Continuing my three-volumes-at-a-time survey of the American Presidents series, edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. This installment covers the presidencies of 1841-1850.
These three presidents come from the heart of the period of obscure presidents. Their importance to US history therefore needs championing. They were also, all three of them, wealthy slave-holding plantation-owners. But unlike previous volumes about slave-holding presidents, whose authors noted the iniquities and hypocrisies arising thereby, these mostly take slavery for granted and pretty much ignore it, as traditional history did. Though the subjects' attitudes towards slavery were important to their politics, their actual practice of it seems separate from their political lives and is mostly omitted from these biographies except to note that running their plantations was an active concern of theirs. Curiously, all three of these men, at least at some point, "believed that [slavery] was inherently evil" (Tyler, p. 22), "branded the institution as 'evil'" (Polk, p. 77), "was personally opposed to the institution in principle" (Taylor, p. 99), but none of them were willing to give up their economic dependence on practicing it, and none made any political moves towards putting their abhorrence into policy.
Gary May on John Tyler is the exception that pays some attention to its subject's slave-holding. It's also the only one of the three by an academic historian, and is by far the best written. That Tyler financed his career not just by living off the backs of, but by buying and selling, slaves earns a bitter remark or two, and Tyler's life as a plantation owner is deemed worth a few scattered pages. Mostly, though - and rightly - the book is about Tyler's politics. May describes Tyler as an old-style Jeffersonian Republican who was ill-at-ease in both major-party options of his mature years, the populist Jacksonian Democrats and the nationalistic Whigs, which explains why he quit both parties in turn. Tyler's terrible reputation as president is due more to his not fitting in than to actual mistakes (though there were some of those, too; worst in May's opinion: appointing Calhoun as Secretary of State), and May concludes by noting Tyler's greatest accomplishments: establishing the principle that a succeeding VP is fully the president and not an acting placeholder, and annexing Texas. Assuming you consider these good ideas.
John Seigenthaler on James K. Polk apparently got the gig because, like his subject, he's from Tennessee, where he's a newspaper editor. But it's not one of the better books in the series: the writing is fuzzy and the chronology wafts around. As with some of the early volumes, this one focuses on its subject's personality. Seigenthaler describes Polk as a humorless workaholic, but he doesn't build the book around this as a thesis as the earlier volumes would. I've always been interested in Polk as a stunningly competent president. Whether or not you agree with his expansionist policies, Polk knew exactly what he wanted to do and accomplished it, and the same is true of his policies in other areas. Seigenthaler describes this, but his emphasis is more on Polk as a vehement Democratic partisan who hated Whigs. It's also livelier on Polk's earlier years as a loyal Jacksonian lieutenant than on his presidency. There's also a curious insert extolling Sarah Polk's talents as first lady (p. 116-18), which is interesting since Gary May says she was "a complete failure" because she was a puritan who forbade drinking and gambling in the White House (Tyler, p. 130). Disputes between these authors, mostly defending their own subjects, could be a theme of these reviews in itself.
John S.D. Eisenhower on Zachary Taylor gets a military historian to cover our first president who was a career military officer. (Previous military presidents had spent more time in civilian occupations.) As a result of what turns out to be this unfortunate combination of author and subject, this book is divided into two divergent parts. The first half dives into Taylor's entire army history with gusto, going into the Mexican War in such detail that there's a campaign map, not that it's of much help in following the text. Eisenhower says that Taylor's family life and maintaining his plantations were of equal importance to him, but the book says little about the former and almost nothing about the latter. Taylor's obsession with certain matters of military protocol is described with a portentousness suggesting they'll reappear in his presidency somehow, but they don't. After Taylor declares his presidential candidacy and retires from the army - in that order - the book switches gears and becomes all about politics. The problem is not only that nothing in the first half supports this topic (the claim that Taylor had earlier Whig sympathies is surprisingly weak), but that Taylor didn't do much in his 16 months as president. Most of that time was spent by the Senate debating what became the Compromise of 1850, which is discussed in detail, but there was nothing for the president to do until the bills reached his desk, which didn't happen until after Taylor died. Eisenhower thinks Taylor would have vetoed at least the Fugitive Slave Act (his opposition to the spread of slavery, remember?), which would certainly have changed subsequent history, but there's no evidence of this either. A quick generalization on the shared character of military presidents is interesting and lets Eisenhower name-check his famous father, but it clashes with what had been said about Taylor as a general. So this book is two puzzl(e/ing) pieces that don't fit together.
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