1840 in Deep South

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Indeed, the Whigs were the party of choice for wealthy slaveholders not only in the lower South, but also the border states. Virginia is of course the obvious exception to this rule. I've talked before about river improvements, as Yankee alludes to, but it's so important to remember that before September 1862 the national conversation was not around whether slavery should continue to exist south of the Mason-Dixon line, but the many considerations (tariffs, access to foreign markets, the growth of the native-born slave population, the internal and Atlantic slave trades, and the never-ending need for land) that determined the profitability of slavery. When we think about the plater elite —who did not comprise the whole body of slaveholders or those who used slave labor, but those at the very top who lorded over huge plantations which in the Deep South produced mostly cotton, in the Carolinas rice and sugar, and in Virginia and Kentucky tobacco —this is a class whose livelihoods are predicated on their ability to replace aging and dying slaves and on their ability to export their produce to Northern and European markets. In the Virginian tidewater, with its easy access to the Atlantic Ocean, the main obstacle was the tariff —so the Virginian planter was a reliably Democratic constituency. In Kentucky, the easiest route is via the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. New Orleans was the port of departure not only for cotton bound for Europe, but also of the internal slave trade —which after 1807 was the only legal slave trade in the United States. In order to safely navigate the river, you need someone to clear the snags and sandbars that otherwise would wreck your boat and send insurance rates through the roof —no state wants to pay for a project that will benefit their freeloading neighbors, so you need the federal government to finance it, and they'll raise the necessary revenue with tariffs. Hence planters in Kentucky and the Mississippi River Valley were a reliable Whig constituency as late as 1860, when they voted in large numbers for John Bell. In the intervening two decades they backed Henry Clay against James K. Polk in the ever-so-close election of 1844 (and were vindicated when Polk vetoed the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1846), Taylor in '48 (who was himself just such a planter), and even turned out for Winfield Scott in what was otherwise a dismal performance for the Whigs in 1852.

Meanwhile, poor whites were a heavily Democratic constituency. They definitely weren't abolitionists or even remotely anti-slavery (though that didn't stop some abolitionists from seeing them as natural allies and trying to recruit them to the Republican party —more on that later), but they also didn't have a vested interest in the nationalizing economic policies of the Whigs. What use are roads and canals to a subsistence farmer with $200 to his name living up in the mountains away from any navigable rivers? He doesn't have a flatboat loaded with tobacco and hemp bound for New Orleans, but he does have to pay Whig taxes and the higher prices caused by Whig tariffs. He's not exactly friendly with the planters either, most of whom have gone to great pains to shut him out of the political process. This is where you get Union Military Governor Andrew Johnson, who hated blacks but hated the planters more and certainly wasn't going to go to war to protect their "property." When Lincoln died, a lot of Radical Republicans saw this class background and assumed they'd have a firm ally in Johnson —after all, we're all on the same side! Is it really surprising that these people were more likely (though still unlikely on the whole) to oppose a war that brought them no tangible gain, but which they overwhelmingly would be expected to fight?

So while we remember the Democrats as the pro-slavery party because of the 1850s, before then, on the issues that mattered, the Whigs were making the strongest case for the interests of large-scale planters. A lot of those clever moderates like Clay who loved to protest their revulsion with the peculiar institution, were actually very good about promoting the interests of slaveholders west of the Appalachians. In 1861, the constitution adopted by the Provisional Confederate Congress at Mobile upheld the 1807 prohibition against the Atlantic slave trade. Fifty years before, South Carolinian Federalist Charles C. Pinckney had vehemently opposed the measure; but since then, the country (and slavery) had spread West, and the internal slave trade —based on the Mississippi River —came to replace the Atlantic slave trade. So what in Jefferson's day had been regarded as an anti-slavery measure, now served to increase the cash value of slaves already in America and to enrich those who made their living carrying slaves up and down the Mississippi. The twin capitals of this trade? —none other than the good Whig cities of Lexington and New Orleans.

(This is not to say Southern Democrats were not pro-slavery —they definitely were —and while poor Southern whites' interests diverged from those of the plantation aristocracy in the 1840s, when push came to shove, they were ready to fight and die for the Confederacy. This isn't a case of an anti-slavery party and a pro-slavery party, this is the case of two regional pro-slavery parties, one representing large-scale planters and the other small-scale subsistence farmers.)

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Safest D states at the time
New Hampshire
Michigan
Alabama
Arkansas
Missouri
Illinois
Virginia


Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia went Whig 3/4 elections minimum, while Kentucky when 6/6 between 1832 and 1852.

How do you think South Carolina would have gone if it had a vote for President like other states?

Its hard to say. Though certainly Dem by the 1840's.

I am thinking it might have been firmly Whig in the 1830s and for the first half of the 1840s on basis of Jackson's response to the Nullifiers movement and the influence of the planter elite in the state.

Considering how restricted the franchise was in South Carolina, this seems likely —as Yankee notes, the Nullifiers were briefly part of the Whig coalition during this period. Of course, in a genuinely democratic election, South Carolinians —three in five of whom were slaves in 1860 —would have voted overwhelmingly for James G. Birney/Gerrit Smith.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Most of the nullifiers would have drifted away during the 1830s, whereas the State's Rights wing didn't start to bleed away until the mid 1840's, namely after what happened with President Tyler.

Drifted/bleed away from the Democrats to the Whigs or from the Whigs to the Democrats?

The latter. John Tyler's alienation from the Congressional Whig party was the trigger for States Rights' Whigs to begin drifting towards the Democrats, a process that culminated with Tyler's endorsement of Polk in the 1844 election.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Safest D states at the time
New Hampshire
Michigan
Alabama
Arkansas
Missouri
Illinois
Virginia


Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia went Whig 3/4 elections minimum, while Kentucky when 6/6 between 1832 and 1852.

Gotta point out that was mostly due to Henry Clay’s influence for Kentucky.

Yes, but Clay was successful in Kentucky politics because his program aligned with the interests of the powerful interests in his state. Andrew Jackson was very personally popular in Tennessee, but once he left office Tennessee did not continue to vote Democratic —indeed, it wouldn't support a Jacksonian for president again until 1856, only coming close when another favorite son (Polk) was on the ballot in 1844.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Weren’t the Nullifier/State’s Rights Whigs WINOs (for example, John Tyler vetoed re-establishing the National Bank)? In fact, weren’t they more Democratic than Jackson considering their objection to Jackson was Jackson enforcing a tariff?

I don't think that's a useful way to think about it. Remember that in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the First Party System, the Republicans split into two main camps: Democratic Republicans* who supported Andrew Jackson, and National Republicans who supported John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay. After Adams' defeat, the splintering of these big-tent coalitions produced a variety of smaller parties, broadly identified as either Jacksonian or Anti-Jacksonian; the latter camp included most National Republicans, as well as Anti-Masons, Nullifiers, and what was left of the Tertium Quids (conservative ex-Republicans concentrated in Virginia). These eventually coalesced to form the Whig party after 1834, it's name a reference to the English Whigs who had toppled the tyrant James II and their successors, the American Whigs of 1776. This branding was especially attractive to those who objected to Jackson's disregard for states' rights and legislative supremacy, and they were an important part of the Whig coalition in the elections of 1836, '38, and '40. The fact that they did not share Henry Clay's commitment to the B.U.S. does not make them Whigs in name only because the Whig party was not founded on support for a national bank; it was founded on opposition to executive tyranny and radical demagoguery. While Tyler vetoed the recharter of the bank, he signed off on other Whig economic objectives, and continued to appoint Whigs (albeit of a notably states' rights bent) to his cabinet even after the split with Clay and the Congressional party. We should not privilege the voice of Henry Clay as the be-all, end-all definition of Whiggery, because while Clay was an important leader of the party (and after 1842 its de facto chief until his death), the original party was not welded from his base alone.


* The use of Democratic-Republican to refer to the Jeffersonian Republican party that existed from c. 1792–1824 is incorrect and unhelpful. Jefferson and his acolytes called themselves Republicans, and in some cases were called democrats by their opposition. "Democratic Republican" enters the lexicon around 1828 and continues to be a label associated with the Jacksonian party well into the 1840s. Wikipedia says that Tyler's "National Democratic Republican" outfit was an homage to Jefferson, but in fact it was in reference to a common alternative name for the Democratic party.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

The pattern of Black Belt Whigs still had remnants even in 1860. Bell won several of the counties over Breckinridge.

It would be very interesting to see a map showing when each of these counties last voted for the Whig or Whig successor ticket.