Alternative History

The United States presidential election of 1848 was the 16th quadrennial presidential election,

1844 US presidential election, 1848 (The United American Empire Of The World) 1852
United States presidential election, 1848
November 7, 1848
Lewis Cass 1848-1856 Zachary Taylor2 MVanBuren
Nominee Lewis Cass Zachary Taylor Martin Van Buren
Party Democratic Whig Free Soil
Home state Michigan Louisiana New York
Running mate William O. Butler Millard Fillmore Charles F. Adams
Electoral vote 163 127 0
States carried 15 15 0
Popular vote 1,361,393 1,223,460 291,501
Percentage 47.3% 42.5% 10.1%
United States presidential election 1848 map
Light Green represents Cass and Dark Blue represents Taylor
President before election
James K. Polk
Democrat
President elect
Lewis Cass
Democrat

held on Tuesday, November 7, 1848. It was won by Lewis Cass of the Whig Party, who ran against Zachary Taylor of the Democratic Party and former Vice President John C. Calhoun of the newly formed Free Soil Party. Incumbent President James K. Polk, having achieved all of his major objectives in one term and suffering from declining health, kept his promise not to seek re-election.

The contest was the first presidential election that took place on the same day in every state, and it was the first time that Election Day was statutorily a Tuesday.

The Whigs in 1846–47 had focused all their energies on condemning Polk's war policies. They had to reverse course quickly. In February 1848 Polk surprised everyone with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War and gave the United States vast new territories (including what are now the states of California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico). The Whigs in the Senate voted 2-1 to approve the treaty. Then, in the summer, the Whigs nominated the hero of the war, Zachary Taylor. While he did promise no more future wars, he did not condemn the Mexican-American War or criticize Polk, and the Whigs had to follow his lead. They shifted their attention to the new issue of whether slavery could be banned from the new territories.

The choice of Zachary Taylor was made almost out of desperation; he was not clearly committed to Whig principles, but he was popular for leading the war effort. The Democrats had a record of victory, prosperity, and the acquisition of both Oregon and the Southwest. It appeared almost certain that they would win unless the Whigs picked Taylor. Unfortunately despite their best efforts, the Whigs still lost to the election to the Democrats by 36 votes and would start to fall apart until disbanding in 1854.

Nominations[]

Whig Party nomination[]

Taylor Fillmore

Grand National Whig banner

Mexican-American War General Zachary Taylor of Louisiana, an attractive candidate because of his successes on the battlefield, but who had never voted in an election himself, was openly courted by both the Democratic and Whig parties. Taylor ultimately declared himself a Whig, and easily took their nomination, receiving 171 delegate votes to defeat Henry Clay, Winfield Scott, Daniel Webster and others. After Webster turned down the vice-presidential candidacy, Millard Fillmore received the party's nomination for vice-president, defeating—among others—Abbott Lawrence, a Massachusetts politician whose mild opposition to slavery led him to be dubbed a "Cotton Whig".

Democratic Party nomination[]

Former President Martin Van Buren once again sought the Democratic nomination, but Lewis Cass was nominated on the fourth ballot. Cass had served as Governor and Senator for Michigan, as well as Secretary of War under Andrew Jackson, and from 1836 to 1842 as ambassador to France. General William O. Butler was nominated to join Cass on the ticket, garnering 169 delegate votes to defeat five other candidates, including future Vice-President William R. King and future Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

1848DemocraticPoster

Cass/Butler campaign poster

The Democrats chose a platform that remained silent on slavery, and with Cass suspected of pro-slavery leanings, many anti-slavery Democrats walked out of the Baltimore convention to begin the Free Soil Party. Van Buren had burned for the nomination, but he had wanted it on a Free Soil platform. Neither his name nor his stand received any support at the Democratic convention.

Free Soil Party nomination[]

Free Soil campaign banner

Van Buren/Adams

The Free Soil Party, was organized for the 1848 election to oppose further expansion of slavery into the western territories. Much of its support came from disaffected anti-slavery Barnburner Democrats and Conscience Whigs, including former Vice President Martin Van Buren. The party was led by Salmon P. Chase and John Parker Hale and held its 1848 convention in Utica and Buffalo, New York. On June 22, Van Buren defeated Hale by a 154-129 delegate count to capture the Free Soil nomination, while Charles Francis Adams, whose father (John Quincy Adams) and grandfather (John Adams) had both served as president, was chosen as the vice-presidential nominee.

Van Buren knew that the Free Soilers had not the slightest chance of winning, rather that his candidacy would split the Democratic vote and throw the election to the Whigs. Bitter and aging, Van Buren did not care despite the fact his life had been built upon the rock of party solidarity and party regularity. He loathed Lewis Cass and the principle of popular sovereignty with equal intensity.

Liberty Party nomination[]

Despite their significant showing in the prior presidential election, certain events would conspire to remove the Liberty Party from political significance.

Initially, the nomination was to be decided in the fall of 1847 at a Convention in Buffalo, New York. There, Senator John P. Hale was nominated over Gerrit Smith, brother-in-law to the party's previous nominee James G. Birney. Leicester King, a former judge and state senator in Ohio, was nominated to be Hale's running mate. Anti-slavery Democrats and Whigs, disappointed with their respective nominees, would form a new movement in conjunction with members of the Liberty Party such as John Hale and Salmon Chase to form the Free Soil Party that summer. At this point, both Hale and King withdrew in favor of a Free Soil ticket led by former Vice President Martin Van Buren, and the great majority of members of the Liberty Party followed them into the new political party. A small faction refused to support Van Buren for the presidency, however. They held another convention in June 1848 as the "National Liberty Party." Gerrit Smith was nominated almost unanimously with Charles Foote, a religious minister from Michigan, as his running-mate.

Other nominations[]

The Native American Party, a precursor to the Know Nothings, which had split from the Whig Party in 1845, met in September 1847 in Philadelphia, where they nominated Zachary Taylor for president and Henry A. S. Dearborn of Massachusetts for vice-president. However, when the Whig Party nominated Taylor for the presidency with Millard Fillmore as his running mate the following year, this rendered his previous nomination moot and the Native American Party failed to make an alternate nomination.

Campaign[]

The campaign was fought without much enthusiasm, and practically without an issue. Neither of the two great parties made an effort to rally the people to the defense of any important principle.

Whig campaigners, who included Abraham Lincoln and Rutherford B. Hayes, talked up Taylor's "antiparty" opposition to the Jacksonian commitment to the spoils system and yellow-dog partisanship. In the South, they stressed that he was a Louisiana slaveholder, while in the North they highlighted his Whiggish willingness to defer to Congress on major issues (which he subsequently did not do).