intelligencer had recently ridiculed the popular uprising in Paris. But Seaton was also the mayor of Washington, and it would be embarrassing for a convention of leading American journalists to echo the Intelligencer’s cool sentiments about European liberation. Yet it would mock the Intelligencer for its publisher now to cheer a violent change of government in the streets of Europe. The outcome of the Old Fellows’ Hall meeting reflected its constituents’ partisan di≠erences. The main source of contention was how to salute the prompt actions of the U.S. minister in Paris, Richard Rush. As noted earlier , Rush, without being instructed to do so by the State Department, had extended o∞cial U.S. recognition to the revolutionary provisional government of France on 25 February, only three days after the outbreak of violence . Initially, Thomas Ritchie of the Union, the o∞cial organ of the Polk administration, “o≠ered a resolution thanking Mr. Rush for his cordial and prompt recognition of the new Government of France,” which, Ritchie observed, “[had] confirmed the provisional government in power . . . when everything was trembling.” The others, however, protested Ritchie’s 3. The Presidential Campaign of 1848 Competing Rhetorics of Revolution 64 Distant Revolutions resolution, declaring that “the sole object [of the meeting] was to congratulate the French people and press, not to o≠er adulation to our Executive, or any of [his] favorites.” Eighteen forty-eight was a presidential election year, heightening sensitivities to partisan claims of influence abroad. Ultimately , Ritchie’s resolution was rejected, and the press gathering issued a compromise resolution, tendering the French people congratulations for respecting “the rights of private property” and recognizing “the rights of labor.” Eventually, many Americans would decide that France could not properly balance the rights of property and labor. But for now these tenuous good wishes from Washington made their way to Paris.2 The disagreement of the Washington press over an alleged American influence in revolutionary France symbolized a wider partisan conflict in 1848 over how to respond to the news of overseas revolution. The 1848 election is not famous in American history; it is much more obscure than the elections, say, of 1800, 1860, 1896, 1932, 1968, and 2000. It is not considered a “critical election,” signaling long-term realignment of the existing party system, nor did it mark a change in the parties’ ideologies. Its results were not decided in the courts.3 Still, the election generated great interest at the time. It was the first presidential election in American history in which voters (all male, mostly white) cast votes on the same day, 7 November. Politics, at least in terms of voter turnout, was more popular in the mid-nineteenth century than today: in the 1848 presidential election, nearly 75 percent of the electorate cast ballots. The two main parties, the Democrats and the Whigs, had wellfunded organizations in most of the states, and the practice of political “campaigns,” wherein candidates traveled around the countryside speaking to public gatherings, had been in place for two decades.4 The 1848 election came on the heels of the United States’ war with Mexico, concluded by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, on 2 February 1848. This treaty called for U.S. annexation of the northern half of Mexico, territories that in time would comprise all or parts of seven U.S. states. Controversy arose over whether the territories would be open to the expansion of slavery. Early in the war a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania , David Wilmot, had called for a federal ban on slavery in any territory acquired in the war. The Wilmot Proviso never passed both houses of Congress, but in 1848 it continued to focus both party and emerging sectional conflicts...

Share