![]() He'd already served in the House of Representatives and the Senate. But Pierce was a man with a long, distinguished political career as a Democrat by the time he reached the White House. It's hard not to have this death in mind when you look at Pierce's failure as a president. The death of Benjamin likely did Pierce no favors when it came to his alcoholism, either. It came just two months before Pierce's inauguration. Perhaps the most tragic incident was the January 1853 train wreck that claimed the life of his son Benjamin. Pierce's personal life was hellacious, his frail wife constantly suffering from illness. This was the best alternative to Peter Wallner's well-reviewed but massive 750-page exploration of Pierce, the second volume of which - two volumes! - calls Pierce a "martyr" in the title. #DISINTEGRATION OF THE WHIG PARTY SERIES#To save time and sanity, I fell back on the American Presidents Series - in this case, the Pierce volume written by Michael Holt. That way I could finally move out of this spell of mediocre one-term chief executives, and make it to the relative excitement of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. After battling through Millard Fillmore for two weeks, I was hell-bent on knocking out Pierce and Buchanan in quick order. Not that I was going to waste a lot of time on either of them. ![]() Such is the case with Franklin Pierce, widely derided as one of the nation's worst presidents - alongside his successor, James Buchanan. When the best thing you can say about a president is that he wasn't ugly, you're clearly not dealing with the greatest leader of all time. You can also follow Marcus' progress at the Twitter account and with this 44 in 52 Spreadsheet. Let it march out of the field, therefore, with all the honors.> Entertainment Editor's note: This is the fourteenth entry in the writer's year-long project to read one book about each of the U.S. It committed a grievous fault, and grievously hath it answered it. Many conservative Whigs followed him.ġ856 was the last election in which the Whigs fielded a candidate, but former Whig William Seward, who went on to serve as Lincoln’s secretary of state, pronounced the party’s eulogy in 1855: “Let, then, the Whig party pass. Fillmore, who had been dumped by the Whigs in 1852, ran in 1856 as the nominee of the American Party, the political wing of the Know Nothings. Meanwhile, other Whigs were getting swept up in anti-immigrant, nativist movements like the Know Nothings, a secret society that grew to become a political force in the 1850s. Among the former prominent Whigs who turned Republican were Thaddeus Stevens, William Seward and Abraham Lincoln. The divisive slavery issue came to a head again in 1854 with the passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which authorized new territories and states to decide for themselves if they wanted to allow slavery.Īnti-slavery Whigs, deciding that their party wasn’t sufficiently committed to halting the spread of slavery, splintered off and formed the Republican party along with anti-slavery Democrats. The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Rise of the Republicans ![]() Going into the 1852 election, Whigs still considered themselves the party to beat, but “Old Fuss and Feathers,” as Scott was derisively known, was shellacked in the general election by the Democrats (he only won 42 electoral votes), dealing the Whigs a bruising blow from which they never recovered. READ MORE: How Andrew Jackson Rode a Populist Wave Into the White House Both Whig Presidents Die While in Office “But in the case of the Whig party, it just couldn’t find any way of dealing with the slavery issue that would satisfy both its Northern and Southern wings.” “Both parties therefore had an interest in keeping slavery off the national agenda as much as possible,” says Wallach. Like the Democratic party before the Civil War, the Whigs were a “bisectional” party that drew voters from both the North and South, explains Philip Wallach, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. And while there was a strong anti-slavery sentiment among some Whigs, it wasn’t an abolitionist party. There were defenders of Native Americans angered at Jackson’s relocation orders that led to the infamous Trail of Tears. There were Protestant moral reformers who wanted to pass prohibition laws aimed at Catholic immigrants. ![]() The Jacksonian Democrats painted the Whigs as a party of wealthy Northern elites who wanted to sidestep the will of the people, but the Whigs actually defied a singular identity. ![]() They took their name from a British anti-monarchist party that was revived in Colonial America as “American Whigs.” Clay, known as “the great compromiser,” was the Whigs’ most influential and vocal early leader. The Whigs formed in 1834 in response to Jackson’s refusal to fund the second National Bank. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |