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habitation. There was little leisure in such circumstances for the development of the fine art of amusement. The tragedy of the lonely emigrant wife, far from her home associations, with her nearest neighbors miles away and brought together but a few times a year by "bees" for barn raising or corn husking, was long drawn out and drab and bitter. The men fared somewhat better. They met oftener and entertained each other by rough practical jokes and those bragging tales which are so peculiarly characteristic of American humor. Institutions which nearly touched the people naturally adapted themselves to these conditions. The churches, with their camp meetings and revivals, their devil treeing and violent conversions, afforded an opportunity for the outburst of the pent-up emotions of the discouraged father or the homesick wife. The colporteurs and itinerant preachers were welcome for their society as well as for their religious consolation. Political life, with the barbecues, the stump speeches, and the processions with gay uniforms and the banners flying, satisfied their innate human longing for display, and their love for the cruder manifestations of humor. The political orator took the place, for many, of all solid reading; the public meeting, of the theater; for a great number the mere fact of being in a crowd was sufficient reward for a twenty-mile ride over a stumpy road. The Whigs, by making politics amusing, made them popular: in 1836 the popular vote was about 1,500,000; in 1840, it was over 2,400,000. That the Whigs adopted these methods because of their unwillingness to discuss issues, is to a large extent true, but one can scarcely regret that they gave the people a few weeks of relaxation.

Naturally the Whigs gained the larger part of this increased The election. vote, though Van Buren also gained in every state except in Kentucky. Harrison received about 540,000 more votes than he, Webster, and White had received in 1836; and Van Buren, about 365,000 more than he had then received. The Whig

gains were distributed over all the country, but they were greatest in Maine and New Hampshire, which were disturbed over the boundary disputes, and in the regions where the ideas of Jefferson retained the largest number of adherents. The Democrats carried only 7 states and 60 electoral votes, to 19 states and 234 electoral votes given to Harrison; the Whigs obtained a majority of 37 in the House and 7 in the Senate.

Sources.

Historical accounts. Financial questions.

Politics,

etc.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

For economic questions, Callender, G. W., Economic History, 578-584 is useful. For politics: Clay's Private Correspondence, ch. XI. Sargent, N., Public Men and Events, II, chs. V and VI. Wise, H. A., Seven Decades of the Union. Where none of these are available, Tyler, L. G., Lives and Times of the Tylers, chs. 19 and 20, gives many letters and an intimate though decidedly partisan view.

Bourne, E. G., The Distribution of the Surplus. Dewey, D. R., Financial History, ch. X; and his, State Banking. Kinley, D., The Independent Treasury. Ormsby, E. McK., The Whig Party, ch. XXV. Schurz, C., Clay, II, ch. XIX. Scott, W. A., Repudiation of State Debts. Shepard, E. M., Van Buren, chs. VIII, IX. Sumner, W. G., American Currency, 131-161.

Fiske, J., Essays Historical and Literary, I, VII, VIII. Garrison, G. P., Westward Extension, 43-67. McCarthy, C., The Antimasonic Party (Am. Hist. Assoc., Report, 1902, I, 367-575). Schurz, Clay, II, ch. XX.

CHAPTER XVI

HARRISON AND TYLER

THE events which turned the exuberance of the Whig Difficulties of the Whigs. victory into bitterness and recrimination seemed to the leaders of the party surprising, disappointing, and accidental, but to one looking back at them after a lapse of time, they seem natural and in part inevitable. It is comparatively easy to build up a party of opposition out of divergent elements; there is strong cohesive power in hatred and distrust, and active administrations like those of Jackson and Van Buren naturally create a host of enemies willing to sink their differences in order to obtain a victory over the common foe. It is a very different thing to hold such a party together when it comes to power and is confronted with the question of how to make use of its victory. It has already been shown how the Jackson party of 1828 disintegrated as the positive program of the administration developed. It could hardly be expected that the Whigs could reap any definite fruits of their success without alienating some of those who aided to elect Harrison. It remained to be seen whether, out of the loosely bound Whig party of 1840, the leaders could save, as Jackson had done, enough support to carry through a con

structive program.

Harrison formed a strong cabinet, with Webster as Secre- The patrontary of State, and with four friends of Clay, the South age. being represented by three members and the North by three. Clay refused a position, but made it evident that he looked upon himself as the leader of the party. So eager was he to begin work that he persuaded the President to summon an extra session of Congress to meet May 31, 1841. At once

Death of
Harrison.

John Tyler.

signs of trouble began to appear. The first dispute arose from the distribution of the patronage. The point of greatest unity among the Whigs had been their attack upon the spoils system. They had condemned the practice of indiscriminate removal, they had attempted to establish the principle that the Senate should share the removal power, and they had denounced the Democratic policy of making appointments for political reasons. When they came to power, however, they made almost as many removals as Jackson had done. The practice of removal once begun, it was found to require unusual self-restraint to bring it to an end. If the civil service under Van Buren was as corrupt as the Whig orators had declared, it was, indeed, necessary to make extensive changes of personnel. Moreover, there was as great pressure for appointment in 1841 as in 1829; in fact, the crowd of applicants was greater, and if, as Adams writes, more orderly, it was at any rate as persistent. The greater leaders of the party were disgusted at this appetite for office and tried to keep their hands clean of it; but the lesser leaders were as active as the Jacksonian patronage mongers, and soon it was evident. that now, as twelve years before, political considerations were to have the greatest weight in determining appointments.

It was impossible to keep entirely clear of this turmoil, and within ten days after the inauguration Clay and Harrison had quarreled over the appointment to the New York customs collectorship. How this personal disagreement would have affected the carrying out of Clay's legislative plans, can never be known. Before the Congress met, office hunting had had a still more serious result. The tireless importunities of the crowds which infested the White House broke down the constitution of the President, and were in part the cause of his death on April 4, 1841, just one month after taking office. The death of Harrison brought for the first time to the presidency a man chosen as Vice President. Gouverneur Morris and other Federalists had in 1801 opposed the adop

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tion of the Twelfth Amendment on the ground that a man elected expressly to that somewhat ambiguous position would nearly always be of the second rank. They preferred the older method, by which each elector voted for two persons for President, and the person receiving the second largest number of votes became Vice President, believing that in this way the latter officer would always be a man of presidential caliber. While their method of preserving the dignity of the office might not have been effective, the danger that they foresaw was a real one. In the present instance still another element of danger was present; the vice presidency had been used to conciliate a minority faction, and now that the President was dead, the representative of this minority fell heir to all the executive power. So much alarm was felt among the Whig leaders that there was some disposition to treat Tyler as "acting President," somewhat shorn of the extreme prerogatives of office; but his decided and proper insistence that he be credited with the full range of executive power, prevented this attempt to stay the natural result of their improvidence.

acter and career.

The alarm of those Whig leaders who wished to revive Tyler's charan active nationalistic policy was certainly justified. Tyler was strongly committed by thirty years of public life to the strictest school of constitutional construction, nor was he likely to modify his views. His leading personal characteristic was an extreme vanity which had been fostered by the established position of his family, the precocious development of his talent, and a rare beauty and grace of manner which had made the path of life easy for him. The pride of his political life was his unwavering consistency, which had led him back and forth from one party to another as each seemed to him to depart from the clear injunctions of the Constitution. That every such change of party had been followed by political advancement seemed to him but the proper reward of virtue, and the historian must record that these changes of party allegiance were made with all sincerity

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