At the Precipice: Americans North and South during the Secession Crisis

4 The Second Party System and Its Legacy: The Careers of John Bell, John C. Breckinridge, Howell Cobb, Stephen A. Douglas, John Tyler, and Martin Van Buren

112 F 4 The Second Party System and Its Legacy The Careers of John Bell, John C. Breckinridge, Howell Cobb, Stephen A. Douglas, John Tyler, and Martin Van Buren he era of the second American party system, which extended from the mid-1820s into the mid-1850s, warrants extended discussion in any analysis of the late antebellum years and the secession crisis. The leaders of the Republican Party, the four principal candidates for national office in 1860, and the organizers of the Confederacy had entered the political arena during the years of Democratic-Whig rivalry. These two national party organizations contained North-South divisions during the 1830s and for most of the 1840s; their subsequent disintegration both reflected and presaged the sharpening sectional tensions that finally disrupted the Union. The legacy of the second party system on the eve of the Civil War included what one scholar has termed “the frenzied, all-consuming, society-defining political culture” of antebellum America.1 The contours and legacy of the second party system can be explored through the lives and careers of six important politicians, four southerners and two northerners, all of them involved at some point in presidential politics but each with a career that reflected the political dynamics of a different state. All took public stands during the secession crisis. Two—Martin Van Buren and John Tyler—were former presidents. Three—John Bell, John Breckinridge, and Stephen A. Douglas—ran unsuccessfully against Abraham Lincoln for the White House in 1860. And Georgia’s Howell Cobb presided over the convention that organized the Confederate States of America in early 1861 and chose Jefferson Davis as its president. Despite the prominence of and influence wielded by these six men, the 1860 election placed in the White House a candidate whom they all opposed. Like thevictorious Lincoln, all of the three losing presidential candidates in 1860 rose to prominence in newer, post-Constitution states west of the Appalachian Mountains. Tennessee had entered the Union in 1796, and its favorite The Second Party System 113 son in 1860 was Bell, a refugee from Upper South Whiggery and nativism who joined the new Constitutional Union Party’s attempt to pour calming oil on the stormy waters of sectional conflict.The fractured Democratic Party nominated the sitting vice president, Breckinridge, a native of Kentucky, which had entered the Union in 1792, and Douglas, from Illinois, which had achieved statehood in 1818. Yet the Bluegrass State followed the Unionist tradition of Henry Clay and voted for Bell, a particular disappointment to Breckinridge, who stood for the firm assertion of southern rights. Illinois, home to two of the 1860 nominees, endorsed Lincoln over his longtime instate political rival, Douglas, who propounded the popular sovereignty stance on slavery in the territories that found great favor among free state Democrats. Both Bell and Lincoln had entered politics as Whigs, while Breckinridge and Douglas were lifelong Democrats, as was Cobb, who supported Breckinridge in 1860. The two ex-presidents had risen to political prominence in their native states, both of which were among the original thirteen: the New Yorker Van Buren endorsed his fellow northern Democrat Douglas, and the Virginian Tyler supported southern Democrat Breckinridge. Despite their Democratic votes in 1860, both Tyler and Van Buren had detoured off the Democratic path earlier in their careers. Tyler had been a state’s rights Whig in the 1830s and 1840s, while Van Buren, the first president born after the American Revolution, had become a Free-Soiler in an attempt to return to the White House in 1848. Van Buren and Douglas, like their states, became firmly Unionist in 1861. Georgia was one of the seven Cotton or Deep South states that seceded before Lincoln’s inauguration. Virginia and Tennessee illuminate the power of conditional Unionism in the Upper South; they joined the Confederacy after the bombardment of Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for troops. Tyler and Bell followed their states and supported the Confederate cause. Kentucky, internally divided between Union and Confederate partisans, attempted for a few months to remain neutral between the United States and the Confederacy. However, it never officially left the Union and ultimately provided more Civil War manpower to the United States than to the Confederate States. Breckinridge , newly elected to one of the Bluegrass State’s seats in the U.S. Senate after Hannibal Hamlin’s inauguration as vice president in early March, supported Kentucky’s failed attempt at neutrality and eventually cast his lot with the...