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  • “Misunderstood and Misrepresented”Beriah Magoffin and the 1859 Kentucky Gubernatorial Election
  • Robert Goebel (bio)

From mid-April 1859 through July 1859, Beriah Magoffin, the Democratic candidate for Kentucky governor, and Joshua F. Bell, a former Whig congressman and the opposition candidate, debated each other over sixty-five times. The two debated on a myriad of topics, but the issue of Congress’s role in the territories concerning slavery dominated the campaign debates and overshadowed the campaign. On April 19, in Lebanon, Bell challenged Magoffin on the issue of Congress’s role in the territories. He supported congressional intervention—the idea that Congress should legislatively intervene in the territories to protect slave property—he argued for a federal slave code in the territories. Conversely, Magoffin championed congressional nonintervention; he advocated that territorial slaveholders look to the federal courts, instead of Congress, for protection of their slaves in the territories. Magoffin feared that if Congress debated a federal slave code, such a debate would lead to further sectional agitation and the passage of a slave code could potentially dissolve the Union.1


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Joshua F. Bell (1811-1870).

filson historical society


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Beriah Magoffin (1815-1885).

library of congress

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Bell and George D. Prentice, the editor of the Louisville Daily Journal, used Magoffin’s opposition to a federal slave code to define his position as popular sovereignty. On May 30, during the gubernatorial debate at Russellville, Magoffin expressed his dismay and frustration at “being misunderstood and misrepresented” by his opponents over congressional nonintervention. Misunderstanding over Magoffin’s position has persisted: modern historians have described Magoffin’s position as “vague and timid” and stated that his tactic was to skew clarity for ambiguity in order to avoid the divisiveness over the issue within the state Democratic Party. However, Magoffin’s position was not vague, timid, or an attempt at avoidance, nor was it popular sovereignty, as his opponents claimed. Magoffin offered a stance that took into consideration the interventionists and noninterventionists of his party and his concern over the growing strength of the Republican Party. His position of congressional nonintervention looked toward maintaining a Union with slavery and the avoidance of sectional agitation within Congress and within his own party, but it exposed him to attacks from his opponents, who used pro-southern arguments to define his view as one of popular sovereignty, all of which demonstrates how much sectionalism had permeated state politics and affected the gubernatorial election.2

At the beginning of their campaigns, neither Magoffin nor Bell set out to discuss Congress’s role in the territories. Bell was the nominee of a nascent party composed of conservative southern Whigs and Know-Nothings who were bound together in their opposition to President James Buchanan’s administration and Democratic control of the federal government. This coalition of former Whigs and Know-Nothings had no official party title but was simply referred to as the opposition. On February 22 and 23, 1859, at its state convention held in Louisville, the opposition adopted a state platform that called for the unity of all conservative men across the nation into a new party to oppose the Democratic Party. The platform arraigned Democrats for extravagance—nineteenth-century parlance for financial mismanagement of the federal government—and for corruption within the Buchanan administration such as the mishandling of federal contracts. The opposition platform also chastised Democrats for housing secessionists in the form of fire-eaters such as Robert Barnwell Rhett, who had threatened secession if the Republicans won the 1856 presidential election. The opposition condemned fire-eaters for their willingness to dissolve the Union over the loss of an election and abolitionists for their willingness to upset national harmony in their efforts to rid the nation of slavery. The opposition adopted these sentiments in their platform, declaring that they would not work with fire-eaters, abolitionists, or any other person who sought to use the federal government to interfere with slavery. The opposition’s main focus was not on slavery but instead on presenting a conservative middle ground to preserve the Union from fire-eaters and abolitionists. In 1860, Kentucky’s...

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