Early presidential elections and Congressional caucuses

For all their wisdom, the founding fathers failed to foresee the rise of the political party system in the new nation. The framers of the Constitution had outlined a system in which the electors voted for president and vice-president indiscriminately. The candidate who received the majority of votes became president, and the one with the second highest number of votes became vice-president. It was a situation fraught with potential difficulties, but recognition of this was slow to dawn, as George Washington was nominated to his two terms in office informally, and elected unanimously.

When Washington announced his retirement in 1796, the presidential candidates then came to be chosen by congressional caucus. The caucus (a word probably derived from the Algonquian Indian term for counselor) was a long-standing American tradition. Since the early 1700s, wealthy Bostonians had been meeting in caucus clubs to endorse candidates for local elections. The 1796 election was the first between two opposing political parties. In secret congressional conferences, the Federalists nominated John Adams and Thomas Pinckney for president and vice-president, while the Democratic-Republicans chose Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr as presidential and vice-presidential candidates. The electors chose Adams as president and Jefferson as vice-president – resulting in the awkward situation of having political foes serving as leaders in the same administration. The 1800 tied election between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr sent the decision to the House of Representatives, and led to the 12^th Amendment to eliminate the ambiguities in presidential election by requiring separate ballots for the president and vice-president.

From 1796 to 1824, the president and vice-president continued to be nominated by the congressional caucus method. But popular sentiment began to oppose congressional caucus nomination as being undemocratic. By 1824, the selection of the two highest officials in the land by secret caucuses of senator and representatives had been decried by nationwide rallies of Andrew Jackson’s supporters, who sought a more open method of candidate selection. The last congressional caucus took place in 1824; and in the 1828 presidential election, Andrew Jackson successfully waged the first modern-style campaign, thanks to the expert organizational abilities of Martin Van Buren of the Albany Regency, a New York state party machine. In 1831 the small Anti-Masonic party, with its Baltimore party convention, initiated the national conventional system of choosing presidential candidates. From then on, political parties took over and American public servants would have to deal with them.

Slavery and the War

In the antebellum South, about 350,000 white families were slaveholders. The other 1,750,000 were subsistence farmers who did not own slaves. Of the slaveholders, only about 7% had more than ten slaves, yet all the slaveholders in the South eventually operated in a pattern of paternalism that developed from a continuing relationship between slaveholder and slave.

Many Southerners regarded slavery as “our burden”, as they had the job of “civilizing” Africans, and this attitude developed into a pervasive set of relations. Because the slave trade had been closed since 1808 and the slave population could not be replaced, slaveholders had a large stake in maintaining their slaves. (By the year 1860 nearly all slaves had been born in the South).

As the system developed, it placed constrains on both slaveholders and slaves. The slaveholder could no longer act as the unquestioned dictator, arbitrarily selling individual slaves or families. The slaves, for their part, were forced into reconciling themselves to their situation.

Slavery was more than a system of labor; it was a mode of production and a form of society, out of which grew a legal system, social pattern system and an ideology. The system itself was based on racism, and by discriminating against blacks and excluding them from schools, slaveholders prevented poor whites from relating to blacks. The paternalistic relationship grew not from a medieval model of regarding slaves as born to their position, but from a capitalist ideology that everyone has the right to bargain. And because slaves regarded themselves as people with a right to bargain, more and more of them came to realize that they also had a right to freedom.

The southern agricultural system was centered on cotton, tobacco and indigo. By 1815, cotton had become the dominant southern crop for export to the newly built textile mills in the North. The large territories in Alabama and Mississippi were planted with cotton. It was achieved by the use of slave labor. After the 1808 national ban on the foreign slave trade, the South turned to breeding slaves to meet its own domestic use. Slave-breeding became a highly profitable venture on its own. The 7000,000 slaves counted in the 1790 census expanded to 4 million slaves in 1860. At the same time, the plantation system was revived. The plantations consisted of fields, orchards, barns, slave quarters and work houses. The privileged whites who presided over these plantations led aristocratic lives of leisure, based on chivalric values.

Before the Civil War, the Cotton Kingdom extended from South Carolina to Texas and Arkansas; cotton accounted for almost two-thirds of the nation’s exports. The Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves eventually had little result on cotton production. After the war, the planters turned instead to sharecroppers and tenant farmers, many of them former slaves, and the cotton output soon equaled and then surpassed the pre-war yields.

Before the war the North numbered some 22,000,000 people (in 23 states and 7 large territories), and the South had just 9,000,000 (in 11 states), some 3,500,000 of them were black slaves, so they had only about 1,140,000 males between the ages of 15 and 40 – compared to the North’s 4,000,000 eligible men. The economy of the North was far more varied and industrialized than that of the South. The North had some 70 percent of the country’s railroad mileage, 96 percent of the rail equipment, and 81 percent of the bank deposits. All this meant that the North had the means to continue and increase its supply of war material, while South simply lacked the capacity ever to catch up. Nearly all of the country’s weapons factories were in the North as were the factories that made the components of ships and the North’s blockade quickly cut off the South from any commerce.

Although slavery was at the heart of the war, even many of the leading abolitionists seemed more concerned with the concept of “slavery” than with black people: many abolitionist societies did not even accept black members. When the war actually broke out, the official position of the Federal Government was that secession and rebellion were the causes; Lincoln, who was personally and profoundly antislavery, wisely soft-pedaled the issue of slavery as first to avoid alienating pro-union slave-holding border states.

Yet as soon as the war started, blacks volunteered to fight for the Union – and were immediately rejected. There were several reasons: some whites sincerely felt it wasn’t “appropriate” for blacks to be expected to fight a “white man’s war”; many including Lincoln still worried about offending the border states; and many (also including Lincoln) frankly thought that blacks wouldn’t make good soldiers. As the Union army moved into Confederate territory, some slaves took refuge in the Union camps; some officers allowed them to stay – but others returned them to their Southern owners. And when Union General John Fremont declared all slaves in his Missouri command to be freed, President Lincoln himself canceled Fremont’s order and removed Fremont himself from the post. Finally, in July 1862, the Federal Congress passed two crucial acts: (1) the Confiscation Act, which declared free all slaves whose owners sided the Confederacy; and (2) Militia Act, which authorized President Lincoln to use blacks as soldiers. Yet blacks were limited to serve as laborers, kitchen personnel, nurses, scouts or even spies.

It was the Emancipation Proclamation that changed this. The Proclamation contained a little-noted announcement: Lincoln finally agreed to use blacks in the army and navy. Before the war ended, some 180,000 blacks served in the Union Army, while another 30,000 were in the Union Navy. But black soldiers were in segregated units, usually under white officers; there were only about 100 black officers, and until 1864, all blacks received only about half the pay of white servicemen.

The South, however, desperately short of manpower, long resisted the idea of using black soldiers. Finally, in 1865, Jefferson Davis proposed and the Confederate Congress approved an act calling for 3000,000 slave-soldiers - who would be promised their freedom in return for service.