WI: Daniel Webster vs. Martin Van Buren in 1836

The initial front runner for the 1836 Whig nomination was legendary Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster. However, in an effort to hang the electoral college and throw the general election to Congress the Whigs shifted their support to three additional candidates: William Henry Harrison, Hugh White, and Willie P. Mangum. This effort failed, but nonetheless Van Buren won both the electoral and popular votes by narrow margins. What if Van Buren had faced Webster on a one-on-one match with the entire Whig organization behind "Godlike Dan"? Could Webster have won the election?
 
No but I think he might have done well enough to be renominated and win in 1840. IMO it was really the Panic of 1837 that broke the Dems base.
 
No but I think he might have done well enough to be renominated and win in 1840. IMO it was really the Panic of 1837 that broke the Dems base.

Would he have done well enough, though? Webster's base of support was in New England and, though people around the nation valued him for his oratory, his electoral experiences outside of this region were generally pretty dismal. I suppose a Webster-Harrison ticket might have been enough to get him some greater support in the West and, as you've stated, the Whigs are going to have to really work at it to lose the election of 1840 after the panic. That being said, I could see the election being a bit closer.

Now, with all that said and done, lets assume that Webster does get elected President in 1840 and still had Whig majorities in Congress. How well do you think he'd perform? Certainly better than OTL - Harrison's death and the subsequent Tyler presidency was a disaster for the Whigs that they never really overcame. Assuming that Webster and Clay are able to shuffle their own egos to the side and work together, we might see a new American Bank and also the beginnings of Clay's American Plan being implemented.
 
The so-called Whig strategy of running different presidential candidates in different sections of the country was not so much a strategy as a necessity. The truth is that there was really no national Whig Party in 1836. There was an alliance of National Republicans, Antimasons, Nullifiers, and disillusioned Jacksonians (especially southerners upset that Jackson had chosen the Northerner Van Buren to succeed him). These forces could unite in Congress on the issue of opposition to Jackson's "tyranny" but that was all. No single candidate for president could get the support of all "Opposition" men in all sections of the country. Even Harrison, despite his Virginia origins, could not appeal to the Lower South in 1836 the way Hugh White did.

So having a single Whig candidate was practically out of the question, and if there were one, it certainly would not be Webster, who was seen in the South as a Federalist (which of course he had been and really always would be at heart) and at least slightly suspect on slavery (he was no abolitionist but had supported slavery restriction at the time of the Missouri crisis and would later affirm the right of Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia--and anyway Hugh White's supporters insisted that no northern man could be trusted on the issue of slavery, that being their case against Van Buren).

A more realistic idea would be for Webster rather than Harrison to be the main northern Whig candidate. As for why that did not come about, see Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, pp. 40-1.

"Even Webster realized that he could get no support from the South. Southern Whigs were not Webster's main obstacle, however; they were willing to let him be the Whig candidate in the North, so long as they could run somebody else in the South.

"But too many northern Whigs regarded Webster as a liability. Outside of New England, Antimasons like New York's Weed and Seward considered Webster's Federalist background, his connections with the Boston Brahmins, and his well-known links to Biddle's Bank as dead weight they could not carry. "It is the height of madness to run Webster as a candidate," Seward warned Weed. "To vote for Webster is indirectly to elect Van Buren—and to fix upon the Whigs the perpetual stigma of federalism." Similarly, Whigs in the Middle West, where, outside of Ohio, National Republicanism had been almost nonexistent, were left cold by Webster's political background and regional identity. They wanted a man of their own, just as Southerners did.

"In the spring of 1835, both Midwesterners and Antimasons from the Middle Atlantic states began to float the name of a man they considered perfect—General William Henry Harrison. Hero of the battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, a former governor of the Indiana Territory and United States senator from Ohio, an Indian fighter with plain airs, and a long-time resident of the West, even though he had been born in Virginia, Harrison was a marvelously attractive newcomer. True, he had never been a National Republican, but Jackson had sacked him from a minor diplomatic post. He was, in sum, an anti-Jackson man.

"Harrison's potential appeal caused Webster's supporters in and outside Massachusetts to complain loud and long of the danger of man worship and military candidates. Harrison, they protested, had insufficient experience, no record on recent issues, no qualifications as a statesman, nothing but fame for a few skirmishes fought in the distant past. To such strictures Harrison's supporters like the Cincinnati Gazette tellingly responded, "Harrison takes with the people.... Mr. Webster cannot be elected President—General Harrison may be elected. South, West, North, East, all can support General Harrison." If, in the eyes of Webster men, Harrison was just as bad as Andrew Jackson, the general's similarity to the Jackson of 1824 and 1828 made him particularly appealing to Westerners and Antimasons. "If it was right to elect General Jackson because he was a favorite citizen, and not the candidate of officeholders, it is right to elect General Harrison on the same principle," declared the Ohio State Journal in 1836.

"Harrison adroitly took steps to reassure Whigs that he shared the principles that mattered most. In a public letter he strongly denounced Jackson's executive usurpations and condemned the dictatorial spirit of party. He advocated federal subsidization of internal improvements and endorsed Clay's scheme for distributing federal land revenues to the states for that purpose. He even said he would back a new national bank if events demonstrated its necessity. By such statements, he won the grudging support of former National Republicans like Clay and Clayton of Delaware, although Webster loyalists refused to be budged.

"The choice between Webster or Harrison as the preeminent northern Whig candidate remained unclear until the end of 1835. For several reasons, Whigs' decision between the two hinged on Pennsylvania's preference. Having lost New York decisively in 1834 and having virtually conceded it to the Democrats in 1835, Whigs realized they had no possibility of snatching it from the New Yorker Van Buren in 1836. Hence they needed the nation's second largest state to have a chance. In addition, a rift within the Pennsylvania Democratic party assured an opposition victory in the state's gubernatorial election in October 1835 and portended triumph in the Keystone State a year later. Finally, Pennsylvania's primary opposition party remained the Antimasons, not the Whigs, and for the Whigs to have any chance of garnering Antimasonic support throughout the North, they had to accept the favorite of Pennsylvania's Antimasonic party. Waiting until after their victory in October, the Antimasons met in convention at Harrisburg in December 1835. Webster had carefully cultivated support among Pennsylvania's Antimasons—but not enough. The convention, and with it the Whig party of the North, gave its nod to Harrison. Webster would remain in the race through the November 1836 election. But he was reduced to being a New England candidate and the chief Whig candidate only in Massachusetts. Elsewhere in the North, as well as in the border states and Virginia, Harrison headed the Whig ticket. The Whigs had found a man of the people, an Indian fighter, a military hero of their own..." https://books.google.com/books?id=hMkYklGTY1MC&pg=PA41

Webster was just too "aristocratic," too much a Federalist for the new era. If he were nominated even as the main northern candidate, he would certainly not carry any state Harrison lost and would likely lose some western states Harrison carried (e.g. Harrison's own state of Indiana, which generally voted for the party of Jackson in presidential elections except when Harrison was running...).
 
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