Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 215

November 21, 2018: GettysburgStudying: Longstreet and Lee

[On November 19, 1863President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettsysburg Address. Few American speeches have been more significant, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy the address and a few other Gettysburg histories and contexts. Leading up to a special Thanksgiving weekend post!]On the distinctions between military and cultural history, and their interconnections.As I understand it—and as a youthful Civil War buff AmericanStudier-in-training I read quite a bit into the war’s battles and strategies, most especially in Bruce Catton’s magisterial American Heritage Picture History —military historians have consistently tended to argue that General James Longstreet, Robert E. Lee’s chief subordinate and dependable “old war horse,” made a number of significant tactical mistakes during the battle of Gettysburg, particularly on the second day (Longstreet naturally disagreed). Moreover, at least some of those mistakes were of the disobedient variety: failing to follow particular orders, attemping his own maneuvers instead of those ordered by Lee, not readying his troops when ordered to do so, etc. Historian Henry Pfanz argues, “Longstreet's angry dissidence had resulted in further wasted time and delay,” and David Callihan adds, “It is appalling that a field commander of Longstreet's experience and caliber would so cavalierly and ineptly march and prepare his men for battle.” Overall, Edwin Coddington sums up this line of thinking, the battle was “a dark moment in Longstreet's career as a general.”I don’t doubt that these military historians have the right of it in many ways, but I’ll admit that the narrative is a frustrating one for me, for the reasons detailed in this post (and expanded upon for the rest of this paragraph). As I wrote there, young AmericanStudier worshipped Robert E. Lee the military tactician and leader, and was concurrently frustrated at the thought that a lesser commander like Longstreet thwarted some of Lee’s best-laid plans in a crucial battle like Gettysburg. Then I grew up, and realized a) thank goodness the Confederacy didn’t win at Gettysburg (as I argued in yesterday’s Chamberlain post); and b) whatever their respective tactical qualities, Longstreet was a considerably better man than Lee, probably throughout their lives and certainly during the crucial post-war years. And just as I can’t separate those cultural historical issues and frames from how I now respond to the battle and its controversial decisions, neither can the Lost Cause acolytes and neo-Confederate partisans whose post-war hostility toward Longstreet has without question contributed to the ongoing narratives of him as a disgruntled Lee subordinate. Moreover, if we try to remove those cultural histories from the equation, I believe that Longstreet’s disobedience at Gettysburg looks significantly different. That’s unquestionably true of his opposition to Lee’s final-day plan to charge the Union center directly; as Longstreet would later recall his words to Lee in his memoir, “General, I have been a soldier all my life. … It is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arranged for battle can take that position.” Lee ordered the attack nonetheless, Longstreet was right, and Pickett’s Charge would become one of the war’s most disastrous and destructive failures. And if we start there, perhaps Longstreet’s other disagreements with Lee during the battle might look more understandable and even accurate as well. After all, military history is still a history of humans, of personalities and perspectives, both the ones we bring from our own era and the ones we find in the historical figures and moments. Longstreet was always a bit of an iconoclast—and if that clearly put him on the right side of history after the war, perhaps it also did so at Gettysburg more than our typical narratives of the battle have allowed.Next Gettysburg post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

November 20, 2018: GettysburgStudying: Joshua Chamberlain

[On November 19, 1863President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettsysburg Address. Few American speeches have been more significant, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy the address and a few other Gettysburg histories and contexts. Leading up to a special Thanksgiving weekend post!]On one of the historical turning points for which I’m most thankful, and the man who made it happen.
If I’m wary about identifying distinct literary transitions and turning points—as I’ve argued in this space, just before identifying one of course—then I’m even more wary about doing so with historical events. Of course it’s easy, and not inaccurate, to highlight singular and significantly influential events like presidential elections (or, on the bleaker side, like the Wilmington coup and massacre with which I began this blog); but to attribute sweeping historical changes or shifts to those, or any other individual events, seems to me to elide the subtleties and nuances and gradualism and multipart nature of historical movement and change. All of this might be especially true when it comes to wars, since they’re so overt and striking and can seem to hinge so much on singular moments and battles and choices. And yet—and you knew this was coming—I think it is possible to boil down the whole trajectory of the Civil War to a single moment and incredibly bold and risky choice, made by perhaps the most unlikely military leader in our nation’s history.
This moment, and everything surrounding it, is a central focus of both Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer-winning historical novel The Killer Angels (1974) and the Hollywood film Gettysburg (1993), so it may be a bit better known than many of my focal points in this space. But then again, every time I’ve told it to someone—and I have done so not infrequently, as it’s one of my favorite American stories—it has been new to them; both of those things (the newness and the favorite-ness) make me feel that it’s okay to include it here. For the contexts, it’s worth noting first, as Shaara does at length, how much the future of the Civil War, and thus America as a whole, hinged on the outcome of Gettysburg—not just militarily but also and more importantly diplomatically, since Confederate General Robert E. Lee was carrying a letter given him by CSA President Jefferson Davis in which, to be brief, the English government basically promised to enter the war on the side of the Confederacy if its army could win a decisive victory on Northern territory. If the war and the American future thus hinged on this battle, the battle itself largely hinged on what happened on the hill called Little Round Top—it was at the extreme Southern end of the Union lines and was the high ground, and if the Confederate army managed to take it, it was likely that the Union army would have to retreat, thus quite possibly giving the battle to Lee. And by the most random but crucial quirk of fate, the Union officer whose regiment was charged with holding Little Round Top was Colonel Joshua Chamberlain of the 20th Maine.
Whole books, including much of Shaara’s, have been written about Chamberlain, so here I’ll just highlight a couple of things: he was a college professor of rhetoric and modern languages who had volunteered for the Union army out of a sense of duty; and prior to Gettysburg his principal battlefield experience had been a horrific night (chronicled in his diary) spent huddled amongst corpses during the brutal Union defeat at Fredericksburg (an event that, among others, had led Chamberlain in that same diary to admit to some significant uncertainty about whether he was capable of adequately leading men in battle; and it’s worth adding that many of his men had come to share those doubts, and had nearly staged a mutiny against his leadership not long before Gettysburg). Throughout the second day of the fighting at Gettysburg (July 2nd, 1863), Chamberlain and the 20thMaine were assaulted again and again by Confederate troops trying to take Little Round Top; they managed to hold off those attackers by the late afternoon were virtually out of ammunition (many men were entirely out) and likely could not withstand another charge. No historian or strategist could fault Chamberlain if he had retreated under those circumstances, but instead he called for the ultimate bluff: he ordered his men to fix bayonets and charge the Southern regiment that was preparing for another charge at them. Taken by surprise, and of course unaware of how little ammo their attackers possessed, the Confederate troops surrendered to Chamberlain; Little Big Top did not fall, the Union army took the advantage into the third and final day of fighting, Lee in desperation ordered the infamous Pickett’s Charge, and the rest, of the battle and in many ways the war, was history.It’s impossible, to reiterate where I started this post, to know for sure what would have happened, in any historical moment or situation, had things gone differently. But it is certainly possible, perhaps even likely, that had Chamberlain made a different choice, the battle and war could have gone to the Confederacy, and from then on American history would have looked so different as to be unrecognizable. Chamberlain, who won the Medal of Honor for this moment, would go on to a very diverse and distinguished career, including four one-year terms as governor of Maine, a decade as president of Bowdoin College, and many other posts and accomplishments. But it doesn’t get any more meaningful than that July 2nd bluff—and we should all be thankful for it.Next Gettysburg post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

November 19, 2018: GettysburgStudying: The Address

[On November 19, 1863President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettsysburg Address. Few American speeches have been more significant, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy the address and a few other Gettysburg histories and contexts. Leading up to a special Thanksgiving weekend post!]On two particularly compelling choices in Lincoln’s concise masterpiece.I’m far from the first to note the irony of just how many words have been written about Lincoln’s 272-word Gettsyburg Address (even that website devotes many, many more words than that to the speech), delivered to consecrate the battlefield’s cemetery on this date in 1863 (about 4.5 months after the battle). Historian Garry Wills wrote an entire, excellent public scholarly book on the speech: Lincoln at Gettsyburg: The Words that Remade America (1992), for example. I would have to be pretty full of myself to imagine that I have much I can really add to all those existing words—and I guess I am, because I’m writing this post! But I’ll also say that you should read Wills’ book, and this one by historian Martin P. Johnson, and this one by Jared Peatman, and and and…Before you do that, though, a couple of things about the speech that especially stand out for this AmericanStudier. For one thing, Lincoln opens with a crystal clear vision of the Civil War’s causes: he calls America “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”; and then calls the war “a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” I likely don’t have to convince many of my blog readers that the Civil War was fought over slavery, but for anyone in doubt who doesn’t want to read long documents like the Confederate secession declarations, Lincoln’s brief speech sums it up quite nicely. I know full well the realities of slavery behind (and propping up) America’s founding, of course; but Lincoln is highlighting here the ideals, the conception and dedication and proposition, that motivated the founding and especially its crucial documents. And he couldn’t be plainer that this war over American slavery is also a war over whether that idealized nation can move past that original sin and toward a more perfect union.And then there’s this sentence in Lincoln’s long (relatively speaking) last paragraph: “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” In part this moment reframes the occasion’s goal of “dedication” one more time, in a way both delightful to this lifelong punner and significant for its connection of memory to action, commemoration to activism, past to future. And in part it folds the moment itself, the speech, the audience, and really all Americans into Lincoln’s vital “us the living” and his even more crucial recognition that the work of progress is advancing but unfinished. To take a cemetery commemoration and make it a call to action for the living is a bold move in and of itself; to make it a command that we take up the mantle of these fallen brethren and carry on with the national work for which they gave their lives is, well, why your short speech remains a touchpoint 155 years later.PS. What do you think?

November 12-18, 2018: Finally, a Book Update!

I’ve been writing about my Exclusion & Inclusion project in this space for a long long time, and promising an update on the book itself for nearly as long. Well, I’m very excited that this week, in honor of this blog’s eight-year (!) anniversary, I can share that long-promised and –awaited update:I’m so excited to announce that We the People: The 500-Year Battle Over Who is an American, will be published in 2019 as part of Rowman and Littlefield’s wonderful American Ways series. American Ways books are engaging and readable, offering vital American histories and stories, conversations and connections, to public as well as academic and educational audiences. They include bibliographic essays that highlight lots of sources for further reading without breaking up the narrative flow of the chapters themselves. They are, in short, exactly the kind of public scholarly writing I’ve been moving into more and more fully over the eight years in this space, and in the many other projects, booksand online writing and otherwise, I’ve been able to pursue in that time as well.I won’t say too much more yet, but will add this: even more than in the past, I think it’s vital for me to get out and talk about this book in as many settings and communities as possible. So if you have ideas or connections for such opportunities, of literally any type and in literally any location (can’t say I’ll be able to get everywhere, but I can say I’ll try!), please let me know, by email or in comments here or on Twitter or any other way! Thanks so much in advance!Next series starts Monday the 19th,BenPS. There’s way too many people to thank in this space, but along with all the usual suspects, I want to single out my great agent Cecelia Cancellaro.

November 10-11, 2018: Major Midterms: The 2018 Results

[To say that this year’s midterm elections were significant is, I believe, to significantly understate the case. But crucial as they were, they weren’t the first such significant midterms, so this week I’ve AmericanStudied five other major midterms, leading up to this special weekend post on this year’s results.]I write this on Wednesday morning, still pretty raw from Tuesday night’s results (and with some vital ones, like Abrams-Kemp in Georgia, certainly still up in the air). But honestly, I said everything I want to say about those results in this Facebook post, which also foreshadows next week’s special post on my exciting book news:https://www.facebook.com/ben.railton.14/posts/10100579352959457Special post on Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on this year’s midterms? Other elections or contexts you’d highlight?

November 9, 2018: Major Midterms: 1994

[To say that this year’s midterm elections are significant is, I believe, to significantly understate the case. But crucial as they are, they won’t be the first such significant midterms, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy five other major midterms, leading up to a special weekend post on this year’s results. And oh yeah: vote!]On three ways—beyond the most obvious, the rise of Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America—that the “Republican Revolution” of the 1994 midterm elections foreshadowed 21stcentury American politics and society:1)      Oliver North: True, former Reagan aide and Iran Contra figure North lost his Virginia Senate bid (to incumbent Charles Robb). But it’s far from a coincidence that North has gone on to become a Fox News star—every aspect of his campaign, from his emphasis on his born-again Christianity to his unrelenting attack ads on Robb, has become integral to the 21stcentury right-wing media world of which he’s now a part.2)      Bill Frist: One of the most surprising 1994 victors was Frist, a heart surgeonwith no prior political experience who defeated three-term incumbent Tennessee Senator Jim Sasser. One of 1994’s most lasting influences has been the value placed on “outsiders,” not just to Washington but to the political realm itself; and no candidate fit that mold better than Frist, who would go on to become the ultimate insider as Senate Majority Leader.3)      Rick Santorum: Among the many GOP triumphs in 1994, relatively little attention was paid to Pennsylvania Congressman Rick Santorum’s victory over incumbent Senator Harris Wofford (in part because Wofford had been appointed after John Heinz’s tragic 1991 death, so was far from an established incumbent). Yet Santorum’s victory was hugely significant, and not only because he has gone on to be a perennial presidential candidate. It marked the growing presence and power of Christian Conservatives, a trend that would culminate in the election and presidency of George W. Bush six years later.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other elections or contexts you’d highlight?

November 8, 2018: Major Midterms: 1930 and Huey Long

[To say that this year’s midterm elections are significant is, I believe, to significantly understate the case. But crucial as they are, they won’t be the first such significant midterms, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy five other major midterms, leading up to a special weekend post on this year’s results. And oh yeah: vote!]On the illustrative and iconoclastic sides to a newly elected Senator.As you might expect, the 1930 midterm elections did not go well for the Republican Party. The Depression was just over a year old in November 1930, and even if President Herbert Hoover and his GOP colleagues had been a bang-up job with managing that economic and social catastrophe, it’s likely that the voters would have taken out their fears and frustrations on the party that controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress at the time. But by most measuresand most historians’ reckonings Hoover et al didn’t respond well at all to the deepening crisis, and so the significant Democratic victories of 1930 were even more predictable. Democrats gained 52 seats from Republicans in the House of Representatives, gaining control of that chamber for the first time in more than three decades. They also gained 8 Senate seats, earning a split of power in that chamber (although Republican Vice President Charles Curtis served as a tie-breaking vote for the GOP). Over the next three election cycles Democrats would gain 118 additional seats in the House, making 1930 the start of a truly sizeable blue wave (to coin a phrase, although of course Democratic in 1930 didn’t necessarily mean what it does in 2018—someone tell Dinesh D’Souza!) that reshaped American politics throughout the Depression era.One of the newly elected Senators in 1930 was none other than controversial Louisiana Governor (still in the midst of his gubernatorial term at the time! On which more in a moment) Huey Long. Long’s seat wasn’t one of those 8 Democratic pickups, as it had already been occupied by a Democrat. But Long did run against and defeat an entrenched incumbent, Senator Joseph E. Ransdell, handily besting Ransdell in a Democratic primary that was by default the full election as well (as the GOP didn’t run a candidate for the seat). Ransdell had been in the Senate since 1912, and had been in the House of Representatives for 14 years before that; those 32 years in Washington made him quite the symbolic embodiment of “politics as usual” and made Long’s ousting of him a striking reflection of the sea-changes underway across the nation in 1930. As usual, Long articulated such radical sentiments bluntly, defending his continuing as governor rather than immediately assuming the Senate seat (on which, again, more in a moment!) by arguing, “with Ransdell as Senator, the seat was vacant anyway.” Long’s plainspoken populism (while complex and fraught as such populisms tend to be) likewise reflected the broader trends that contributed to this 1930 rejection of Hoover and company and the subsequent moves toward new perspectives and the New Deal.So in some important ways Long’s 1930 victory was a telling example of those larger national trends. But in other ways it, like Long itself, was entirely unique and kind of ridiculous. Again, while his Senate term began in March 1931, Long simply didn’t occupy the seat for nearly a year, finishing out most of his term as governor before moving to Washington in January 1932. Long being Long, he also took things significantly further than that; when Lieutenant Governor Paul Cyr, a former Long ally who had turned against the governor, correctly noted that Long really couldn’t serve in both roles and attempted to assume the governorship, Long fought back, kind of literally: he called Cyr’s actions a coup e’tat and ordered the state National Guard to surround the Capitol Building. He then went to the state Supreme Court to argue that Cyr had vacated the Lieutenant Governor position through his actions, won that lawsuit, and replaced Cyr with a crony, State Senate President Alvin Olin King; it was King who took over for the final few months of Long’s gubernatorial term when he finally moved to DC to assume the Senate seat. All of which is to say, as undoubtedly extreme as this year’s midterm elections feel, things could always get more unique and crazy.Last midterm tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other elections or contexts you’d highlight?

November 7, 2018: Major Midterms: 1874

[To say that this year’s midterm elections are significant is, I believe, to significantly understate the case. But crucial as they are, they won’t be the first such significant midterms, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy five other major midterms, leading up to a special weekend post on this year’s results. And oh yeah: vote!]On extending our concept of historical turning points, but also resisting ideas of inevitability.I’ve written both here and elsewhereabout our tendency to focus too much on presidents to narrate our eras and histories, and there’s a corollary and complementary trend (one I’m as frequently guilty of as anyone, to be clear) of focusing on presidential elections as singular and key historical moments and turning points. A particularly clear case in point would be the hugely contested and controversial presidential election of 1876, the eventual results of which, as I’ve written before in this space, seem to have directly produced one of the most significant turning points in the nation’s history: newly elected President Rutherford B. Hayes’s 1877 decision to end Federal Reconstruction throughout the South. Whether Hayes did so as a direct result of a “crooked bargain” to secure the presidency remains a point of contention among historians and perhaps always will; but even if he did not, there’s no doubt that ending Reconstruction was one of his first actions as president, and thus that this particular moment reinforces the broader narrative that it is presidential elections which especially represent and contribute to historical turning points.  But while it was Hayes who made that particular 1877 call to end Federal Reconstruction, there was of course a long, complex series of moments and events that led up to that tragic decision. Any such list would have to include many of Andrew Johnson’s white supremacist actions as president and many of the and racially motivated massacreswith which the white South so thoroughly resisted Reconstruction. But alongside such longstanding historical trends we could also locate the contested and influential 1874 midterm elections as a direct predecessor to 1876’s electoral result. Due in part to those broader Reconstruction-era trends (which among other things greatly limited African American voting throughout the South), and in part to a number of other factors (the Panic of 1873, the Grant Administration’s many prominent scandals), Congressional Republicans lost 93 seats and their majority in the House of Representatives (the second-largest swing in House history), with Southern Democrats in particular dominating the elections at every level. Congressional Republicans’ abilities to work with Grant and help advance Reconstruction’s goals were severely curtailed, and the stage was set for 1876’s contested results and their tragic aftermaths.Or was it? Another historical move we tend to make a bit too quickly (and again, I’m just as guilty of this as anyone) is to read back from what we know happened into prior events that can thus seem to foreshadow those future trends. Certainly it’s fair and important to think about the relationship between different moments and events, and it seems clear that the 1874 election results reflected some shifting regional, national, and political realities that continued to influence subsequent events such as (especially) the 1876 presidential election. But of course a great deal can happen over the two years between national elections, and it would be both inaccurate and highly dangerous to suggest that 1874 led in any direct way to 1876. Highly dangerous, that is, because it might lead to inaction or apathy in the aftermath of a midterm election that doesn’t go as we hope, rather than a renewed commitment to the battle ahead of the next elections (and everything else still to come). I’m writing this post well before yesterday’s midterms, so I don’t know whether that bleak possibility will have turned out to be a reality—but I know that no matter what, we can and should learn from historical moments but never treat them as necessarily or inevitably predictive of what follows. Next midterm tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other elections or contexts you’d highlight?

November 6, 2018: Major Midterms: 1858 (and 1859)

[To say that this year’s midterm elections are significant is, I believe, to significantly understate the case. But crucial as they are, they won’t be the first such significant midterms, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy five other major midterms, leading up to a special weekend post on this year’s results. And oh yeah: vote!]On how Congressional elections can reflect and even amplify societal collapse.I know that’s a really bleak lead for an Election Day post, and I promise I didn’t intend for that to be the case; the posts in this series are chronological, and I also didn’t know what I wanted to say about each midterm election when I picked them as post topics. But in truth, I do believe (and full disclosure, I’m writing this post in early September, exactly two months prior to Election Day, but I can’t imagine this perspective changing much and certainly not for the better between now and then) that the 2018 midterm elections do have the potential to contribute significantly (well beyond normal midterm elections, that is) to whether the country moves in a better or worse direction going forward. Am I saying that the country might devolve into civil war in the next few years if the midterms go badly? Not necessarily—but it’s worth noting that a few years before the Civil War, a series of regular and special midterm elections between August 1858 and November 1859 did in fact contribute to the gathering momentum toward and even causes of that most divisive and tragic period in American history.What makes the historical comparisons tricky, though, is that the most straightforward way to describe the results of those elections would be to say that a progressive party opposed to a historically awful President gained partial control of Congress. Former Senator and Secretary of State James Buchanan had been elected president in 1856, and had spent the next two years doing everything he could to support a Southern, slaveholding, and white supremacist agenda (including, perhaps most egregiously, lobbying the Supreme Court to rule in Dred Scott v. Sanford [1857] that slaves were legally property and not human beings). Buchanan’s extremism alienated fellow Democrats (especially Northern ones like his primary opponent Stephen Douglas), and those tensions, along with the vote-splitting presence of small but influential political parties like the anti-immigrant Know Nothings (renamed the American Party for the 1856 election) and the anti-Buchanan Southern Opposition Party, allowed the very new, anti-slavery Republican Party to gain its largest number of Congressional seats yet across these two years of midterm elections. The Republicans didn’t win quite enough seats to have a majority in the House of Representatives, but the presence of those smaller parties nonetheless gave the Republicans a plurality and a chance to exercise significant Congressional power in opposition to Buchanan’s agenda.While that sounds like a good thing, the Civil War arrived less than two years after the last of those special elections in November 1859. I’m not suggesting that these Congressional Republicans did anything in particular to hasten the war, or even that they necessarily could have prevented it; the die might well have been cast by 1858 (or perhaps even as early as the “Bleeding Kansas” conflicts of 1854-1856). Instead, I would argue that the extremely divided and fractured nature of these Congressional results reflected those deepening sectional and national divisions—but also, perhaps, exacerbated them. More exactly, I think a greater sense of solidarity and coalition among the various opposition parties—certainly between the Republicans and the Southern Opposition Party, for example, which could have better supported the nascent and vital Southern Unionism that continued throughout the Civil War—might have allowed for more effective resistance to Buchanan and his pro-slavery and white supremacist efforts. Which is to say, on Election Day 2018 I hope we resisters remember not only what we’re fighting against, but that we’re all in it together.Next midterm tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other elections or contexts you’d highlight?

November 5, 2018: Major Midterms: 1826

[To say that this year’s midterm elections are significant is, I believe, to significantly understate the case. But crucial as they are, they won’t be the first such significant midterms, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy five other major midterms, leading up to a special weekend post on this year’s results. And oh yeah: vote!]On the single-party midterms that presaged an era of increasing partisanship and conflict.
I’ve written before about the incredibly divisive presidential election of 1800, which, along with other foundational histories such as the overtly political origins of the Supreme Court or the battle over the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, should lay to rest any arguments that American government or society has ever been free of political parties or partisan conflicts. But despite those originating political realities, there was one decade or so when the U.S. operated as a largely one-party system: the period between about 1815 and 1825, a decade known as the Era of Good Feelings. The Federalist Party had mostly collapsed on the national level, and virtually all of Congress as well as the Presidency were controlled by the Democratic-Republican Party throughout the period. Although of course there were divisions and battles within the Democratic-Republican Party, this was still an era of apparent political solidarity, a time during which Secretary of State and future President John Quincy Adams could say, in an October 1817 letter to his nephew John Adams Smith, that, “Party spirit has indeed subsided through the Union to a degree that I should have thought scarcely possible.”
Adams was elected president in 1824, but during his first and only term he and the rest of the nation would learn that perhaps the seeming absence of party spirit was indeed not possible. The 1824 election alone highlighted tensions within the Democratic-Republic Party, as Adams was running against three other Democratic-Republican candidates and one of them, Andrew Jackson, received more popular and electoral votes; since he did not receive a majority, however, the election went to the House of Representatives which controversially chose Adamsinstead. Jackson supporters spent the next couple of years angrily working toward the 1826 midterm election, which as a result became perhaps the first truly divisive such midterm—Jacksonians picked up sufficient seats in the House of Representatives to claim the majority, with Jackson’s friend and ally Andrew Stevensonbecoming the new Speaker of the House; and they added seats to an existing Senate majority, giving Jacksonians control over both Houses of Congress and the ability to directly oppose Adams’ administration. The Good Feelings were no more.
The ramifications of the 1826 midterms went far beyond just those next couple years of divided government, or even Jackson’s subsequent and highly significant (as well as hugely destructive) 1828 election to the presidency. The 1826 election also marked the final endpoint for the nation’s original political parties, as Jackson had separated from the Democratic-Republicans and run in 1828 under the banner of a new Democratic Party; his opposition would subsequently reorganize under another new title, that of the Whig Party. While again there had been plenty of conflict between the founding era’s original political parties, this second two-party system would reach new levels of partisanship and vitriol, helping usher in a new era in national politics (one not at all unrelated to the Democratic Party’s gradual but clear connection throughout this era to the interests of the system of slavery). All illustrations of just how important and influential a midterm election can be.Next midterm tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other elections or contexts you’d highlight?