The Last Time a President Destroyed a Major US Political Party

He was a military hero who had never himself voted in a presidential election. His name surfaced as the Whig Party and the nation were torn by the legitimacy of slavery. Democrats supported the horrific institution, and the 12^th President of the United States (1849-50) was the last president of the Republic who owned them. His tenure in office was short – 16 months to be precise – dying from either food poisoning from a bowl of milk and cherries, or as some have suggested, poison. The United States was a minor country at the time, so the machinations of the American politics had very limited impact outside of North America.

His name: Zachary Taylor, and he has often been depicted as a blithering incompetent, but with President James Polk ailing and unable to run for a second term, both the Democrats and Whigs were desperately looking for an electable candidate. A major general with major military success was a seemingly attractive choice. Until contemporary historians reconfigure the list, Zachary Taylor is generally considered the worst president of the United States. His tenure was so absurdly misdirected that his political party, Whigs, completely disbanded shortly after his death. Fortunately, he was not in office very long. But it began so well.

“Just days before Congress officially declared war on Mexico in May 1846, Taylor led U.S. troops to two victories over much larger Mexican forces at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma. And in February 1847, Taylor’s force defeated Mexican troops despite being outnumbered 3 or 4 to 1 at the Battle of Buena Vista. After the victory, Taylor was toasted from Maine to Georgia. Americans sang, ‘Zachary Taylor was a brave old feller, Brigadier General, A, Number One/ He fought twenty thousand Mexicanoes;/ Four thousand he killed, the rest they ‘cut and run.’ ’

“Members of both major political parties at the time—the Democrats and the Whigs—started holding public celebrations lauding Taylor with elaborate toasts to George Washington, the republic and their new hero. They often culminated with formal resolutions amid loud ‘huzzahs’ endorsing Taylor’s nomination for president in 1848. As the booze-fueled, red, white and blue political excitement grew, one Kentuckian exclaimed, shortly after Taylor’s Buena Vista victory, ‘I tell ye, General Taylor is going to be elected by spontaneous combustion.’…

“[Taylor] would only accept a nomination to be ‘president of the nation and not of a party.’ A genuine nationalist who recognized how much Americans disliked professional politicians, Taylor placed himself above the ‘trading politicians … on both sides.’

“Despite all this talk of staying away from one party or another, Taylor began inching toward the Whig Party, and the Whigs inched closer to him. At first glance, a general seemed to be a strange choice for the Whigs. Founded in the 1830s as a strained coalition of Southern states’ rights conservatives and Northern industrialists united mostly by disgust at Andrew Jackson’s expansion of presidential power, the Whig Party considered the war a disastrous result of presidential overreach. In fact, the popular backlash they stirred against Democratic President James K. Polk was so great that the Whigs seized control of Congress during the 1846 midterm election. But once America’s victory over Mexico triggered such enthusiasm, some Whigs calculated that running an extremely popular war hero like Taylor would prove to voters that the Whigs were patriotic, despite their anti-war stance.

“Taylor also appealed to the Whigs’ founding fear of presidential power. In the letters he wrote, he invoked Whig doctrine, justifying a passive president who deferred to the people and the Congress.

“And then, there was the slavery issue: Taylor’s ambiguous status as a slaveholder who dodged questions about the escalating slavery debate seemed to be a clever choice for a party increasingly divided over the South’s mass enslavement of blacks. The territory the U.S. acquired during the Mexican-American War only escalated the feud, sparking a major political debate over whether slavery would be allowed in the new territories. Both parties (each awkwardly uniting Northerners who disliked slavery with Southern slaveholders) had reason to seek safe candidates that year.” Gil Troy, Professor of History at McGill University, writing for Politico.com, June 2, 2016. At least Taylor voiced his opinion that slavery should not be promted in new states and territories. But Taylor was a total outsider, with economic policy views quite opposed to Whig doctrine, who really did not belong in any political office.

Further, Taylor’s connection to slavery was antithetical to many Whigs, who never believed he should have been nominated. “In the end, 62 percent of Taylor’s votes still came from Southern Whigs, who calculated that Taylor’s nomination would kill the abolitionist movement: ‘The political advantages which have been secured by Taylor’s nomination, are impossible to overestimate,’ cheered one Southerner.” Troy. Dissention among Whigs mounted.

But what did Taylor… and the Whigs… really stand for. They got an electable candidate… but forgot to design a platform. “The party had not even drafted a platform for this undefined, unqualified leader. Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune pronounced the convention ‘a slaughterhouse of Whig principles.’ The Jonesborough Whig did not know ‘which most to dispise, the vanity and insolence of Gen. Taylor, or the creeping servility’ of the Whig Convention that nominated him.

“Resisting pressure to run as an independent, but refusing to stump for Taylor, Henry Clay exclaimed, ‘I fear that the Whig party is dissolved and that no longer are there Whig principles to excite zeal and simulate exertion.’ A New York Whig, claiming the convention ‘committed the double crime of suicide and paricide,’ mourned, ‘The Whig party as such is dead. The very name will be abandoned, should Taylor be elected, for ‘the Taylor party.’ ’” Troy. The Whigs were hopeless fractured, and they had elected a novice with no political skills, certainly not the kind of leader who could mend that massive rift.

Taylor was caught trying to placate various factions, but “[m]ost dispiriting, Taylor, who made no pledges and had no principles, gave rank-and-file Whig voters nothing to champion, while alienating many of the most committed loyalists. In The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, the historian Michael Holt notes that Taylor’s victory triggered an ‘internal struggle for the soul of the Whig party’: was it more committed to seizing power or upholding principle? Underlying that debate was also a deeper question, still pressing today, about the role of fame, popularity, celebrity, in presidential campaigning—and American political leadership.

“Unfortunately for the wobbling Whigs, Southerners then felt betrayed when Taylor took a nationalist approach brokering what became the Compromise of 1850. As a result, Holt writes, ‘Within a year of Taylor’s victory, hopes raised by Whigs’ performance in 1848 would be dashed. Within four years, they would be routed by’ the Democrats. ‘Within eight, the Whig party would totally disappear as a functioning political organization.’” Troy.

Signed into law after Taylor’s death, the “Compromise of 1850 is the name given to a package of bills passed in September 1850, aimed at defusing a stand-off between the Northern free states and the Southern slave states. The argument concerned those territories which had been acquired by the United States during the Mexican-American War of the late 1840s and, in particular, their status. The compromise was a qualified success in that it averted the immediate threat of war or secession. However, it did not lead to a long-term settlement: the outbreak of the American Civil War was delayed by barely a decade.” TotalHistory.com. Not so much a success if you believe slavery to be the abomination that is always was. The bills addressed inter-state territorial claims, the division of new territories, where slavery might be allowed and where it could be banned and even protected slave owners against runaway slaves.

Zachary Taylor left both the nation and the Whigs more politically divided than ever. Both the Whigs fractured into self-destruction, and a decade later the Civil War ripped the nation apart. He alienated just about everyone. “It was summer, and a major U.S. political party had just chosen an inexperienced, unqualified, loutish, wealthy outsider with ambiguous party loyalties to be its presidential nominee. Some party luminaries thought he would help them win the general election. But many of the faithful were furious and mystified: How could their party compromise its ideals to such a degree?” Troy. Hmmm. A new clearly antislavery party, the Republicans rose after Taylor and his Whigs were gone.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder if the above scenario happened again in the 2016 election of Donald John Trump, now a candidate able to generate votes at the expense of so many basic Republican and American values.