The life and times of John Kelly, tribune of the people

by J. Fairfax McLaughlin

RISE OF POLITICAL ABOLITIONISM—MARTIN VAN BUREN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE OF THE ABOLITIONISTS—JOHN KELLY’S BRILLIANT COURSE IN THE SYRACUSE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION OF 1855.

The rise and fall of the Know-Nothing party took place when John Kelly was yet a young man. The old Federal party and its several legitimate successors, more especially the Whigs and Know-Nothings, had not been fortunate in their conflicts with the Democratic party. Founded by Mr. Jefferson, the latter party always had been distinguished for two central ideas—a strict construction of the Constitution, and adherence to the minimum scale of governmental powers. The Federalists had destroyed themselves as a national organization by opposition to the war of 1812. General Jackson declared he would have hung the men who burned blue lights at New London, when Commodore Decatur was blockaded there by the British fleet.[10] These blue lights were said to be signals to the enemy of the movements of the American forces. The exposure by John Quincy Adams of the machinations at Boston of John Henry, the British emissary and spy, who was sent from Canada to instill treason in New England and bring about the secession of the Eastern States,[11] had hardly less effect in sealing the fate of the Federal party than the Hartford Convention, whose object was the dissolution of the Union. Massachusetts—not South Carolina—was the birthplace of the secession doctrine.[12] The extinction of the Federal party was followed by the “era of good feeling.” Then came the disruption during the administration of John Quincy Adams, who having first propitiated Jefferson and Madison by making war on the Hartford Convention and the Essex Junto, in the end showed he was a Federalist at heart by reviving the principles which had distinguished his father’s administration, and opening the way for the formation of the Whig party by fastening the protective system on the country, and deducing implied powers from the Constitution not found in that instrument. The inevitable tendency of these revived ideas of federalism was towards the centralization of all powers, whether delegated or not, in the General Government. The Whig party, though led by the brilliant Henry Clay, was no match for the Democratic party. Twice it succeeded in wresting the government from the Democrats, but on each occasion the result was due to Democratic dissensions, and to the furore excited over the name of a military chieftain—Harrison in 1840, and Taylor in 1848. With Clay and Webster the Whig party died, and was succeeded by Know-Nothingism. Mr. Kelly’s part in the overthrow of the American or Know-Nothing party was dwelt upon in the last chapter.

But the old Federal party, so unsuccessful with the Hartford Convention, and in its opposition to the second war with England; so short-lived in its regained supremacy under the Whigs; and so easily overthrown under its bigoted organization of Know-Nothingism; was at length about to adopt a new course, and to acquire a new vitality in its war with the party of the Constitution, the Jeffersonian Democracy, destined to place it in control of the government for a quarter of a century, and to revolutionize the institutions of the country, if not the principles of the Constitution itself. Agitation over negro slavery furnished the anti-Jefferson party with this new lease of life. That agitation became the burning question in American politics while Mr. Kelly was in Congress. A maximum of government was now to be employed, and the disciples of Mr. Jefferson, divided and routed, were soon to behold the Hamiltonian school of politicians in absolute control of every department of the Federal Government.

The commanding influence of New York in the affairs of the United States was never more conspicuously displayed than at the time of the dissolution of the Whig and organization of the Republican parties. Dissensions among the Democrats of New York proved a potent factor in this process of decay and rejuvenation among their opponents. Prior to 1848 the Abolitionists had no strength as a party organization. Mobbed in Boston, New York and other cities, denounced by Daniel Webster as “infernal Abolitionists,” and by Henry Clay as “mad fanatics,” they struggled in vain for long years to effect a lodgment in American politics. A rapid glance at the origin of political Abolitionism will not be without interest to the historical student. Forty-four years ago, January 28-29, 1840, an anti-slavery convention was held at Arcade, then in Genessee County, New York. Reuben Sleeper of Livingston County presided. Among the delegates were Myron Holley and Gerrit Smith. At this conclave a call was issued for a national convention, to be held at Albany April 1, 1840, to discuss the expediency of nominating Abolition candidates for President and Vice-President of the United States. At the time and place appointed the first national convention of the anti-slavery party was held. Alvan Stewart presided, and the Liberty Party, after a long discussion, was organized. The convention was composed of delegates from six States. James G. Birney and Thomas Earle were nominated for President and Vice-President. They received a little less than 7,000 votes at the polls, the Harrison and Tyler tidal wave sweeping everything before it. In 1844 the Liberty Party again placed its candidates in the field—James G. Birney for President and Thomas Morris for Vice-President—who polled nearly 60,000 votes, and defeated Henry Clay. The politicians were not slow to perceive that the Abolitionists at last held the balance of power between the two national parties of Whigs and Democrats. But no one then dreamed that Martin Van Buren, who had achieved all his successes in life as a Democrat, whom the South had made President in 1836, and whom John Randolph described as the “Northern man with Southern principles,” would place himself at the head of the Abolitionists in 1848, and thereby defeat his own party at the Presidential election of that year. In this surprising defection of Mr. Van Buren from the Democratic party, Samuel J. Tilden likewise struck his colors and went off with the Little Magician into the camp of the Abolitionists. Lucius Robinson also bolted with Tilden. John Kelly followed the lead of William L. Marcy and Horatio Seymour, and supported Cass and Butler, the nominees of the National Democracy.

A convention of the Liberty Party was held at Macedon Locke, Wayne county, New York, June 8, 9 and 10, 1847, at which the Abolitionists nominated Gerrit Smith and Elihu Burritt for President and Vice-President. Burritt declined, and at a convention held soon after at Rochester, New York, Charles C. Foote was nominated in Burritt’s place. The politicians now began to put in their fine work. The national committee of the Liberty Party and their outside advisers had their own plans with which the nomination of Gerrit Smith conflicted. They accordingly called another convention of the Liberty Party to meet at Buffalo, October 20, 1847. The Macedon convention thereupon separated from the Liberty Party, and took the name of Liberty League. Both wings were in agreement in maintaining that slavery was unconstitutional. William Lloyd Garrison and his followers, while not endorsing the Liberty Party in all things, held that a rising of the slaves in the Southern States would be no “insurrection.” In this view the Abolition editors concurred, as did also the Liberty Party conventions in Massachusetts and other Eastern States, those held in various parts of New York, and those convened in Ohio and other Western States. The Liberty League occupied the same ground in regard to slavery, with this difference: they took position on other public questions which the Liberty Party excluded from the scope of its operations. Gerrit Smith, who was one of the single idea Abolitionists, in fact their leader, was placed in nomination for the Presidency at the Buffalo Liberty Party Convention of October 20, 1847. His candidature would have received the hearty support of the Liberty League, for its members knew that a servile insurrection was what he desired. Thirteen years later Gerrit Smith supplied John Brown with the money to carry out his notorious Harper’s Ferry raid, the revelation of which fact in Frothingham’s biography of Gerrit Smith led to the suppression of the book by the friends of the latter. The managers of the convention passed over Mr. Smith, and for the first time went outside of their own ranks for candidates. John P. Hale, of New Hampshire, and Leicester King, of Ohio, were nominated for President and Vice-President. These nominations were only temporary. In 1848 the Barnburners of New York were in open revolt against the Democrats, bolted at the National Democratic Convention of Baltimore, and held a convention of their own at Utica. The anti-slavery Whigs of Massachusetts and the followers of Joshua R. Giddings and Salmon P. Chase in Ohio were ready to unite with the Abolitionists of the Liberty Party. A conference was held by the leaders of these various discordant factions, secessionists from the two old parties, which led to the call for the celebrated Buffalo Convention of August 9, 1848. In that Convention was born the Republican party of to-day. The Liberty Party was swallowed up, Hale and King withdrew, the name of Free Soil party was assumed, and two men never before considered as distinctive Abolitionists, Martin Van Buren and Charles Francis Adams, were nominated for President and Vice-President. “A party has arisen,” said Daniel Webster with vitriolic humor in a speech at Abington, Massachusetts, October 9, 1848, “which calls itself the Free Soil party. I think there is a good joke by Swift, who wished to ridicule some one who was making no very tasteful use of the words ‘natale solum’:

“‘Libertas, et natale solum!

Fine words. I wonder where you stole ’em.’”

Thomas H. Benton, the Jackson Democrat and friend and champion of Van Buren in the long struggle between the latter and Calhoun, added his condemnation to that of Webster, the New England Whig. Of the Free Soil party, which was launched on its stormy career at the Buffalo Convention, Benton says in his “Thirty Years’ View”: “It was an organization entirely to be regretted. Its aspect was sectional, its foundation a single idea, and its tendency to merge political principles in a slavery contention. And deeming all such organizations, no matter on which side of the question, as fraught with evil to the Union, this writer, on the urgent request of some of his political associates, went to New York to interpose his friendly offices to get the Free Soil organization abandoned; but in vain. Mr. Van Buren accepted the nomination, and in so doing placed himself in opposition to the general tenor of his political conduct in relation to slavery. I deemed this acceptance unfortunate to a degree far beyond its influence upon persons or parties. It went to impair confidence between the North and the South, and to narrow down the basis of party organization to a single idea; and that idea not known to our ancestors as an element in political organizations. Although another would have been nominated if he (Van Buren) had refused, yet no other nomination could have given such emphasis to the character of the convention and done as much harm.”[13] The vote in 1848 was as follows: Taylor and Fillmore, 1,360,752; Cass and Butler, 1,219,962; Van Buren and Adams, 291,342. Mr. Van Buren was assisted very warmly in this crusade against the National Democratic party by Samuel J. Tilden and Lucius Robinson, and having effected his object in joining the Abolitionists, the defeat of General Cass, he turned his back on his new allies in a single year and returned to the Democratic fold. But the “harm” predicted by Benton had been done, and the prodigal’s return could not undo it. It was by such exploits that Mr. Van Buren won the title of “Fox of Kinderhook.”

Four years later, in 1852, the Free Soil party again held a national convention, and nominated for President and Vice-President John P. Hale of New Hampshire, and George W. Julian of Indiana. They polled 157,685 votes at the election.

At the succeeding Presidential election the Whig party was dead, and the seed sown at the Buffalo Convention of 1848 by the Free Soilers had flowered in the interval into its natural fruit—the Republican party, a sectional organization founded on the single idea of opposition to slavery. The mission of this party was proclaimed by its leader. William H. Seward, to be an “irrepressible conflict” between a solid North and a solid South. John C. Fremont and William L. Dayton were nominated for President and Vice-President by the Republican National Convention of 1856. Francis P. Blair, Mr. Van Buren’s old friend of the Globe, was the political inventor of Colonel Fremont. Buchanan received 1,838,169 votes, Fremont 1,341,264, and Fillmore 874,534.