An Expose of the Tea Party Movement (of the 1850’s)

In the summer of 1858, the state of Maine – about as deep into Yankee territory as one could get – found itself host to a genteel southerner named Jefferson Davis, a former Secretary of War and a current United States Senator from Mississippi. On the Fourth of July, on board a ship near Boston, he delivered a rousing speech where he condemned the burgeoning secessionist movement. That same summer a Georgian named Alexander Stephens was finishing his final (for the moment) term in the House of Representatives, having decided that he was not going to seek re-election in the fall. Meanwhile, in Virginia, a U.S. Army officer named Robert E. Lee was taking a two-year leave of absence from the military in an attempt to salvage the finances of the three plantations that had belonged to his father-in-law, who had owned nearly two hundred slaves when he had died in 1857.

None of these three men were extremists when it came from the slavery question. Davis and Stephens were considered political moderates and Unionists, and Lee was a long-serving soldier whose loyalty to the United States was not in question. None of them would play any substantial part in the process by which the southern states seceded. Yet by 1861 all three of them were serving the cause of the new Confederate States of America as its president, vice president and military adviser to the president, respectively.

Why did this happen? While each man may have had complex reasons for why they felt they had to support the Confederacy, the short answer is that a fringe political movement took advantage of America’s political stagnation and used it create a situation where Davis, Stephens and Lee found themselves having to take what they considered to be the least bad choice presented to them. This is not to defend the actions of three men who consciously chose to commit treason against the United States of America, but it should be acknowledged that they were not the movers and shakers behind the initial formation of the Confederacy and their decision to serve it was not made in a vacuum.

Today we have the Tea Party, an angry, radical and complex social movement that has managed to vex both liberals and mainstream conservatives with its rejection of both progressive dogma and the “politics as usual” style of Washington. But in the decade before the American Civil War there was also a Tea Party, even though it wasn’t called that. It was a fringe movement whose leaders were called the “Fire Eaters” for their impassioned rhetoric in defense of slavery. Their movement made appeals based on race, much like the Tea Party now does. It advocated state’s rights, much like the Tea Party now does. And the Fire Eaters managed to split a major American political party into factions, much like the Tea Party is threatening to do now.

The unofficial but authoritative leader of that movement was William Lowndes Yancey (1814-1863), known in his lifetime as the “Prince of the Fire Eaters”. Born in Georgia but raised mostly in New York, he went to college in Massachusetts, then returned to the south and became a slaveholder through marriage. He got started with a career in journalism and then migrated to politics, where he served in both the state legislature of Alabama and in the United States House of Representatives. When secession became a reality he offered his services to the Confederacy, served as the head of its diplomatic mission to Europe during the early stages of the war, then returned to the south and served in the Confederate States Senate. He had the good fortune to die in July of 1863, thus saving himself from having to see the destruction of the nation he toiled to create.

Yancey and his Fire Eater allies had emerged as a political force during the tumultuous 1850’s, a decade that had seen both physical violence between pro-slavery and abolitionist factions in the Kansas Territory and the abortive uprising of John Brown in 1859. Yancey was a skilled orator and, although he was officially a Democrat, he made no secret of the fact that he was increasingly unhappy with the northern elements within the party and more and more thought that secession was the only sensible thing for the south to do. When the Democratic Party held its national convention in Charleston, South Carolina in April 1860, Yancey was there and knew just what needed to be done to make secession a reality. It was a commonly held view that the election of a Republican as President of the United States – the Republicans then being the party associated with abolitionism – would be so intolerable to the southern states that they would leave the Union rather than  submit to it. But in order for the Republicans, a young and not fully established party, to win, the Democratic Party would have to be sabotaged.

Back in the nineteenth century, in the days before political conventions became so stage managed that the future nominee was known months in advance, nominating fights could and did erupt on the floor of party conventions, and that was exactly what happened in Charleston in 1860. The front runner going into the convention was Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, who was considered the only potential nominee who could win nationally in the fall. Douglas was a moderate on the slavery issue; he supported its continued existence but was not a fiery supporter of its expansion, and because of this it was thought he could win enough of the more populous northern states to claim the presidency. Unfortunately for Douglas, moderation on the slavery question was no longer the political virtue that it had once been.

By the end of the 1850’s the great untouchable issue in American politics was slavery, and it had become so red hot with partisan fervor that it was almost impossible to touch any other political issue that overlapped with it. The Democratic Party had made a bargain with itself to protect slavery as an institution, and thus it had appeal to both the planter class in the south and the non-abolitionist population of the north. But, with the growing rigidity and partisanship of the political system, that compromise was becoming untenable. That problem was embodied by Douglas, who had committed the unpardonable sin of supporting the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which had allowed the settlers of the Kansas Territory to decide the question of slavery on their own (which is what set off the wave of violence there), and which had essentially repealed the old Missouri Compromise of 1820. Douglas had done so by quite reasonably pointing out that in a democratic society laws that the electorate didn’t support could always be subject to repeal. Yancey and the Fire Eaters, not to mention an ever growing number of southerners in general, did not want this logic to apply to the territories. They felt that the government should guarantee the existence of slavery in them until such time as the settlers there, upon preparing a constitution for statehood, could decide one way or the other on the matter.

This may seem like a fairly trivial distinction to us as twenty-first century Americans, but there was a certain evil logic to the south’s position for, as the reasoning went, if slavery was not legal in the territories then slaveholders wouldn’t settle there, and when statehood came to that territory it would surely become another free state because there wouldn’t be any slave-owning voters. If the number of free states was allowed to exceed the number of slave states, then the fear was that the south would not be able to stop the passage and ratification of a constitutional amendment outlawing slavery, or even block laws that regulated and limited it. At Charleston the question of slavery in the territories ended up paralyzing the convention when it came time for the party to vote on an official platform for 1860.

Twelve years earlier the Alabama state convention of the Democratic Party had adopted a platform that took a firm stand on the question of slavery in the territories, insisting, among other things, that the federal government had no power to restrict slavery there and that the territorial governments should not have that power until statehood. William Yancey was instrumental in the adoption of that platform. And that state platform would come to haunt the national Democratic convention of 1860. At their 1856 convention the party had adopted a platform which had stated its support for the continued existence of slavery. This platform was re-approved by the delegates at Charleston, but then things exploded over the question of additional language to be added. The delegates of the southern states wanted an additional paragraph, derived from the language of the 1848 Alabama state platform, to be tacked on to the 1856 platform.

Immediately this proved unacceptable to the supporters of Senator Douglas (who, it should be added, was not himself present in Charleston), who realized that no candidate, not even theirs, could win states in the north with that type of a platform. It was one thing for a candidate to run on a pro-slavery platform – the northern abolitionists were not yet numerous enough to defeat that – but it was quite another thing to run on a platform that pledged to stuff slavery down the throats of people who might not want it. They realized that a platform such as that would very likely lead to a Republican victory. After days of haggling over the issue the convention approved the more moderate platform the Douglas men had wanted. Then things quickly fell apart. The delegation from Alabama was firmly under the control of William Yancey, and the leaders of six of the the southern delegations had already agreed to follow the lead of the Alabamians. Upon the defeat or their platform, the Alabama delegation withdrew from the convention, followed by the six other southern delegations.

Even with many delegates gone, the chairman of the convention, Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts, ruled that the nominee, who had to be voted in by a two-thirds majority of the delegates, had to be approved by two-thirds of the original number of delegates, not two-thirds of the remaining number. And after numerous ballots were taken it became clear that nobody was going to be nominated at Charleston. There were still enough anti-Douglas men left in the other delegations to block his nomination, and no other potential nominee could garner anything close to the two-thirds majority. Cushing had no choice but to adjourn the convention, announcing that it would be reconvened in Baltimore in June.

Things didn’t go any better at Baltimore. In parts of the south the state branches of the Democratic Party had named new delegations that were more friendly to Stephen Douglas. These were present at the re-adjourned convention, as were the original southern delegations they were meant to replace. Days were spent trying to resolve the matter of who should be seated, and ultimately the pro-Douglas men won and the newer delegations were seated. And once again the southern delegates started to walk out. This time the remaining delegates were able to successfully nominate Douglas, but his victory was Pyrrhic. The delegations who had walked out this time convened their own convention elsewhere in Baltimore and nominated vice president John C. Breckinridge as their candidate.

Just as Yancey and the Fire Eaters had intended, the party was split. In the north Douglas and Abraham Lincoln ran against each other, while in the south Douglas and Breckenridge competed for votes. They both lost votes to each other, and to make matters worse they also both lost votes to a candidate named John Bell of the little known and long gone Constitutional Union Party. As expected, Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans won, the south seceded and the American Civil War was on.

Now, a hundred and fifty years later, it is the Republican Party – the same party which benefited when the Fire Eaters split the Democrats – that finds itself threatened by an insurgent political movement. And the issue that has been threatening to split the party is healthcare, a battle that finally ended this past Sunday when the House of Representatives approved the “reform” legislation and sent it to the president for signing. The vote was narrow and partisan (just one Republican in the House voted for it), and when it was all over the extreme right wing was stunned. The right wingers had, as far back as the town hall ruckus last August, already imagined that the battle was over with and that all that was needed was for them to drag their feet until the Democrats gave up. As the recriminations began it was obvious that many of them were possessed by the thought that this was not supposed to happen, that the Tea Party protesters, the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts and the right wing media pressure on Democrats and Republicans alike was supposed to kill the “reform” dead.

While Democrats and progressives have celebrated the passage of the “reform”, the truth for Republicans and the right wing movement in general is that they have severely lost face with their defeat but have sacrificed little else. Even with the impending “fixes” added on, the final legislation is still full of heavy concessions that were made to Republican legislators. But conservative writer David Frum makes an excellent point when he says that:

A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.

Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

And:

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

In other words, only one House Republican voted for what was essentially a Republican piece of legislation, and the blunt fist of the Tea Party extremists and their allies in the right wing media is what was responsible. Because the political process had become stagnant, because neither the Democrats nor the moderate Republicans offered any real leadership, the debate was defined by the extremists.

And that is the lesson that we all must take from the tragedy of the Civil War and the frustration of the healthcare “reform” fiasco. Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens and Robert E. Lee each made an individual decision to serve the Confederacy, but in many ways the decision had already been made for them. It was made for them by radicals who knew that men such as they would be hard-pressed to oppose secession once it became a fact. Similarly, the centrist Republicans in the House each made an individual decision to oppose the healthcare legislation, but in many ways their decision was also made for them.

Social and political movements all seek to create their own realities, and incompetent leadership allowed the Tea Party to create the reality on this issue and led to a situation where many Republicans, men who might otherwise have voted for healthcare “reform” – I always use quotations because the bill passed is essentially corporate welfare with some progressive giveaways – felt that they could not. William Yancey and the Fire Eaters may all be long dead, but their ghosts are still haunting American politics.

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