Achilles,

A short time ago you told me that you are determined to sulk in your tent rather than vote for a candidate with whom you disagree on a fair number of issues.

In 1848, the New York anti-slavery Democrats (so called as a derisive reference to the fabled man who burned down his barn in order to rid it of rats), unsatisfied with their choice of a Northern pro-slavery Democrat (Lewis Cass) and a slave-owning Whig (Zachary Taylor), made an alliance with a somewhat smaller group of “Conscience Whigs” and the remnants of the old Liberty Party to create the Free-Soil Party. Backing the candidacy of Martin Van Buren (a seemingly odd choice, as he had been a decidedly pro-slavery President during his single term), the party won nothing more than 2 Senate seats and 14 in the House, but it is widely credited with preventing the election of Cass, who narrowly lost New York to Taylor, with the Barnburner vote proving a decisive subtraction from Cass’s total. In other words, by their efforts they had managed to hand the Presidency to a slave-holder.

Curiously, their luck in this was better than they could have expected -- at least temporarily. President Taylor, to the surprise of most, proved to be adamantly opposed to the expansion of slavery into the territories. However, President Taylor died during the debates leading up to the Compromise of 1850, and was succeeded by Millard Fillmore, who was a Whig, though decidedly not of the “Conscience” variety. The Compromise, with its draconian Fugitive Slave Act, followed soon after.

The party remained independent until absorbed by the Republican Party in the great political re-alignments of 1854-1856.

The Moral of the Story -- Don’t count on luck and the future to mend your errors. We are still responsible for the foreseeable consequences of our actions, and “dumb luck”, after all, can only follow a dumb move. Splitting a party to attain your ends in some future here-and-now is never a sure thing.

Theodore Roosevelt decided in 1912 that he had been too hasty in relinquishing the Presidency in 1908. He was dissatisfied with the performance of his hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft, and probably with private life as well. An organization called the National Republican Progressive League, founded out of disenchantment with Taft by Robert LaFollette, endorsed Roosevelt for the Republican nomination before the 1912 Republican convention. The effort proved fruitless, as the convention named the incumbent Taft as their nominee for re-election.

However, TR was never one to accept defeat gracefully. Instead of accepting the choice of the convention, he chose to combine with the National Republican Progressive League to form the Progressive Party, popularly known as the “Bull Moose” Party. In the resulting three-cornered contest, the Republican vote predictably split between Taft and Roosevelt, allowing Democrat Woodrow Wilson to ride to victory in November, with an agenda that neither Taft or Roosevelt would have approved. Of course, since the Progressives had no influence with Wilson (naturally, since they had opposed him), they had no influence on his policies.

The irony, of course, is that by attempting to influence the choice of president by endorsing a charismatic third-party outsider, they had unwittingly forfeited their chance to influence Presidential policy for the next four years or more. (As it turned out, it was more.) The truth is that the Taft supporters and the Roosevelt supporters weren’t all that far apart. It was largely TR’s ego that kept the rift from being mended, in my view.

The moral of the story -- Never follow a dynamic personality on a doomed quest. Going over a cliff is always foolish, no matter who you’re following.

In 1860 the Democratic Party was badly split between the supporters of Sen. Steven Douglas’s doctrine of “Popular Sovereignty”, which held that the inhabitants of a territory themselves had the power to regulate slavery within their borders, and the followers of the extreme Southern policy of (among others) Senator Jefferson Davis, who held that until the process of adopting a state constitution and applying for admittance to the Union, no territorial authority had the power to inhibit the right of slave owners to bring their slaves (and thus, slavery) into the territory. By the time the delegates assembled in Charleston, SC (a singularly unfortunate place to hold that convention), much of the hostility of the deep South toward their Northern brethren had hardened into a cold, uncompromising hatred of Sen. Douglas himself. Although Douglas had a majority of the delegates’ votes for the nomination, the minority was able through various maneuvers to prevent the Illinois Senator from gaining the nomination. In the end, the Southern delegates, in an eerie foreshadowing of their actions a few months later, seceded from the convention (and from its successor, held in Baltimore), and nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky for President. In the four-cornered contest that ensued, Abraham Lincoln was elected President, a result that the secession of the Southern delegates from the Charleston Convention had ensured.

Southern “fire-eaters” used this result to justify the secession of the Southern slave states from the Union, which in turn led to the bloodiest war in American history, and also to the destruction of the “peculiar institution” itself, which the Southerners had set out to save and to spread.

Moral of the Story: Never let your dislike of a politician blind you to your own (and your country’s) best interests.

It may seem odd to us now, but the re-election of Abraham Lincoln didn’t look at all likely in the summer of 1864. The war had dragged on for three years, Grant’s Virginia campaign had resulted in casualty lists the likes of which the North had never had to endure before, Sherman had been unable to force a finish-fight with cagey General Joseph Johnston or to capture Atlanta, and the Northern people were beginning to wonder whether the war could ever conceivably be worth the cost. In Lincoln’s own party, some of the Radical Republicans were suspecting that the reason that the war had yet to be won was that Lincoln hadn’t been tough enough . Incredibly, some of them even suspected Lincoln or plotting to save slavery. When they were unable to prevent the re-nomination of Lincoln at the Republican Convention, the dissident faction formed what they called the Radical Republican Party, and nominated Gen. John C. Fremont, the Republican Party’s first presidential nominee in 1856.

While never a large slice of Republicanism, Lincoln and other mainstream Republicans realized that the split in the ranks could be fatal in November. Various negotiations ensued, and the radicals, who were no more eager to elect Gen. McClellan, the Democratic candidate, than Lincoln himself was, returned to the fold. It is suspected that the price of the radicals’ return was the resignation of Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, and given Blair’s trouble-making while in the cabinet, one gathers that Lincoln let him go with very little heart-burning. Fremont and Blair both stumped for the Lincoln/Johnson ticket, and they went on to a decisive victory. The war turned out to be just as hard as anyone could possibly wish, and slavery was destroyed by the war, just as the radicals desired. By backing Lincoln, the radicals had guaranteed that they would continue to have influence on the course of events. Gratitude is not always reliable in politics, but is not to be easily disregarded, either.

Moral of the Story -- Better to help elect a candidate you can influence, than fail to oppose a candidate of views opposite to yours who will have no reason to influence you once they are in office.

You may be wondering what all of this has to do with you and the present election (although I’d like to think you got most if not all of this on your own). In my next letter, I shall try to show you the relevance of all of this to the doctrine of responsibility, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Sumner, William Wilberforce, and incrementalism as a weapon.

Yours,

Odysseus