Alabama Governors: A Political History of the State

Reuben Chapman / John R. Mayfield

Reuben Chapman, 1847–1849 JoHn r. MAyfield reuben Chapman’s one term as governor was not a time of legislative innovations or notable administrative initiatives. rather, it served as a transition from Jacksonian-style politics concerned with internal issues such as state banking and indian removal to politics increasingly dominated by national issues.During Chapman’s tenure,Alabama’s response to national events sped the process by which state issues became submerged beneath a wave of proslavery and prosecession rhetoric. reuben Chapman was born in virginia on July 15,1799,the son of Ann reynolds and reuben Chapman, a minor officer in the revolutionary war. in 1824, when young reuben was twenty-five, he traveled on horseback to Alabama, where he read law in his brother samuel’s office.he then moved to morgan County and ultimately to huntsvilleinmadisonCounty.he prospered and soon acquired a plantation in black belt sumter County, thus forging connections in both sections of the state.he remained a bachelor until age thirty-nine,when he married a sixteenyear -old girl, Felicia Pickett.Together they reared two sons and four daughters . one nineteenth-century observer described Chapman as “bright, humorous and impressive in conversation, with courtly manners.” on sundays he took a pew in the episcopal Church. in 1835 Chapman entered Congress from his north Alabama district and was reelected six times.he was a loyal Democrat,taking the usual Jacksonian line against a national bank,high tariffs,and such.There was nothing remark- 64 / reuben Chapman 1847–1849 able about his service until the introduction in 1846 of the Wilmot Proviso, a rider to an appropriations bill that, if passed, would bar slavery from any territories acquired from mexico as a result of U.s. victory in its war with that nation.At that possibility Chapman came alive. he immediately voiced his opposition, and his public denunciations put him in line with a group of proslavery,southern disciples of south Carolina states’ rights senator John C. Calhoun.A rising star among these Calhounites was Alabama’s ownWilliam lowndesyancey,a fire-eating,proslavery editor and lawyer who presided over the Democratic convention in 1847 and placed Chapman’s name in nomination for governor. it was a timely and perhaps brilliant move. incumbent Joshua martin’s bolt from the Democratic Party in 1845 made him unacceptable as a candidate in 1847. nathanial Terry, who had won the Democratic nomination in 1845 only to be rejected by the voters, campaigned hard for another chance. Another contender for the nomination was henry W. Collier, a Tuscaloosa lawyer who, like the Whigs, favored privately chartered banks that might ease the tight money supply. in Chapman, Alabama Democrats had a compromise choice: a regular party man who had not been directly involved in the Terry-martin bank controversy of 1845, a man who was antibank and thus satisfied that important segment of the party, and a north Alabamian who was also a planter known to be friendly to the interests of the black belt. in response to Terry’s machinations at the 1845 convention, Democrats changed the party rules so that two-thirds of the delegate votes,rather than a simple majority,were necessary for nomination.The Terry forces at the convention stuck together through nineteen ballots, but after ten hours, an exhausted crowd finally nominated Chapman by acclamation. Whigs, noting the Democratic factionalism, sensed victory and nominated their own north Alabama candidate, nicholas Davis, a limestone County planter, but Chapman defeated him handily by more than six thousand votes. he promptly threw a festive and opulent inaugural ball. behind the gaiety lay a darker reality. Chapman saw Alabama’s important challenges as being almost entirely external. in a pattern that would become almost a gubernatorial sine qua non over the coming decades and even to the present, Chapman took the many real and hard problems of the state— in this case debtor relief and an inadequate money supply—and simply ignored them. rather, he preferred to attack “outside interference,” calling on his fellow Alabamians to resist all northern attempts to prevent slaveholders from taking their property wherever they pleased. To do otherwise, he asserted, would make Alabamians “serfs where we were equals, and equals reuben Chapman 1847–1849 / 65 only with our serfs.” it was rhetoric that delightedyancey and the great mass of Alabamians. Chapman’s inaugural speech was a harbinger of the political atmosphere to come.of...