Union Party (United States, 1850)

This article is about the 1850s political party in the Lower South. For other uses, see Unionist Party.

The Union Party was a proslavery, unionist political party in the United States during the early 1850s. It was one of two main political parties in the slave states of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, alongside the Southern Rights Party. The Georgia affiliate was known as the Constitutional Union Party. The party was organized to support the Compromise of 1850. While some figures such as Daniel Webster predicted a sweeping political realignment in which the Union Party would unite all those in favor of the Compromise measures, no national organization ever emerged. The party disbanded following acceptance of the Compromise by the Southern Rights leaders, with most former Unionists returning to their previous partisan allegiances.^[1]

Union Party
Other name	Constitutional Union Party (GA)
Leaders	Jeremiah Clemens (AL) Howell Cobb (GA) Alexander H. Stephens (GA) Robert Toombs (GA) Henry S. Foote (MS)
Founded	1850; 175 years ago (1850)
Dissolved	1853; 172 years ago (1853)
Ideology	Anti-abolitionism Conditional Unionism Pro-Compromise Proslavery
Politics of the United States Political parties Elections

Events following the Mexican–American War fueled rising tensions between the free and slave states, as proslavery fire-eaters threatened secession in response to the Wilmot Proviso. The crisis fractured the existing party system and produced an alliance between unionist Democrats and Whigs in the Lower South who sought to avert a civil war and defeat their intrapartisan rivals. Unionists were especially active in the 1851 elections, when Union parties elected 14 members to the U.S. House of Representatives and won governorships in Georgia and Mississippi.^[2] The acquiescence of the Southern Rights leaders to the Compromise after 1851 removed the need for a dedicated Union Party. Many Whigs who had supported the Union Party movement subsequently joined the Democratic Party, while most Union Democrats returned to their former political allegiance.^[3]

In states where Union parties were organized, Unionists supported preservation of the federal Union and opposed an independent Southern Confederacy. Ardently proslavery, they rejected secession as unconstitutional and ruinous to the interests of the slave states.^[4] Instead, they advocated a policy of conditional unionism wherein the slave states would remain loyal to the national government so long as the free states agreed to abide by the Compromise and abstain from any future attacks on slavery. While they opposed immediate secession, Unionists did not rule it out in the future should Southern demands go unheeded.^[5] Many who had been Unionists in the 1850s would go on to serve in the Confederate government during the Civil War, including Alexander H. Stephens, who served as vice president of the Confederacy from 1861 to 1865.^[6]

Background

Compromise of 1850

Main article: Compromise of 1850

Mapa de los Estados Unidos de Méjico (1847) showing territories ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gained the provinces of Alta California and Nuevo México for the United States and opened the question of slavery's extension into the territory. Prior to ratification, the U.S. representative from Pennsylvania David Wilmot introduced an amendment providing as a "fundamental condition" of annexation that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist in any part" of the Mexican Cession. The so-called Wilmot Proviso passed the House of Representatives but stalled in the Senate, where it became a serious point of contention between the free and slave states. The Proviso was a major issue in the 1848 United States presidential election, resulting in a split between the anti-extensionist Barnburner Democrats and the dominant faction of the Democratic Party, which advocated popular sovereignty. The Barnburners joined antislavery Conscience Whigs and abolitionists in the Free Soil Party, which polled 14 percent of the votes in the free states. The breach in the Democratic ranks allowed the Whig candidate, major general Zachary Taylor, to carry the critical state of New York and win the election while maintaining a noncommittal position on the territorial question.^[7]

Taylor planned to finesse the Proviso by granting immediate statehood to California and New Mexico, thus bypassing the territorial stage and avoiding the need for the national government to assume responsibility for slavery's exclusion from or expansion into the Southwest, but died before Congress could come to any determination.^[8] A compromise package introduced by the senator from Kentucky Henry Clay was defeated by the combined votes of Northern free-soilers and Southern fire-eaters. Following weeks of deadlock, the Compromise was shepherded through Congress item-by-item, with border state Whigs joining the Northern members to admit California as a free state, abolish the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and settle the boundary dispute between Texas and New Mexico, while Northern Democrats joined the Southern members to pass the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and organize the Utah and New Mexico territories without restrictions on slavery. Taylor's successor as president, Millard Fillmore, declared the Compromise measures a "final settlement" of sectional issues and committed U.S. soldiers to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.^[9]

Clay's original omnibus proposal consisted of eight planks, subsequently enacted as individual items.

1. Admission of California as a free state;
2. Organization of the Utah and New Mexico territories without restrictions on slavery;
3. Settlement of the Texas-New Mexico boundary dispute in favor of New Mexico;
4. U.S. assumption of debts contracted by the Republic of Texas prior to annexation;
5. Abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia;
6. Protection of slavery in the District of Columbia;
7. Strengthened U.S. enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Clause;
8. Denial of U.S. authority to regulate the interstate slave trade.^[10]

Whig Party

Main article: Whig Party (United States)

Whig Mass Meeting on Boston Common, Sept. 19th 1844

The Whig Party was a conservative political party in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century.^[11] It was the main opposition to the Democratic Party from 1834 until 1854.^[12] Following the party's unexpected defeat in the 1844 United States presidential election, some voices within the party called for a political realignment in which Whigs would join dissident Democrats in a new party. Taylor's nomination and election were seen as a step in this direction, in light of the general's perceived popularity with nativists, Democrats, and independent voters. The allocation of patronage in the new administration was indeed intended to build up a new "Taylor party" that would supplant the Whigs as the major opposition to the Democrats. Catastrophic Whigs losses in state and congressional elections held in the fall of 1849 put an end to the Taylor movement but not to discussion of a possible realignment among Whigs of various stripes.^[13]

Following his inauguration, Fillmore wrote to Hamilton Fish that he intended "to save the country [and] to save the Whig party, if possible." The president's strenuous support for the Compromise measures exacerbated divisions among Northern Whigs, however; intensified intraparty conflict led some pro-Compromise Whigs to conclude with Webster that "a new arrangement of Parties is unavoidable." During the winter of 1850–51, they increasingly looked to an alliance with pro-Compromise Democrats and "the creation of a great National Union Party" in answer to the problems presented by the sectional crisis.^[14]

History

Union Party movement, 1850–51

Alexander H. Stephens, leader of the Georgia Constitutional Unionists in Congress

Following the congressional vote on the Compromise, the freshman U.S. senator from Ohio Salmon P. Chase wrote that "the question of slavery in the territories has been avoided. It has not been settled." Fillmore's insistence that the measures constituted a "final settlement" of sectional issues conflicted with the reality that a passionate minority of free-soilers and fire-eaters still opposed the Compromise. The ad hoc majority assembled for each of the Compromise measures disguised the fact that most members had voted against any concessions by their section; in both houses, fewer than one-third of the members had supported the omnibus package.^[15] Opposition to the Compromise cut across party lines and divided individual state organizations. These circumstances encouraged pro-Compromise politicians in certain states to form bipartisan Union coalitions predicated on unconditional acceptance of the Compromise.^[16]

Several prominent pro-Compromise Whigs endorsed the Union Party movement during the fall of 1850, including Clay, Webster, and John P. Kennedy. In contrast, most Democrats denied the need for a new party. The junior U.S. senator from Illinois Stephen Douglass, who managed the passage of the Compromise measures through the Senate, said, "the Democratic party is as good a Union party as I want." One notable exception was the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Howell Cobb, a Democrat from the unionist upcountry of Northern Georgia whom local circumstances compelled to seek an alliance with pro-Compromise Whigs. During the summer of 1850, Cobb's allies joined the majority Whig faction led by Alexander H. Stephens and Robert Toombs in an ad hoc Union coalition that became the basis for the state's Constitutional Union Party. Informed partly by ideology, Stephens and Toombs also hoped to displace the rival Whig faction led by the senior U.S. senator from Georgia John M. Berrien, who had gravitated into the Southern Rights orbit.^[17]

The new party movement experienced modest success in Massachusetts and New York City, where a Union ticket was circulated during the 1850 New York state election. The strongest performances by the Union Party, however, were in the Lower South. In Alabama and Mississippi, as in Georgia, upcountry Democrats joined most Whigs in Union parties that contested elections held in 1851. In Mississippi, the Union U.S. senator Henry S. Foote defeated the Southern Rights leader Jefferson Davis in the gubernatorial election; Cobb was elected governor in Georgia, while Unionists won majorities in both chambers of the Alabama Legislature. Fourteen Unionists were elected to the 32nd United States Congress, all from the Lower South. The results of the elections encouraged Unionists like Alabama's Henry W. Hilliard to believe that the Union Party could be a vehicle for their national political ambitions.^[18]

Attempts to establish a new national party, however, came to little. When Stephens circulated a round-robin letter in March 1851 as a test of Union Party sentiment in Congress, most Whig and Democratic members declined to leave their old parties. A Union National Convention proposed for February 22 failed to materialize. Webster's efforts to organize the Union Party in the free states failed decisively, resulting in debilitating Whig losses across the Upper North. Meanwhile, Fillmore's pro-Compromise stance, together with strong showings for Southern Whigs in elections held in 1851, diminished demand for a new pro-Compromise party. By coopting the Union platform while emphasizing traditional Whig economic policies, the president hoped to position Whigs to carry the slave states in the 1852 United States elections.^[19]

Presidential campaign, 1852

Daniel Webster, Union Party presidential candidate in 1852

Union Party activity in the 1852 United States presidential election centered around Webster, who marketed himself to Whigs and Unionists as a potential presidential candidate. In a contentious scene at the 1852 Whig National Convention, Webster's supporters blocked Fillmore's nomination for three days before the exhausted delegates at last selected the aged major general Winfield Scott. Undaunted, Webster's Union Party allies engineered his nomination by a faction of the Georgia Constitutional Union Party. Furious at Scott's nomination, conservative Whigs determined to humiliate their intraparty rivals joined the Webster movement. Independent Webster tickets were nominated in Georgia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. In the free states, the Webster forces were supplemented by supporters of the Native American Party, who hoped to secure Pierce's election by diverting nativist Whig voters to Webster.^[20]

Webster, however, was by this time ambivalent to his election; privately, he advised friends to vote for the Democratic candidate, Franklin Pierce. The candidate's indecision reflected contradictory impulses that would lead to the decline of the Constitutional Union Party in Georgia. The Georgia Unionists had split between Union Democrats and Union Whigs, each of whom held out hope that the nomination of a pro-Compromise candidate would pave the way for reconciliation with their former parties. Following the 1852 Democratic National Convention, Union Democrats in the Constitutional Union state convention endorsed Pierce. Refusing to support the national Democratic candidates, Union Whigs held their own convention at Macon, Georgia that nominated Webster.^[21] The Union Democrats subsequently withdrew their candidates in favor of the Pierce ticket nominated by the Southern Rights Party and declared the Constitutional Union Party dissolved; a minority who still opposed merger with the Southern Rights men held their own convention and nominated a separate ticket pledged to Pierce. Thus, voters in Georgia had the choice of four presidential tickets in 1852: the Southern Rights and Union Democratic tickets, each pledged to Pierce; the Union Whig ticket; and the regular Whig ticket pledged to Scott.^[22]

Webster's death one week prior to the election brought an abrupt end to his candidacy.^[23] He received 7,378 votes posthumously in Georgia, Massachusetts, and New York; Jacob Broom, the substitute Native American candidate, polled a further 2,415 votes in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The Unionist showing in Georgia accounted for 71 percent of Webster's national total.^[24] Two Union Democrats and one Union Whig were elected to Congress from Alabama; no other states returned Unionists to the 33rd United States Congress.^[25]

Electoral history

Presidential tickets

Election	Ticket		Electoral results
	Presidential nominee	Running mate	Popular vote	Electoral votes	Ranking
1852	Daniel Webster[a]	Charles J. Jenkins	0.23%	0 / 296	4