The American Vice Presidency (23 page)

King disagreed, however, with Calhoun’s argument that the 1828 Tariff of Abominations, providing for high protective tariffs for northern industry, warranted the South’s right to disregard it. Of nullification, King declared, “I view it as neither peaceful nor constitutional, but clearly revolutionary in its character, and if persevered, it must, in the nature of things, result in the severance of the Union.… From such a calamity,” he said, “may God in his mercy deliver us.”
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As for Calhoun, King said he was “a dead cock in the pit,” predicting, “The father of nullification under no circumstances can ever receive the support of the Southern States.”
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This and other issues brought King increasingly into conflict with Clay. However, always striving to conciliate on matters of regional disagreement, he subsequently supported Clay’s compromise tariff, which chagrined Jackson as well as southern foes of protectionism. But once again in opposition to Clay, King resisted Clay’s efforts to recharter the national bank and became entangled in Jackson’s order to remove federal funds from it, which led to a Senate censure of the president. When King and Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, another Jackson supporter, fought to have the censure expunged, King, as an expert on Senate rules, stoutly defended the president. Of Clay’s effort to force Jackson to produce a pertinent document, King declared, “The Senate was in no danger; it had never been so strong or so saucy as it was at the present moment.”
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It was from the context of this ill feeling that King’s challenge to Clay to a duel emerged in 1841. The Whigs behind Clay had won control of the Senate for the first time, and he clashed with Democrats over the Senate’s printing of the contract held by Francis P. Blair, editor of the
Washington Globe
, a Democratic organ. At last holding a majority in the chamber, the irascible Clay was moved to greater heights of temper than ever. When Senator Albert Cuthbert of Georgia had the temerity to break in on one of Clay’s harangues, the Kentuckian told him, “I will not, I cannot, be interrupted. I will not permit an interruption. The practice is much too common … and I trust it will not be continued here.” As Cuthbert started to offer a reply,
Clay irately asked if “the senator applies to me? If he does, I will call him to order.” Cuthbert replied that when Clay showed “proper courtesies towards his opponents,” he could expect courtesy from Cuthbert “and not till then.”
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Another Democrat wrote of the Kentuckian: “Clay’s insolence is insufferable, and it will not be borne. Never have I seen power so tyrannically used as the new Senate are now using it, and every federal [Whig] senator bows servilely to the arrogant dictation of Clay.”
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Concerning the
Globe
and Blair, Clay said he believed it “to be an infamous paper, and its chief editor an infamous man.” When King in his moderate way replied that Blair’s character would “compare gloriously” with Clay’s own, Clay rose and shot back, “That is false, it is a slanderous base and cowardly declaration and the senator knows it to be so!” King in his mild manner responded simply and tersely to the chair, “Mr. President, I have no reply to make—none whatever. But Mr. Clay deserves a response.”
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In the code of the day, the meaning was clear. King sat down and scribbled on a piece of paper his challenge to a duel. Then he left the chamber, handing the paper to Lewis Linn of Missouri, who gave it to Clay. The die was cast. Each side appointed a second for the affair, and as the law then required, the Senate sergeant-at-arms arrested the two senators. Clay now thought better of his rashness and posted a bond of five thousand dollars specifying he would take no hostile action against King. The placid Alabamian insisted on “an unequivocal apology” from Clay, who gave it with the acknowledgment that it would have been wiser to keep his views on Blair to himself. King then apologized in turn, after which Clay walked over to King’s desk and, perhaps in his manner of showing goodwill, asked King for a pinch of his snuff.
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They shook hands as applause broke out in the fascinated gallery.

King’s own courtesy and benign manner was not lost on Jacksonian Democratic leaders. They well remembered with embarrassment their previous vice president from Kentucky, Richard Johnson, whose personal marital history and unkempt visage often reflected poorly on the party. King was the opposite. When the 1840 campaign neared, he came quickly to mind as a vice presidential nominee from the South to replace Johnson as President Van Buren’s running mate. After all, King had often filled in
for the truant Johnson as the Senate president pro tem. Johnson, however, stayed on the Democratic ticket with Van Buren, and King’s fans looked ahead to the 1844 campaign.

In Washington, King was a close friend and roommate of James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, a presidential hopeful, and they often discussed their mutual national ambitions. Some Alabamians had been mentioning King also as a possible presidential candidate, but he told Buchanan that in return for Buchanan’s support for the Democratic vice presidential nomination King would not compete with him. Calhoun, also seeking the presidency, pointed out to King that only one southerner could be on the ticket. With Polk of Tennessee the presidential nominee, a northerner, Dallas of Pennsylvania, got the vice presidential nod.

In 1844, when Van Buren scuttled his own chances for reelection by declaring his opposition to the annexation of Texas, King wanted the Democratic presidential nomination to go to Buchanan, hoping his friend would advocate him as his southern, ticket-balancing running mate; instead Lewis Cass was nominated. Meanwhile President Tyler, who was tired of having his appointments rejected by the Senate, turned to one of its most popular members and nominated King to be his minister to France.

King had a successful tenure in Paris, being instrumental in neutralizing French objections to the U.S. annexation of Texas. But his heart remained in the Senate, and he wrote Buchanan, who was now secretary of state: “Most sincerely do I wish that we had both remained in the Senate.”
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Accordingly, he decided to seek his old seat in the next election through the Alabama State Legislature. But running as a Union supporter against the incumbent Dixon Lewis, who was a states’ rights defender, King suffered the only election defeat in his career. Seven months later, however, President Polk named the other Alabama senator, Arthur Bagby, minister to Russia, and Alabama’s governor appointed King to fill the vacancy. Later in 1848, King ran for and won a full term, beating the Whig leader Arthur Hopkins.

Meanwhile, King had continued to keep his eye on the vice presidency, whose function as presiding officer of the Senate often fell his way. At the Democratic National Convention of 1848, his name was among those offered for the second office, but the nomination to be Lewis Cass’s running mate went to General William O. Butler of Kentucky, another veteran of
the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. The electoral appeal of military leaders continued to hold sway.

That outcome left King in a front seat in the Senate during a most contentious time. At this point, his feelings about remaining in the Senate seem to have changed. He wrote to Buchanan: “A seat in the Senate is, I assure you far from being desirable to me; bringing with it as it does at this particular time especially, great responsibility, great labor, and no little anxiety.”
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The bitter argument over the expansion of slavery into the western territories reached its height with Clay’s proposal of the Compromise of 1850, whose amendment was the subject of heated and extended controversy. King, as was his custom, urged that northern and southern colleagues find middle ground.

While King agreed with Clay’s general quest for compromise, he opposed the direct admission of California to statehood, preferring that it first retain territorial status for a time during this troubled period. Congress, he insisted, had “about as much constitutional power to prohibit slavery from going into the Territories of the United States as [it had] power to pass an act carrying slavery there.” But while he said the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia would unfairly impede the interest of slave owners in neighboring Virginia, he believed the trading of slaves there ought to be prohibited.
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As modifications to Clay’s compromise were being considered, King joined a majority view of the select Senate Committee of Thirteen: that state legislatures had a right to take action on slavery in their jurisdictions, but territorial legislatures did not until they became states. Many southerners were critical of the Alabamian while others applauded his conciliatory efforts. At the same time, he warned northern abolitionists that if they sought to undercut the South’s legitimate rights, its sons would “hurl defiance at the fanatical crew, and unitedly determine to defend their rights at every hazard and every sacrifice.”
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When the sudden death of President Zachary Taylor in July 1850 raised Vice President Millard Fillmore to the Oval Office, King was unanimously chosen as the Senate president pro tem to assume the presiding duties for the remainder of Fillmore’s unexpired term, another tribute to his fair-mindedness.

In 1852, the Alabama Democratic convention, in endorsing the
amended Compromise of 1850, also directed the state’s delegates to the national party convention to back King for either the presidential or vice presidential nomination. A marathon forty-nine-ballot contest for the first office ensued. Those initially involved—Lewis Cass, James Buchanan, William Marcy of New York, and Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois—were all set aside in favor of Franklin Pierce, another Mexican War general. As a consolation prize to the defeated Buchanan, the Pierce camp permitted him to select the vice presidential nominee, and he put forward his friend King, easily selected on the second ballot. At last King had within his grasp the office whose main duties he had so often performed as Senate president pro tem in the absence of elected vice presidents.

The Pierce-King ticket easily prevailed over the weak Whig entry of Winfield Scott and William A. Graham of North Carolina. But King’s deteriorating physical condition from tuberculosis limited his participation. Despite resigning his Senate several weeks after the selection in order to repair to the tropical climes of Cuba in the hope of a recuperation, one never occurred.

Upon King’s death, Pierce, who had paid little notice to him in his brief tenure as vice president, respectfully observed that his illness “was watched by the nation with painful solicitation” and “his loss to the country, under all circumstances, [was] justly regarded as irreparable.”
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But Pierce had given no evidence of consulting with or involving his vice president in the formation of his administration. It was considered likely in any event that, had King lived, he would have remained primarily occupied as president over the Senate. It was a task for which he was eminently well-suited, and he had fulfilled it with great bipartisan approval during all his years in Washington. But the vice presidency itself warranted greater employment, not yet granted by any president under whom King had served.

JOHN C. BRECKINRIDGE

OF KENTUCKY

T
he man elected to the vice presidency as running mate to James Buchanan in 1856 was destined to become one of the most divisive and controversial figures in the Civil War, soon to follow. The thirty-six-year-old John Cabell Breckinridge, the youngest vice president ever to serve, was another veteran of the Mexican War, having spent six months as a volunteer infantry officer. Becoming a member of the Kentucky legislature at age twenty-eight, he had started in politics as a Jacksonian Democrat, but as a strong supporter of slavery he took a course that ultimately found him fighting against the Union he had vowed to defend.

The namesake of his grandfather and father, the third John C. was born on January 16, 1821, into a prominent political family. His grandfather was an Anti-Federalist ally of Jefferson who had served in the Senate and as Jefferson’s attorney general. The youngest John C. earned a bachelor’s degree at Centre College, in Danville, Kentucky, and studied law at Princeton and at Transylvania, in Lexington. Winning a seat in Congress soon after passage of the Compromise of 1850, involving slavery’s expansion into the western territories, Breckinridge became an outspoken voice for southern Democrats arguing that the federal government could not bar the peculiar institution anywhere in the territories.
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Despite his views on slavery, Breckinridge was a defender of the Union, a position that cast him as a moderate in many southern eyes. During his
time in the Kentucky legislature he supported the Kentucky Colonization Society, which as a branch of a national organization advocated the resettlement of black slaves abroad. It was a view shared by Abraham Lincoln for a time. Breckinridge was not a cotton planter or a major slaveholder, but he did own some household servants and comfortably embraced the exploitation of slaves that was at the heart of southern society.