That there is a picture of your friend and mine, our eighth president, Martin Van Buren. Long before he got his trademark white, wispy mutton chops and sly (or perhaps toothless) smirk, he apparently had much redder mutton chops. Other than that, he's not the most notable of presidents—consigned to the ranks of those remembered chiefly through my personal childhood favorite, Yo, Millard Fillmore!
You may know that his German pedophilia anecdotally gave rise to the phrase OK, (Get it? Old Kinder hook. Ha ha. Never mind.) or even his role in catalyzing the Albany Regency in New York politics. What's far less known is how he won the presidency in the first place: by defeating a Whig platform in 1836, in one of the strangest campaigns in American history. Well, that and piggybacking on the political career of Andrew Jackson.
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The southerners got their act together first, putting forth White as a candidate in 1834; he responded to the speculation by saying that he would run, even though he never wanted to be president, really. Anti-Jacksonians in the north, on the other hand, could not stand White as a general candidate, and wanted fellow senator Daniel Webster, with Harrison as his running mate. Soon, the newly minted Whigs up north decided that it was better for a gun-totin' Injun-killin' general to be president than a platinum-tongued orator after all, and Harrison quickly replaced Webster.
As the election neared, it became abundantly clear that the northern and southern factions of the party could not agree on such controversial issues as "states' rights" and "not making complete asses out of themselves in a presidential election", so most slave states had a Whig ticket of White and John Tyler, while most free states, along with the turncoat border states of Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, ran Harrison and Francis Granger (who preferred killing Masons to Injuns). Daniel Webster's home state of Massachusetts chose to run him instead of Harrison, and South Carolina, for rather mysterious reasons, nominated Mangum, who looks amusingly waifish in the picture below.
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