Nativists propel New York tycoon to presidency--in 1856

When I wrote this post about George Law a dozen years ago, the obvious parallel I found to him was Ross Perot. Today the obvious comparison is Donald Trump. Anyway, here is the post (modified to update an URL):

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His Name Was Law! The Ross Perot of 1856?


"At this time George Law was considered to be the leading candidate of the
Native American party for President..."
-- Charles H. Haswell, *Reminiscences of New York by an
Octogenarian (1816 - 1860)*
https://web.archive.org/web/20060210064139/http://www.earlyrepublic.net/octo/octo-25.htm

Everyone (well, everyone *here*) knows that former President Millard
Fillmore was the American (Know Nothing) Party's candidate for the
presidency in 1856. What is not so well known is that for a while it was
widely believed that the party's nominee would be, not Fillmore but New
York City steamship, railroad, and construction magnate George Law. In
this post, I will undertake to rescue this once-celebrated man from
obscurity, and to ask what would have happened had he indeed won the
American Party's nomination. (See
http://www.famousamericans.net/georgelaw/ for the only biography of Law I
could find online; otherwise, my chief source for him is Tyler Anbinder,
*Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the
1850s*; there is also a brief discussion in the late William E. Gienapp's
*The Origins of the Republican Party 1852-1856*.)

Law, born in upstate New York in 1806, was to antebellum Americans what
Rockefeller or Carnegie would be to the Gilded Age. Leaving his family
farm at age eighteen, he labored as a hod carrier at a canal site. He
worked his way up to stone-cutter, then mason, and by his early twenties
he had become a contractor, building a small canal lock. Soon he had
developed a successful contracting business, specializing in canal and
railroad construction. As a businessman, Law (in Anbinder's words, p.
205) "seemed to have the Midas touch. After moving to New York City, he
bought a failing bank and turned it into one of the city's largest. He
also acquired a struggling railroad and transformed it into a money-maker.
Next Law entered the steamship business, and he soon dominated the
field."

Having achieved all this success in business, Law began to seek
distinction in politics as well. He was a political neophyte, but he had
three important assets. One, obviously, was his money. His second was
his realization that much of the popularity of Know Nothingism was the
public's increased distaste for professional politicians. So he portrayed
himself as a patriotic outsider who would rescue the country from the
corrupt politicos. As the nativist New York *Mirror* said in obvious
reference to him, what the country needed was "a common sense business
man" in the White House. And Law's third asset was the backing of James
Gordon Bennett's New York *Herald* (the most widely read newspaper in New
York City, though it could not match Greeley's *Tribune* in national
circulation). Bennett was not a nativist, but he constantly criticized
corrupt politicians, and though that the Know Nothings might bring about
political reform. Hoping to create the same sense of youthful exuberance
that had characterized the "Young America" movement of a few years
earlier, Bennett helped to publicize ""Live Oak George" and called for the
creation of "Live Oak" clubs to promote Law's candidacy.

(For the apparent origins of the "Live Oak" nickname, see
http://www.famousamericans.net/georgelaw/ "In 1852 he had a contest with
the Cuban captain-general, which brought him prominently into public
notice. The Spanish official was incensed because the purser of one of his
vessels had published an offensive statement in a New York newspaper, and
refused entrance to any vessel having him on board. The American
government refused to sustain Mr. Law in his determination to send the
'Crescent City' to Havana with the purser on board, and withdrew the mail
when he persisted. He nevertheless despatched the steamship, and the
captain-general failed to carry out his threat to fire on her. Mr. Law,
who after this was called 'Live-Oak George,' from a nickname bestowed on
him by the workmen in his ship-yard, assailed the administration, which he
accused of pusillanimity, in newspaper articles..." The president at the
time was of course Fillmore, which was one reason there was no love lost
between Law and Fillmore.)

In any event, although most veteran nativists supported Fillmore, some
climbed aboard the Law bandwagon, including New York's Bayard Clark,
Philadelphia's Lewis C. Levin, and the Know Nothings' first national
president, James Barker. Although other possible candidates like Sam
Houston had been mentioned, by the spring of 1855 the race for the
American party nomination had narrowed to Fillmore and Law. Law wrested
control of the New York organization from the Fillmoreites, and got a big
boost when the American-controlled Pennsylvania legislature endorsed him
in February 1855. Fillmoreites were aghast, John Pendleton Kennedy
complaining that Law's candidacy was "the most open attempt to purchase
the Presidency" in the country's history. The rising number of newspaper
endorsements of Law also worried the Fillmoreites. (Actually, Law got
many of these endorsements simply by purchasing the newspapers in
question. But the Fillmoreites worried that a public ignorant of this
fact might interpret the endorsements as part of a popular groundswell.)

However, Law's candidacy eventually began to founder. Most anti-slavery
Know Nothings soured on Law when his allies voted for Section Twelve
(calling for the maintenance of all existing laws on slavery, presumably
including the Kansas-Nebraska Act) at the Know Nothings' 1855 convention.
Furthermore, reform-minded Know Nothings began to question Law's large
campaign expenditures as an attempt to "buy" the presidency. As one anti-
Law newspaper put it, Law:

"is without doubt a good financier, a shrewd, active business man and in
general a go-ahead-on-the-high-pressure principle Yankee but our
government is neither a broker's shop, a contractor's office, or a
locomotive engine, is not suited to his capacities and though it might be
to him a profitable speculation to be President of the United States, it
would be to the people, ruinous."

By December 1855 one of Fillmore's lieutenants would report that the Law
men were "pretty well *whipped*." The Law forces, however, mounted one
last offensive, spending money freely in a desperate attempt to secure
delegates to the Know Nothings' February 1856 Philadelphia presidential
nominating convention. On the eve of the convention, former Governor
Washington Hunt of New York observed that "His partizans are active, bold,
and confident, and their operations are very extensive. I did not suppose
it possible, but I begin to suspect that his nomination at Phila[delphia]
is not so impossible."

It was not to happen, of course. At Philadelphia, both sides after
canvassing the delegates and seeing Fillmore's strong southern support,
realized that Fillmore would be nominated. The Law forces urged that the
nominations be delayed until July, but failed (in 1855 when the Law
bandwagon was rolling it was the Fillmoreites who wanted to delay the
nominations and the Law men who successfully demanded that they be held in
February). Fillmore, still in Europe, received the nomination by 179
votes to 24 for Law (with 40 scattered). This looks so overwhelming that
one may question whether Law was ever really a threat, but one must
remember that Law's chief support was in the North and that by this time
many northerners had walked out to protest Fillmore's imminent nomination
and the convention's failure to demand restoration of the Missouri
Compromise. The journalist Murat Halstead jeered that men voted against
Law "with his dinners and wine in their stomachs, to say nothing of his
money in their pockets." A disgusted Law went on to support the
Republicans later that year.

Let's say that Fillmore had met with a fatal accident sometime in 1855-6.
Could Law have won? I think it is possible *if* a northern walk-out could
have been delayed long enough. It is easy to say that the old-time
conservative Whigs in the party would have found another candidate if
Fillmore had not been available, but I am not sure that they could have
settled on any one candidate, while Law would have the support of younger
northern Know Nothings who viewed Fillmore-style politicians as worn-out
hacks. I really don't know whether Law would have done better or worse
than Fillmore but his campaign would obviously not lack for finances, and
he would probably be much more willing than Fillmore to consider the idea
of fusion tickets in some northern states [1] which might have gotten him
more electoral votes than Fillmore, and could throw the election into the
House. Even in the South, maybe memories of his standing up to the
Spanish in the "Crescent City" affair might give him a chance to carry
Louisiana (but only if Law was not identified too openly with the fusion
movement in the North).

Anyway, there do seem to be some curious anticipations of Ross Perot
here...

[1] In a previous post, I have mentioned the Fillmoreites turning down
Republican offers of fusion tickets in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In
Illinois, where such a ticket might have won (though it would certainly
have lost some German votes), negotiations between Republicans and
Americans were less formal and apparently never very serious--but perhaps
they would have been more so with Law as American candidate. In Indiana,
Republicans were bitter with the Americans for not having supported Oliver
Morton's nearly successful gubernatorial campaign (though they didn't run
a candidate of their own, either), and the subsequent recriminations
killed any chance of fusion. Schuyler Colfax related that the Republicans
rejected an unofficial American proposal to divide the electoral ticket
with eight Fremont and five Fillmore electors. "We were satisfied that we
should be weaker with this Fusion than without--as it would alienate all
the foreign vote & would not bring more than half the Fillmore vote to us
at any rate." He added: "We told them we had a future before us & they
had not." (Quoted in Gienapp, p. 406)

http://soc.history.what-if.narkive.com/bjrbftPE/his-name-was-law-the-ross-perot-of-1856
 
I'd nothing else I'd expect him to do worse in the South. Fillmore had at least the former Whigs to fall back on, and other non-Democrats who wanted to fight the dominant vehicle. I don't know how many of them would go for a Yankee businessman with no real political experience or connection to them.
 
I'd nothing else I'd expect him to do worse in the South. Fillmore had at least the former Whigs to fall back on, and other non-Democrats who wanted to fight the dominant vehicle. I don't know how many of them would go for a Yankee businessman with no real political experience or connection to them.

OTOH, in Louisiana, which Fillmore narrowly lost in 1856, http://psephos.adam-carr.net/countries/u/usa/pres/1856.txt there was much resentment of Fillmore for having enforced the neutrality laws against Louisiana-based Cuban filibusters. I could see Law, with his anti-Spanish record, doing better there...
 
OTOH, in Louisiana, which Fillmore narrowly lost in 1856, http://psephos.adam-carr.net/countries/u/usa/pres/1856.txt there was much resentment of Fillmore for having enforced the neutrality laws against Louisiana-based Cuban filibusters. I could see Law, with his anti-Spanish record, doing better there...

Fair enough, Lousiana could be one of a few states that overwhelmingly go for Law just due to person affection. Although I wonder how his attitude toward (or lack thereof) would affect the slave owners decision to back him.

Just a thought, could the Whig Party endorse someone else in this election? OTL they co-nominated Fillmore because he was already nominated by the American Party (and the Whigs had been hemorrhaging supporters left and right), but would they do the same for Law? Could they try to limp on with one last rump candidate like John Bell (running 4 years early) or some other border-state Whig? Could an irate Fillmore, upset he was beaten by some upstart railroad tycoon, try and get the Whig candidacy and run solely to spite Law?
 
Question: assuming Law got the American nomination who would be his the VP nominee (I assume it would be a Southerner like Donelson if not him exactly)? And assuming Fillmore could scrounge together enough support for his rump Whig run who would be his?
 
Could John Bell from Tennessee be the VP candidate? Would Bell even want the nomination.

Sam Houston would be another good VP candidate to balance the ticket.
 
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