Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [497]
In 1837 Aaron Clark, the Whigs’ mayoral candidate, won office in part because Loco Foco radicals ran an independent candidate and siphoned off votes from Tammany’s man. When President Van Buren adopted the Locos’ approach to currency questions, the disaffected Democrats trooped back to Tammany Hall, only to see the Conservative Democrats, many of them bankers or bank stockholders, decamp en masse, make common cause with Whigs, and get Clark reelected in 1838. A brief economic upturn helped Democrat Isaac Varian squeak into City Hall in 1839 and 1840, and Democrat Robert H. Morris proved able to hold the mayoralty for three successive terms (1841—43), though again by slender majorities. Meanwhile the Common Council teetered back and forth, Whigs winning control in 1837—38, Democrats in 1839—41, Whigs in 1842, Democrats in 1843. At the state level, the governorship passed in 1838 from Democrat William Marcy to Whig William Seward, who was reelected in 1840 (though he lost in the city); then Democrats recaptured Albany in 1842 with William C. Bouck.
Whigs scored heavily among those who blamed the governing party for the depression, but they also did well because they finally turned to a new breed of professionals: Whig politicians who had mastered the art of Tammany-style electioneering. Thurlow Weed, an Albany newsman turned full-time politico, was a robust and florid fellow, a man who liked his oysters and wine. He was also shrewd, manipulative, and determined to whip the hitherto disparate elements of Whiggery into a cohesive party. Weed tapped New York City’s community of rich Whig and Conservative Democrat merchants for campaign contributions and amassed a sixty thousand dollar war chest his first year out. Spending cash as effectively as he raised it, he made use of promotional techniques invented by the penny press. In 1838 Weed rescued Horace Greeley, whose New-Yorker was foundering in choppy depression seas, and hired him to edit a party sheet, the jeff-ersonian, which contributed substantially to Seward’s victory.
Weed could play political hardball too. In the 1838 campaign Whig agents were dispatched to Philadelphia, where they hired two hundred lowlifes at thirty dollars a head. These “floaters,” conveyed to New York City, were trooped from poll to poll, casting fraudulent ballots. Once Whigs gained power they happily deployed Tammany tactics to keep it, giving prison inmates one-day passes contingent on their voting the anti Tammany ticket, and marching almshouse paupers to the polls en masse, their gray uniforms temporarily exchanged for new clothing. Whigs also embraced the spoils system with delight and, when they captured the municipal government in 1837, handed out jobs and contracts to party members only. To block Tammany’s penchant for mass naturalizations, Whigs passed a state law—applicable to New York City only—that required voter registration. They also cut the length of elections from three days to one.
In the 1840 presidential race, Weed again drew upon Greeley’s skill as political publicist. New York Whig magnates opened their purses as never before, allowing Weed and Greeley to spend fabulous sums transforming patrician William Henry Harrison into a Man of the People. When Democrats incautiously charged that General Harrison had, since retirement, been guzzling hard cider in a log cabin in Ohio, Weed and Greeley transformed both wooden house and apple drink into badges of honor. New York imagemakers contrasted Harrison-as-backwoodsy-pioneer to a putatively aristocratic Van Buren. Greeley’s new subsidized sheet, the Log Cabin, was also chock-a-block with woodcuts, cartoons, large-type slogans (“Tippecanoe and Tyler, too”), and the words and music for campaign songs. A smash success, its circulation soon topped eighty thousand.
Weed and Greeley took their presidential campaign to the New York streets as well, advancing an urban politics of spectacle. A totemic log cabin, capable