*Van Buren had been a fairly unsuccessful and unpopular president, but he was re-nominated by the Democrats nonetheless, due to his continuing influence within the party and in return for years of loyal service.

*The Whigs only ran one candidate this time around, and they again chose William Henry Harrison, a war hero and former territorial governor whose political views (if any) were not widely known and who, therefore, had few enemies.

*Although Harrison had been born on a Virginia plantation and studied medicine before turning to the Army in 1791, and had been governor of the Northwest Territory and the Indiana Territory, he was portrayed as a simple man, a poor farmer living in a log cabin and sipping hard cider.  Likewise, he ran on his war record, recalling his service with Mad Anthony Wayne at Fallen Timbers and his victories at Tippecanoe and the Thames, and was known as ‘Old Tippecanoe’ or even ‘Old Tip.’

*Determined to make no mistakes this time, the Whigs balanced their own ticket with a moderate and principled Democrat, John Tyler, also of Virginia.  Together, they ran as ‘Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!’ while van Buren was called ‘Martin van Ruin’ for the Panic of 1837 that haunted his entire presidency.  With no real political stands made by Harrison, the entire campaign was one of slogans and electioneering and advertising—of log cabins and hard cider.

*Although the popular vote was separated by less than 150,000 votes (or a little over 6% of the total), Harrison won almost the entire electoral vote, 234 to 60, and the total voter turnout was 78% of those registered, the highest to that point in American history, and one of the highest ever.

*Politics had become extremely popular and a significant part of the culture, and the two-party system was cemented as part of the American political tradition.

*On 4 March, 1841, Harrison stood in Washington to give his inaugural address.  It was a baroque piece, filled with classical allusions, intricate rhetoric, and interminably lengthy passages.  Daniel Webster, the Secretary of State, was permitted to edit it down, and proudly boasted of having killed ‘seventeen Roman proconsuls as dead as smelt.’  Despite this, the speech lasted two hours and fifteen minutes, the longest in American history.  Harrison did not wear an overcoat in the cold winter weather, caught pneumonia, and died exactly one month later—the oldest president elected to office at that point, the one with the longest inauguration address and shortest terms ever, and the first to die in office.

*The Whigs were horrified.  Clay, the most influential man in the Senate, and Webster, Secretary of State, had meant to steer the government with Harrison as a figurehead.  Tyler, however, made it clear that he was his own man, declaring that he was president, not just vice-president acting as president (as there was some debate among Constitutional scholars), and, despite running as a Whig (aligned with the states-rights minority faction in the Whig party), was still a Democrat at heart.

*Tyler let Clay destroy the independent treasury, but then Tyler vetoed a new Bank bill, and a substitute for it called the ‘Fiscal Corporation,’ literally a Bank of the United States under another name.  Not only did this show that he would not let Clay control the presidency, it was also in line with his Constitutional principles, which were largely Jeffersonian.

*Tyler grudgingly signed a 32% tariff similar to that of 1832, because he saw that the federal treasury was getting too low, but he vetoed a law to distribute proceeds from the sale of western lands to the states, saying that was the government’s money, and there was no need to give it away when the government was low on cash.

*Tyler was called ‘His Accidency,’ the ‘Executive Ass,’ and had ‘Tyler Grippe’ named after him.  There was an attempt to impeach him and there were threats on his life.  The Virginia Whigs formally expelled him from the party, and his entire cabinet resigned except for Webster, who was tied up in delicate foreign negotiations with Great Britain.

*The United States and Great Britain remained hostile, and perhaps were growing more so.  The British ridiculed American culture as barbaric, coarse, uncivilised and unrefined.  Having recently abolished slavery themselves, the British looked down on the continuation of that system within the United States.  Americans, aware of the difference, and even more acutely aware of the financial debts owed Great Britain returned the insults in kind.  British authors, including Charles Dickens, wrote numerous vituperative articles against the United States, in part because the lack of proper copyright laws in America meant their work was constantly printed in American with payment of royalties.  Americans also had a bad habit of not paying back the loans made them by English investors in public works and private businesses.

*The rebellions in Canada in 1837 had little chance of success, but Americans, hoping otherwise, or just wanted to hurt Britain, sent military supplies and even volunteers to their aid.  The American steamboat Caroline was intercepted carrying supplies across the Niagara River.  The British eventually crossed the river into New York, captured the boat at a dock, set her on fire and cast it adrift into the river, where she shortly went over the falls with one American on board.  This was played up and exaggerated by the newspapers of the time, but was definitely a violation of American neutrality.

*Americans were outraged.  In 1838, Americans burnt the British ship Sir Robert Peel in an American port.  When a Canadian named McLeod boasted of having taken part in the raid in a bar a few years later in 1840, he was arrested and charged with murder.  The British threatened war, and he was released under diplomatic pressure and an alibi.

*The British further annoyed America by offering asylum to a group of 130 slaves who had captured the Creole, which was transporting them from Hampton, Virginia, to New Orleans for sale.

*There was a border dispute in Maine as well.  There were about 12,000 square miles of territory in the Aroostook River Valley that were claimed by both nations in or near northern Maine, and the British wanted to build a road through it to connect Halifax and Quebec.

*Lumberjacks from Canada and the US moved in and began brawling in the area, and this threatened to evolve into open warfare.

*The British sent wealthy financier, Lord Ashburton, who had married an American woman, to negotiate with Webster.  They split the territory, with the US getting 7,000 square miles and the British 5,000, including the route for the new road.  The treaty also established a boundary for Minnesota.  Neither nation was too happy with the outcome, but both agreed that it solved their problems for the moment, and the two nations returned to insulting each other with the pen rather than the sword.

BACK TO SYLLABUS