Previous Tip vs. the Sly Fox: The 1840 Election and the Making of a Partisan Nation

Richard J. Ellis, a veteran scholar of presidential politics, means that the election pitting the Democratic incumbent Martin Van Buren in opposition to Whig William Henry Harrison also needs to be remembered as the primary presidential election by which a serious political social gathering chosen—moderately than merely anointed—its nominee at a nationwide nominating conference. On this evaluation, the conference’s choice, in addition to Henry Clay’s post-convention phrases and deeds, emerge as essential elements within the shaping of the nineteenth-century partisan nation. Exploring the puzzle of why the Whig Occasion’s political titan Henry Clay misplaced out to a relative political also-ran, Ellis teases out the function the fluctuating economic system and rising anti-slavery sentiment performed within the social gathering’s fateful choice to appoint the Harrison-Tyler ticket. His work dismantles the caricature of the 1840 marketing campaign (a.ok.a. the “carnival marketing campaign”) as all froth and no substance, as an alternative giving due seriousness to the deeply held ethical commitments, in addition to anxieties in regards to the political system, that knowledgeable the marketing campaign.

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Previous Tip vs. the Sly Fox, the marketing campaign of 1840 can lastly be seen clearly for what it was: a contest of two profoundly completely different visions of coverage and governance, together with basic, still-pressing questions in regards to the place of the presidency and Congress within the US political system.