The Anti-Abolitionist Campaign of 1840

Abstract

����� Doyouthink that songs about coonskins and log-cabins andhard cider, or thejokes ofTom Corwin, can longdrown the cries goingup from millions of human beings in chains in the South? complains an abolitionist character in Brand Whitlock's The Buckeyes. Much of Whitlock's last (and unfinished) novel revolves aroundthe tomfoolery ofthepresidentialcampaign ofWilliam Henry Harrison in 1840. Ethan Grow, an avid reader of Garrison's Liberator, scorns the Whigs for running an old man for President, widiout aplatform, withoutaprinciple—nothingbuta reputation for fightingIndians,while theyignored the burning, live, throbbing issue of black slavery.1 Despite this calculated evasion, or perhaps because of it, Whidock implied, Harrison and die Whigs capturedthe White House and the Congress with die eagercomplicity ofthe voters in whathas gone down in history and folklore as the Log Cabin of 1840. Whidock might have been echoing die words of George Washington Julian, a young Whig in 1840 who became the Free-Soil candidate for vicepresident in 1852. Julian admitted to taking part in die grand national frolic by riding 150 miles to a mass meeting at the site ofdie Tippecanoe battlefield in Indiana. While he denied die 1840 contest hadbeen eidiera campaign ofideas or a struggle for political reform in any sense, Julian noted diatbehind all die clatter and nonsense slavery was die real issue, but diat itwent unrecognized by bodi parties.2 Bodi Edian Grow and George Julian were nonetheless wrong in assuming thatthe majorpolitical parties avoideddie slavery issue in 1840, though diis has been a common presumption. Cries were heard above die sound and fury of the 1840 campaign—not diose of suffering slaves but of their masters and odiers in bodi North and Soudi who sought protection for the South's peculiar institution. As voters listened to die campaign rhetoric in 1 Brand Whitlock's The Buckeyes: Politics and Abolitionism in an Ohio Town, 1836-1845, ed. Paul W. Miller (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1977), 194. Tom Corwin won election in 1840 as Governor of Ohio (and later as United States Senator) and was well known for his wit and eloquence. ' Political Recollections, 1840-1872 (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg & Company, 1884), 22-29, 64-67.