The Pen Makes a Good Sword: John Forsyth of the Mobile Register (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 142 and perhaps inspired to open your own little Shop of Independence. It’s good not to have a boss. Take a look at the Bright Star book and then start recording what you know of the best and most deservedly cherished small businesses you know about. You just might be inspired to write your own book. JIM REED Birmingham, Alabama The Pen Makes a Good Sword: John Forsyth of the Mobile Register. By Lonnie A. Burnett. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. viii, 239 pp. $37.50. ISBN 0-8173-1524-1. The exceptionally long career of John Forsyth Jr., editor of the Mobile Register, provides a valuable insight into patronage and party politics in Alabama from the Jacksonian era to Reconstruction. The son and namesake of a Georgian who served as secretary of state to both Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, the younger Forsyth, as his biographer illustrates, “reaped personal financial rewards through party patronage ” (p. 4). Andrew Jackson appointed him U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama; James Knox Polk named him postmaster of Columbus, Georgia; Franklin Pierce chose him as minister to Mexico; and James Buchanan awarded him lucrative government contracts. Forsyth’s career inevitably raises the question of how federal patronage influenced his political decisions. When a Democrat occupied the White House, Forsyth opposed the extreme states’ rights faction in his political party. Nevertheless, when a Whig held the presidency during the struggle over the Compromise of 1850, Forsyth joined the faction in Alabama that favored secession. With the return of the Democrats to the White House after 1852, Forsyth again opposed the extreme states’ rights group. Regarded as a southern moderate, he advocated the candidacy of Stephen A. Douglas in the presidential election of 1860. In a letter to a fiery rival newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser, Forsyth addressed the troubling issue of slavery in the territories. He warned that southern insistence on protection of territorial slavery would only insure the election of a Republican president. “And then . . . what becomes of your claim for protection in the Territories?” he asked (p. 102). Forsyth’s gloomy prophecy was fulfilled when Abraham Lincoln was elected President on a platform that closed the territories to slavery. To the dismay of many southern moderates, Forsyth then immediately abandoned the Union and advocated secession. Nonetheless, his biogra- A P R I L 2 0 0 8 143 pher argues that Forsyth was not contradicting his principles by his hasty switch. According to Burnett, throughout the 1850s “Forsyth presented a consistent stance on the issue of disunion” (p. 124). The author points out that Forsyth always had warned that hostile control of the presidency would be a reason for secession. On the above point, a cynical reviewer cannot help but question Forsyth’s motives more closely. While granting that Forsyth would be concerned, quite rightly, about the South’s loss of power and influence, would he not also feel considerable remorse about his own diminished position? Would he not regret, quite bitterly, the demise of the patronage that he had received from the federal government for approximately twenty-five years? And might he not plan to seek it again, early on, from a new constituency? In examining Forsyth’s extensive and wide-ranging career, Burnett has detailed quite carefully Forsyth’s participation in the Mexican War, his service as minister to Mexico, his struggles in the confused Democratic nominating conventions of 1860, and his frustrations on the commission that Jefferson Davis appointed to negotiate friendly relations between the United States and the Confederacy. In none of these endeavors did Forsyth cover himself with glory. Furthermore, he seems to have given impractical advice to Stephen A. Douglas in his political campaign of 1860 and to Braxton Bragg in his military campaign in Kentucky in 1862. At the beginning of the Reconstruction era, Forsyth had the reputation of being a southern moderate, but in his subsequent editorials in the Mobile Register he proved to be very immoderate indeed. Lonnie Burnett has written a first rate biography of John Forsyth, but, in...