Book Review: James Buchanan and the Political Crisis of the 1850’s Part Five

Similarities between the 1856 election and the elections of the 2000's

Now, if you would let me set the stage, I think that there are some striking similarities from these two elections and our previous three. The year is 1856; Franklin Pierce has just left office after four prosperous but sectional tensioned years between the Northern states and the Southern sates, and if a sectional candidate assumes office civil war will erupt. This was the situation that James Buchanan, James Fremont and Millard Fillmore found themselves in during the fall of 1856. Buchanan was able to barley squeak out a win in the southern states and wins enough northern states to push him over the electoral hill. How did he do it? Some, such as Michel Stampp, argue, and I agree, that the overriding theme of the 1856 election was fear, fear that the Union would dissolve under a sectionalist president such as the republican Fremont. In the 2000, we saw that even though George W. Bush was not able to win the popular vote he was able to sweep the south and key northern sates to win the electoral count. And in the 2004 election the overriding theme was fear, fear of the dissolving of our way of life or fear of unknown threats. What I’m trying to say, is that the election of 1856 and when we combine the elections of 2000 and 2004 we find some striking similarities.

As for the election of 2008, I think that it can be described as a new political generation taking the reins, in the same way that the republicans where able to in 1860. The Jacksonian style at that time had been....
the popular mode of politics for over thirty years, while it was revolutionary at its time, putting vibrancy of leadership above even-headedness, its position to put the issue of slavery outside of the governments hands had led the country in to disarray and it was time for a change. By 1964 the Great Society had waned and the silent majority, later to become the center-right country, under Nixon and then Regan was beginning to flourish. Let’s move down the time line to George W. Bush, like Buchanan, surrounded himself with an agreeable cabinet that imposed itself on congress to pass controversial legislation. Take for instance, the resolution to go to war with Iraq or the Patriot act. George W. Bush, also like Buchanan, united a new political force that started in the 1990’s with remnants of the campus protest movements and new voters uninitiated the system.

The relation is most clear when Kunpfer writes, “The existence of generational rhetoric-of appeals to age-related sentiments in the popular mind- can indicate that a leadership associated with traditional political customs has become vulnerable to charges of being out of date. The public has, in effect, conflated policy with the age group of the policy makers and drawn some plausible conclusions-the age of the leadership becomes an issue and the dynamic of public discourse change as a result.” (149) if I didn’t state in the beginning that this article was written in 1991 it could have been written yesterday. Finally, it seems to be true that even though customs change and political styles morph we can look to the past for examples of the present.