USA > Delaware > Historical and biographical encyclopaedia of Delaware. V 1 > Part 36
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HISTORY OF DELAWARE.
the States who believed it too centralizing and | Adams of Massachusetts and William H. undemocratic in its provisions, and that by its Crawford of Georgia, all of whom had been allied with the old National Democratic party. adoption the States would surrender too much of home rule and States' rights. At the head of this class stood Thomas Jefferson, the draftsman of the Declaration of Indepen- dence.
In Delaware, however, there was but a small and insignificant number who opposed the Fed- eral Constitution, framed by the Convention in 1787, and she led off in its adoption in advance of all the other States. The friends of the instrument became known as Federalists, while the objecting party assumed the name of Re- publicans at first, and later adopted the name of the Democratic Party. Of course the Fed- eral became the dominant party in Delaware, and so continued, with a very few slight re- verses, from the adoption of the Constitution down to 1827.
In the summer or autumn of that year the old party lines were obliterated entirely and new party organizations were formed. Up to this period the population of the three coun- ties was nearly equal, and they were, as now, equally represented in the two Houses of the General Assembly. From the earliest forma- tion of these parties the representation in the Legislature from New Castle County was almost uniformly Democratic, and that from the other two Counties, Kent and Sussex, was as uniformly Federal. The Federal majorities in the popular vote at the election in the two lower Counties, also very generally out-num- bered the Democratic majority in New Castle. Hence of the sixteen governors of the State under the State Constitution of 1793, thirteen were Federal, including Charles Polk, the last governor elected under the old Federal regime. These old party lines had been wiped out more than a decade before, when the Demo- cratic party throughout the Union had grown so powerful, that at the election of Mr. Mon- roe in 1816, of the seventeen States then com- posing the Union, there were but three in which the Federal party predominated, Dela- ware being one of the three.
In 1827, the country all over was in a state of fervent political excitement. There had, three years before then, been four candidates for the presidency of the United States before the people-General Andrew Jackson of Ten- nessee, Henry Clay of Kentucky, John Quincy
The vote of Delaware had been cast in part for Adams, and in part for Crawford, by clec- tors appointed by a Legislature, a majority of which, were old Federalists, because there was no Federal candidate in the field. None of tliese four candidates commanded a majority in the Electoral College, but General Jackson led them all by a considerable plurality. Not- withstanding this, however, as is nearly always the case, the weaker candidates-two of them at least, Clay and Adams -combined against. the stronger and defeated Jackson, and elected Adams by that combination. Mr. Adams ap- pointed Mr. Clay Secretary of State, and im- mediately the battle cry of "bargain and cor- ruption" was rung out by the friends of General Jackson from one end of the Union to the other.
The last political fight between the old Federal and Democratic parties in Delaware, was made on the second Tuesday of October 1326, when the old Federal party elected Charles Polk of Kent County, Governor, and Louis McLane of New Castle County, Repre- sentative in Congress. They also elected a majority of the General Assembly. A large majority of the old Federal leaders had, in the meantime, espoused the cause of General Jack- son. Under the influence of these leaders, the Legislature elected in 1827, passed what was known as the militia law, the object of which, as was afterwards discovered, was the creation of a military spirit among the young men, that might redound to the benefit of the mili- tary hero, General Jackson. The Bayards, Booths, Johns, Rogers, McLanes of New Cas- tle County, the Claytons, Ridgelys, Raymonds and Cummins of Kent, and the Robinsons, Rod- neys, Coopers, Dunnings, Laytons, and Payn- ters of Sussex County, had been the leading families in the old Federal party; and all these except the Johns, the Claytons, the Rodneys, and the Laytons, now took position at the head of the Jackson party, while most of the old Republican or Democratic leaders joined com- pany with them.
Late in the summer or early in the Autumn of 1827, the two old parties called mass meet- ings at the county towns with the view of disbanding and taking sides in the new organi-
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zations about then to be formed, not so much ; Though so young he had already come to be on questions of policy in the conduct of gov- regarded as the ablest lawyer and must elo- quent orator the State had ever produced. In Sussex nearly all the leading men of both the old Federal and Democratic parties had in- clined to favor the election of General Jack- son, the Hon. Caleb S. Layton who is still liv- ing at the advanced age of 84 years, being the only member of the bar in that county who sided with the Administration of Mr. Adams. ermental affairs as in reference to personal preferences between the two candidates then prominently before the country for the presi- dency. Up to that time four presidents out of the five who had preceded Mr. Adams, had filled the office two terms, and probably they all would have been re-elected but for the passage by Congress of the alien and sedition law on the recommendation by President Adams, the father of John Quincy. Wash- ington had set the precedent and two terms of four years had become the limit fixed by the people by a sort of unwritten law. " Mr. Crawford who had been a candidate in 1824, had been struck with paralysis and was out of the question as a candidate in 1828, and Mr. Clay, who had also been a candidate in 1824, was Mr. Adams' Secretary ofState and of course declined to be an aspirant against his chief. Candidates for the presidency had up to this time, been presented to the people generally by Congressional caucus instead of National Conventions, as now. The friends of Mr. Adams' administration in Congress, had presented him, and the admirers of the old hero of New Orleans, had done the same for him. There were no outside candidates.
The campaign had already commenced in 1827, a year in advance of the election, when the old parties in Delaware met for the last time, in their respective mass meetings for the purpose of dissolution and taking sides in new parties, the one in favor of, and the other op posed to, the Adams Administration. The party supporting the administration adopted the name of "American Republican" and that adopted by its opponents was "The Republi- can Party." The former were called, by the latter, the Administration party, and were in turn called, by their opponents, " Jacksonites."
The National Republican party had for its leaders, in New Castle County, Kensey Johns Jr., afterwards for many years Chancellor of the State, John J. Milligan and Dr. Arnold Naudain, men of ability and popularity, then in the early prime of their manhood ; in Kent it was led by John M. Clayton, a young man scarcely more than 30 years old but who, with a splendid and imposing presence, combined the most winning manners, towering intellect and a marvelous knowledge of human nature.
The writer remembers an amusing circum- stance which occurred on the Green, in Dover, at the time of the division of the forces of the old Democrats, between the Adams and Jack- son parties. A gentleman named Coombe, residing in Smyrna, had long harbored a dis- like against a fellow Democrat in Dover, named Abel Harris. While the two lines were drawn out across the square from the State House to the old Farmers' Bank, the one line taking position for Jackson and the other for Adams, the Smyrna Democrat was observed by old Doctor John Adams, of Dover, who had been a leading democrat, to be searching up and down both lines without taking his stand with either, and on being asked the reason why he did not stand in with one or the other, he replied that he was wait- ing to ascertain " where Abe Harris had taken his stand, as he was determined to take the other side ;" and so he did ; and unto the day of his death he lived an ardent Adams man and died in the Whig faith.
The contest at the general election in Dela- ware, in 1827, was intensely bitter, and was even more so in the presidential election in 1828. The young leader of the Administration party-for so John M. Clayton was at once acknowledged-though he had never, until 1827, taken any active part in politics, with his allies above named, handled the forces of the Administration, or the American Republi- can party, with magnificent skill, and the re- sult both years was a triumph for Mr. Adams in Delaware, though General Jackson was elected President in 1828 by an overwhelming majority, both in the electoral college and on the popular vote. The two parties continued to bear the names of "Republican" and "American Republican," respectively, until shortly after the veto of the United States Bank Charter by General Jackson, and various other acts of alleged usurpation by the old
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hero, the almost kingly power which his oppo- Representatives. The mode of electing a nents charged him with assuming, suggested : United States Senator had not then been pre- to them the changing of their party name and taking that of "Whig" under which their fathers had fought against the usurpations and
scribed by the Congress of the United States, but there was a law on the State Statute-book which provided that such elections should be tyranny of George III. About the same time by joint ballot of the two Houses of the Gen- the Jackson or Republican party dropped the eral Assembly. The Democratic Senate re- fused to obey this law, knowing that as there was a majority of only one for the democrats in that body, while the whigs had a majority of two or three in the lower house, the result would be the election of a whig to the United States Senate. As a consequence the State was only represented in the Senate chamber by one member for the succeeding two years. latter name and assumed that of the " Demo- cratic" party, and by that name has continued down to the present time. The Jackson party of Delaware, however, was slow to accept the change, especially in the two lower counties, and even as late as 1840, they frequently called themselves the Van Buren party, and the Re- publican party, while owing to the circumstance which occurred at a Democratic meeting in New York, the whigs dubbed them with the sobriquet of the Locofoco party. It happened in this wise ; at a meeting held by the demo- crats at night in one of the public buildings, the discordant elements were about to come to blows, when somebody turned off the gas, and instantly hundreds of locofoco matches were set off all over the room and kept burn- ing till the gas was turned on again. The fact that so many democrats were in the habit of carrying matches in their pockets thus gave rise to a nickname, which stuck on the party for a quarter of a century, and indeed still continues to cling to it.
The campaign of 1828 resulted in a great victory for the old hero of New Orleans throughout the country ; but in Delaware the administration or American Republican party led by Mr. Clayton was triumphant, and as an acknowledgment of his eminent services and ability, the Legislature elected him to the Sen- ate of the United States, although he had scarcely reached the age required by the con- stitution as one of the qualifications for a mem- ber of that body. He at once took rank with Clay and Webster as one of the great leaders of his party. For an uninterrupted period of ten years he held his party in the ascendant in the State until in 1838 while he occupied the position of its Chief Justice and could not take part in political strife, when some discon tented whigs in Sussex made up a Reform party and elected their ticket in that county. A majority of the Reform members joined the Democrats of New Castle county and thus gave them control of the State Senate, the whigs still having control of the House of
In 1840 the hard times throughout the whole country, the suspension of specie payments, and the unpopularity of Mr. Van Buren, then Presi- dent, and a candidate for re-election, produced a political tornado, which swept the country from Maine to Louisiana, only seven States out of the twenty-five voting for Van Buren, and the others, including Delaware, voting for Harrison and Tyler. No prior political cam- paign had ever witnessed a tithe of the ex- citement of that of 1840. It was opened in Delaware on the 3rd of March, at Dover, by an immense mass meeting, and was kept up with increasing spirit till the night of the election on the first Tuesday in November, when the whole whig ticket was elected in all the counties; New Castle for the first time giving a whig majority. The majority in the State reached upward of a thousand votes out of a total of only about 10,000. From one end of the country to the other, and from one end of this State to the other, the people for six or eight months had been wild with enthusiam for "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," as the whig candidates had been called in the songs and speeches of the campaign. Early in May a young men's ratification meeting was held in Baltimore, which was said to have been at- tended by 100,000 people from the whole country, not a single State being unrepre- sented. One of Mr. Van Buren's organs early in the canvass had denounced Gen. Harrison, the hero of the terrible Indian battle of Tip- pecanoe, as a weak and womanly old gentle- man, totally unfit for the Presidency, and had recommended that he be left to remain at home in his log cabin at North Bend, Ohio, to regale himself with a barrel of hard cider, and
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his corned hominy and raccoon meat. Im- [ by Baltimore, the Banner Whig Hundred of the State.
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mediately a paper was started in Baltimore and New York called the "The Log Cabin Advocate," and the changes were rung from the Atlantic to the Mississippi in favor of the log cabin candidate. Thousands of log cabins were built all over the country decorated with barrels of hard cider, and strings of herrings outside, with raccoons disporting themselves on the roof and chimneys ; these were set on wheels and figured in all the processions, some of which were often several miles long, consisting of carriages, wagons, carts and vehicles of every kind, and hundreds of men, young and old, mounted on horseback and always accompanied by brass-bands and choirs of singers. Hard cider was dealt out in gourds and tin cups all along the line, and song-books with their "yaller kivers " as they were called, were vade-mecums with almost every young whig in the State, and many of the older ones, also. Meetings at night were held in mammoth log cabins erected for the purpose, and there was scarcely a day during the campaign in which the groves were not made to resound with the melody of campaign songs and the eloquence of political orators. For the first time in this State the women came in crowds to swell the throngs at politi- cal gatherings. Even old ladies of three score years were not unfrequently seen comfortably seated in the log cabins drawn by horses, and sometimes, even by men, in the processions. The song-singing and log cabin processions were at first and for several months met by ridicule from the democratic press and speakers; but towards the close they, too, attempted, feebly, very feebly; however, to get up a little music and song-singing, but there was no spirit in it, and their ballads and bands were shelved before the campaign ended.
At the Baltimore Convention there was a mammoth ball brought from the remote west- ern county of Maryland, and offered by the young men as a present to the whigs of that State which should show the largest delegation to the convention. Delaware won the ball, some 15 or 20 feet in diameter, and it was rolled all the way from Baltimore to Wil- mington, and afterward rolled from Wil- mington along with the log cabins and cider barrels, all over the State, and finally was carried off, after the election in November,
In 1842, Mr. Tyler having succeeded to the Presidency by reason of the death of General Harrison, undertook to set up a Tyler party to re-elect him to another term. That weakened the whig party considerably in Delaware, but it pulled through successfully, and in 1844 went largely for Mr. Clay, the whig candidate for President, and Mr. Clayton was again elected to the Senate of the United States to succeed Hon. Richard H. Bayard, who had become a whig after the veto of the United States Bank Bill, and filled one term in the Senate, but failed to be re-elected in 1839 by reason of the Reform movement in Sussex County and the action of the Senate of the State in refusing to go into joint ballot as above stated. The State then became represented in the National Senate by two cousins, John M. and Thomas Clayton. In 1846 the whig party was again successful in electing a majority of the Legis- lature, but Mr. Tharp, the democratic candi- date for Governor, was elected by a small majority, and again in 1848 Delaware voted for Gen. Taylor who was the whig candidate for President, and elected a majority of the whig candidates for the Legislature and the Repre- sentative in Congress. In 1850 a small party was organized by the advocates of Legislation for the prohibition of the sale of intoxicating liquors. This party, which though compar- atively very small in numbers, nominated a candidate for Governor, Mr. Thomas Lock- wood of Frederica, Kent County, who had always before then been a warm and decided democrat ; and Doctor Waite, of New Castle county, was also selected as its candidate for Congress. Most of the whigs who had joined it remained true to their pledges to support this ticket, but the large majority of the dem- ocrats who professed to operate with it could not withstand the temptation to go back to their old love, and the result was the defeat of the whig candidates for Governor and Con- gressman, although by very small majorities, that of Mr. Ross the Democratic governor candidate having only about 20 votes, and that of Mr. Riddle the candidate for Congress not much more. The Temperance party also aided the election of a majority of democrats on the Legislative ticket. For the first time in the history of the two parties the democrats
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had now control of both the Executive and | ocratic member of the Senate, but a life long Legislative Departments of the State Govern- ment and the Representative in Congress, and one democratic United States Senator, James A. Bayard, the father of the present Senator, Thos. F. Bayard.
In 1852 Mr. Clayton, who had withdrawn from active participation in politics since his retirement from the office of Secretary of State on the death of President Taylor in 1850,again came to the front of the Whig party and took the leadership. The democratic Legislature had provided by law for the holding of a con- vention to amend the Constitution of the State. The mode provided for in the law was different from that recommended in the con- stitution of 1831 which was largely made by Mr. Clayton. He opposed the holding of a convention, unless called in the manner recom- mended in the constitution of 1831, and fought the democratic party on that issue. The whigs succeeded in electing to the House of Representatives a majority of three (3) in that body, but in consequence of the holding over of six members of the Senate, the democrats had a majority of one in that branch. Mr.Clay- ton was named in the caucus of the whigs as their candidate for United States Senator, but as had happened fourteen years before, the democratic majority in the State Senate re- fused for several weeks to go into joint ballot. Sometime during the month of January, 1853, however, a most virulent and unjustifiable personal attack was made upon Clayton on the floor of the United States Senate by Gen. Cass, Stephen A. Douglass and Mason of Vir- ginia, charging him with duplicity towards his own government and a cowardly truckling to Great Britain, in the negotiation of what has passed into celebrity and been known as the Clayton-Bulwer treaty ; negotiated ostensi- bly for the purpose of giving the protection of the two most powerful nations on earth to a canal which an American Company had ob- tained(from Nicaragua,) the privilege of cutting between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans ; but really, also, more for the purpose of compell- ing England to abandon her protectorate over the Mosquito Indians, and her encroachments under that pretext upon the territory of the weak republics of Central America. When the speeches of Messrs. Cass, Douglass and Mason had been published, John Sorden, Esq., a dem-
personal friend of Mr. Clayton, openly avowed his intention , to go into joint ballot, and to vote for him if necessary, that he might go back and defend himself. The dead-lock was thus broken and Mr. Clayton took his seat at the extra session called by President Pierce upon his inauguration. How he achieved his triumphant vindication has passed into history.
The campaign of 1852 was the last in which the whig party engaged in this State or in the nation. Gen. Winfield Scott, its candidate for the Presidency, had only carried four out of the thirty-one States then in the Union. Del- aware was not one of those four. They were Vermont, Massachusetts, Maryland and Ken- tucky.
In 1854, a new organization was built upon the ruins of the Whig party. It started with se- cret societies called Know Nothings which were gotton up all over the country and of course in Delaware. In these lodges most of the old whigs were gathered with large numbers of democrats. The principles of the party were opposition to foreign influence, and opposition to the influence of the Catholic Church in political affairs expressed in their watchword, "Place only Native Americans on guard." These affiliated societies very soon became crystallized with what was afterwards called "The American Party." It was very success- ful in this State in the campaign of 1854, electing its entire ticket throughout the State by an aggregate majority of about 1000 votes. It only survived the one campaign in any of the States, but it might have achieved an- other victory in Delaware in 1856 but for the passage of a prohibitory liquor law by the Legislature in 1855, the effect of which was so paralyzing to the party that in 1856 its candi- dates were beaten by a majority aggregating in the State about 2000 out of about 14,000 votes.
In the Northern States the action of Mr. Pierce's administration in attempting to force slavery into the newly organized territories of Kansas and Nebraska, led to great discontent among the democrats, a great many of whom were opposed to the planting of that institution on free soil. In 1856 the Republican party was organized by the old whigs mainly, but with quite a large proportion of democrats-in fact it embraced the entire free soil demo-
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cracy who had voted against General Cass in ! lass. Those democrats who nominated Breck- IS48, with many other new converts. In Dela- enridge, made up that wing which was in favor ware, however, it could scarcely be said to have had at that day any organized existence. It placed in nomination for the presidency Col. John C. Fremont. The democrats nominated James Buchanan, and the odds and ends of the old whig party and its successor, the Ameri- can party, met in Baltimore and nominated Millard Fillmore as the candidate of the old Whig and American parties. The fight in Delaware during this campaign was, as has been shown, completely disastrous to the American party, and the republicans who sup- ported the state and county candidates nomi- nated by the Americans, only cast 305 votes in the entire State for Mr. Fremont. The American and Republican parties were buried ; the former not to rise again probably in the present century, possibly never. of Free Trade and the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court of the United States which had declared that "the negro had no rights which the white man was bound to re- spect;" that he was a mere chattel and that his master had the right to carry him into any territory or state in the Union, without for- feiting his right of property in him. The sup- porters of Douglass were for squatter sover- eignty-allowing the settlers in the territories to decide for themselves whether they would tolerate theinstitution of slavery; the disciples of Bell went for the Union, and Constitution as it was, and for the enforcement of the laws- meaning the enforcement of the fugitive slave law and the Dred Scott decision-differing from the Breckenridge party only on the sub- ject of protection to American Industry and some minor measures, while the republicans advocated such legislation as would confine the institution of slavery strictly to those states where it already existed, and free discus- sion upon the question of the gradual but final extinction of slavery. The People's party in Delaware had also agreed among themselves to support the same state and county ticket, with the privilege to each individual to support Lincoln and Hamlin, or Bell and Everett, as they might individually prefer. The Breck- enridge party nominated Benjamin T. Biggs, of New Castle county, for Congress, the Douglass men nominated Elias Reed, of Kent, and the People's party nominated George P. Fisher, of Kent. In the midst of the cam- paign a small portion of the Bell-Everett wing of the People's party split off from the rest with the view of making sure the defeat of Fisher by nominating another candidate, but not being able to find one who was dis- posed to run on that basis, the effort proved a failure and Fisher was elected by a plurality of some two hundred and fifty votes.
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