1852 United States presidential election

The Southern Rights Party was an offshoot of the Democratic party in several Southern states which advocated secession from the Union, electing a number of Congressmen and holding referendums on secession in a number of southern states, none of which were successful.

It was unclear in early 1852 if the Party would contest the presidential election. When the Alabama state convention was held in early March, only nine counties were represented. The party decided to see who was nominated by the two major national parties and support one of them if possible. When Georgia held its state convention, it acted as the state Democratic Party and sent delegates to the national convention.

After the Democratic National Convention, the Party was not sure that it wanted to support Franklin Pierce and William R. King, the Democratic nominees. Alabama held a state convention from July 13–15 and discussed at length the options of running a separate ticket or supporting Pierce and King. The convention was unable to arrive at a decision, deciding to appoint a committee to review the positions of Scott/Graham and Pierce/King with the option of calling a "national" convention if the two major-party tickets appeared deficient. The committee took its time reviewing the positions of Pierce and Scott, finally deciding on August 25 to call a convention for a Southern Rights Party ticket.

The convention assembled in Montgomery, Alabama, with 62 delegates present, a committee to recommend a ticket being appointed while the delegates listened to speeches in the interim. The committee eventually recommended former senator George Troup of Georgia for president, and former Governor John Quitman of Mississippi for vice president; they were unanimously nominated.

The two nominees accepted their nominations soon after the convention, which was held rather late in the season. Troup stated in a letter, dated September 27 and printed in the New York Times on October 16, that he had planned to vote for Pierce/King and had always wholeheartedly supported William R.D. King. He indicated in the letter that he preferred to decline the honor, as he was rather ill at the time and feared that he would die before the election. The Party's executive committee edited the letter to excise those portions which indicated that Troup preferred to decline, a fact which was revealed after the election.

Liberty Party nomination

The

The Whigs' platform was almost indistinguishable from that of the Democrats, reducing the campaign to a contest between the personalities of the two candidates. The lack of clearcut issues between the two parties helped drive voter turnout down to its lowest level since 1836. The decline was further exacerbated by Scott's antislavery reputation, which decimated the Southern Whig vote at the same time as the pro-slavery Whig platform undermined the Northern Whig vote. After the Compromise of 1850 was passed, many of the southern Whig Party members broke with the party's key figure, Henry Clay.^[8]

Finally, Scott's status as a war hero was somewhat offset by the fact that Pierce was himself a Mexican–American War brigadier general.

The Democrats adopted the slogan: The Whigs we Polked in forty-four, We'll Pierce in fifty-two, playing on the names of Pierce and former President James K. Polk.^[9]

Just nine days before the election, Webster died, causing many Union state parties to remove their slates of electors. The Union ticket appeared on the ballot in Georgia and Massachusetts, however.

Results

When American voters went to the polls, Pierce won the electoral college in a landslide; Scott won only the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Massachusetts, and Vermont, while the Free Soil vote collapsed to less than half of what Martin Van Buren had earned in the previous election, with the party taking no states. The fact that Daniel Webster received a substantial share of the vote in Georgia and Massachusetts, even though he was dead, shows how disenchanted voters were with the two main candidates.

In the popular vote, while Pierce outpolled Scott by 220,000 votes, 17 states were decided by less than 10%, and eight by less than 5%. A shift of 69,000 votes to Scott in Delaware, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania would have left the electoral college in a 148–148 tie, forcing a contingent election in the House of Representatives.

As a result of the devastating defeat and the growing tensions within the party between pro-slavery Southerners and anti-slavery Northerners, the Whig Party quickly fell apart after the 1852 election and ceased to exist. Some Southern Whigs would join the Democratic Party, and many Northern Whigs would help to form the new Republican Party in 1854.

Some Whigs in both sections would support the so-called "

The Southern Rights Party effectively collapsed following the election, attaining only five percent of the vote in Alabama, and a few hundred in its nominee's home state of Georgia. It would elect a number of Congressmen in 1853, but they would rejoin the Democratic Party upon taking their seats in Congress.

Kentucky and Tennessee were the only slave states that Scott won. None of the future Confederate states elected governors in the 1852 and 1853 gubernatorial elections and only Whigs only won 14 of the south's 65 seats in the U.S. House. The party held no state legislatures in the south except for in Tennessee.^[5] The Democrats, who carried all but two northern states, would see a decline in the north following the 1854 elections due to controversy around the Kansas–Nebraska Act. They lost control of all free state legislatures except for two and their seats in the U.S. House from the north fell from 93 to 23.^[10]

Source (Popular Vote): Leip, David. "1852 Presidential Election Results". Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections. Retrieved July 27, 2005.
Source (Electoral Vote): "Electoral College Box Scores 1789–1996". National Archives and Records Administration. Retrieved July 31, 2005.

• The leading candidates for vice president were both born in North Carolina and in fact both attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, albeit two decades apart. While there, they were members of opposing debate societies: the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies. Both also served in North Carolina politics: King was a representative from North Carolina before he moved to Alabama, and Graham was a governor of North Carolina.

Records

This was the last election in which the Democrats won Michigan until 1932,^[d] the last in which the Democrats won Iowa, Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio^[e] or Rhode Island until 1912, the last in which the Democrats won Wisconsin until 1892, the last in which the Democrats won Connecticut until 1876 and the last in which the Democrats won New York until 1868. It was, however, the last election in which the Democrats' chief opponent won Kentucky until 1896,^[f][11] and the last until 1928 in which the Democrats' opponent obtained an absolute majority in Kentucky.

Geography of results

Cartographic gallery

• 
  Map of presidential election results by county
• 
  Map of Democratic presidential election results by county
• 
  Map of Whig presidential election results by county
• 
  Map of Free Soil presidential election results by county
• 
  Map of "Other" presidential election results by county

Results by state

Source: Data from Walter Dean Burnham, Presidential ballots, 1836–1892 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955) pp 247–57.

States that flipped from Whig to Democratic

• Connecticut
• Delaware
• Georgia
• Florida
• Louisiana
• Maryland
• New Jersey
• New York
• North Carolina
• Pennsylvania
• Rhode Island

Close states

States where the margin of victory was under 1%:

1. Delaware 0.19% (25 votes)
2. North Carolina 0.90% (735 votes)

States where the margin of victory was under 5%:

1. Tennessee 1.46% (1,686 votes)
2. Kentucky 3.12% (3,934 votes)
3. Louisiana 3.88% (1,392 votes)
4. Connecticut 4.23% (2,890 votes)
5. Ohio 4.65% (16,410 votes)

States where the margin of victory was under 10%:

1. Pennsylvania 5.02% (19,458 votes)
2. New York 5.21% (27,201 votes) (tipping point state)
3. Iowa 5.39% (1,907 votes)
4. California 6.19% (4,749 votes)
5. Massachusetts 6.38% (8,114 votes)
6. Rhode Island 6.52% (1,109 votes)
7. Maryland 6.59% (4,945 votes)
8. New Jersey 6.91% (5,749 votes)
9. Indiana 7.88% (14,439 votes)
10. Michigan 9.62% (7,982 votes)

Electoral college selection

See also

• History of the United States (1849–65)
• Inauguration of Franklin Pierce
• Second Party System
• 1852–53 United States House of Representatives elections
• 1852–53 United States Senate elections

Notes

References

1. ^ "National General Election VEP Turnout Rates, 1789-Present". United States Election Project. CQ Press.
2. ^ ^{a b c d e} National Party Conventions, 1831-1976. Congressional Quarterly. 1979.
3. ^ William DeGregorio, The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents, Gramercy 1997
4. ^ Gienapp, William (1984). The Whig Party, the Compromise of 1850, and the Nomination of Winfield Scott. Presidential Studies Quarterly.
5. ^ ^{a b} McPherson 1988, p. 117.
6. ^ Charles O. Paullin, "The National Ticket of Broom and Coates, 1852." American Historical Review 25.4 (1920): 689–691. online
7. ^ Dubin, Michael J. (2002). United States Presidential Elections, 1788-1860. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company. p. 128.
8. National Archives
   .
9. ^ "Democratic Rallying Song for 1852". The Mountain Sentinel. Ebensburg, PA: 1. October 7, 1852.
10. ^ McPherson 1988, p. 129-130.
11. ^ Counting the Votes; Kentucky Archived November 20, 2017, at the Wayback Machine

Works cited

• ISBN 9780195038637
  .

Further reading

• Blue, Frederick J. The Free Soilers: Third-Party Politics, 1848-54 (U of Illinois Press, 1973).
• Chambers, William N., and Philip C. Davis. "Party, Competition, and Mass Participation: The Case of the Democratizing Party System, 1824–1852." in The history of American electoral behavior (Princeton University Press, reprinted 2015) pp. 174–197.
• Foner, Eric. "Politics and prejudice: The Free Soil party and the Negro, 1849–1852." Journal of Negro History 50.4 (1965): 239–256. online
• Gara, Larry. The Presidency of Franklin Pierce (UP of Kansas, 1991).
• Gienapp, William E. The origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (Oxford UP, 1987).
• Holt, Michael F. The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War. (Oxford University Press, 1999).
• Holt, Michael F. Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857 (Macmillan, 2010).
• Marshall, Schuyler C. "The Free Democratic Convention of 1852." Pennsylvania History 22.2 (1955): 146–167. online
• Morrison, Michael A. "The Election of 1852." American Presidential Campaigns and Elections (Routledge, 2020) pp. 349–366.
• Nevins, Allan. Ordeal of the Union: A house dividing, 1852–1857. Vol. 2 (1947) pp 3–42.
• Nichols, Roy Franklin. The Democratic Machine, 1850–1854 (1923) online
• Riddle, Wesley Allen. "Unrestraint Begets Calamity: The American Whig Review, 1845–1852." Humanitas 11.2 (1998). online
• Wilentz, Sean. The rise of American democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2006) pp 659–667.

States

• Baum, Dale. "Know-Nothingism and the Republican majority in Massachusetts: The political realignment of the 1850s." Journal of American History 64.4 (1978): 959–986. online
• Beeler, Dale. "The Election of 1852 in Indiana." Indiana Magazine of History (1915): 301–323. online
• Campbell, Randolph. "The Whig Party of Texas in the Elections of 1848 and 1852." Southwestern Historical Quarterly 73.1 (1969): 17–34. online
• Huston, James L. "The Illinois Political Realignment of 1844–1860: Revisiting the Analysis." Journal of the Civil War Era 1.4 (2011): 506–535. online
• Morrill, James R. "The Presidential Election of 1852: Death Knell of the Whig Party of North Carolina." North Carolina Historical Review 44.4 (1967): 342–359 online.
• Rosenberg, Morton M. "The Iowa Elections of 1852." Annals of Iowa 38.4 (1966). online
• Solomon, Irvin D. "The Grass Roots Appearance of a National Party: The Formation of the Republican Party in Erie, Pennsylvania, 1852–1856." Western Pennsylvania History (1983): 209–222. online
• Sweeney, Kevin. "Rum, Romanism, Representation, and Reform: Coalition Politics in Massachusetts, 1847–1853." Civil War History 22.2 (1976): 116–137.
• Walton, Brian G. "Arkansas Politics during the Compromise Crisis, 1848–1852." Arkansas Historical Quarterly 36.4 (1977): 307–337. online

Primary sources

• Chester, Edward W A guide to political platforms (1977) online
• Porter, Kirk H. and Donald Bruce Johnson, eds. National party platforms, 1840-1964 (1965) online 1840-1956

Web sites

• "A Historical Analysis of the Electoral College". The Green Papers. Retrieved September 17, 2005.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to United States presidential election, 1852.

• Presidential Election of 1852: A Resource Guide from the Library of Congress
• 1852 popular vote by counties
• 1852 state-by-state popular vote Archived May 17, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
• Election of 1852 in Counting the Votes Archived October 23, 2017, at the Wayback Machine