The ‘Fainting General’ vs. General Apathy: The 1852 Presidential Election and War of Words

The US Presidential election of 1852 pitted two former veterans of the Mexican-American War (1846–8), and because the platforms of the Democrat and Whig parties were watered down in an attempt to steal each other’s supporters, the election turned into a bitter contest of personal attacks rather than policy. The Whig Party candidate was Virginian Winfield Scott, hero and architect of the successful 1847 campaign to seize Mexico City, while the Democrat Party candidate was Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, a general who served under Scott with a dubious war record. Scott being unsympathetic to slavery meant that southern Whigs were reluctant to support him, while Pierce’s support for the Fugitive Slave Act – a part of the controversial 1850 Compromise – was hated by antislavery northerners. Because Pierce was relatively unknown outside of New England, the Whig Party vilified him and his war-time service in an attempt to drain his support. The historian Michael Holt explains the contest: “Propaganda aimed at southern Whigs was reduced essentially to a simple assertion: our guy is not as bad as their guy.” Scott was a military legend but bad politician with an elitist reputation, while Pierce was a mediocre general but politically loyal and personally charming.[1]

RIGHT: Battle of Churubusco, during the Mexican–American War, painting by Carl Nebel. Hand-colored lithograph; original size of painted area: 43×27.5 cm. 1851. Source: Wikimedia. Click to enlarge.

Pierce’s War Record

General Pierce’s Mexican War record has been the subject of some historical inconsistency. On August 20, 1847, the US Army fought a decisive engagement on the outskirts of Mexico City known as the Battle of Churubusco. Taking center stage in that contest was a large outcropping of volcanic rock known as the Pedregal, which the Americans flanked the day before to outmaneuver the Mexicans. While Pierce was traversing the sharp and treacherous rock the previous evening, his horse lost its footing and fell – resulting in his leg being crushed underneath it. Historian Timothy Johnson, who wrote two books focusing on Scott and the campaign, notes that Pierce’s foot “was so tender that he held it away from the animal so that it would not rub or bounce against its side.” The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, Pierce’s presidential campaign biographer and personal friend, put the episode in the best light possible. “The commander-in-chief had already heard of the accident that befell Pierce the day before; and as the latter approached,” wrote Hawthrone, “General Scott could not but notice the marks of pain and physical exhaustion, against which only the sturdiest constancy of will could have enabled him to bear up.” Employing his literary powers, Hawthrone turned the presidential candidate and fellow New Englander into a fearless warrior:

Pierce, my dear fellow,” said he [Scott], – and that epithet of familiar kindness and friendship, upon the battlefield, was the highest of military commendation from such a man, – “you are badly injured; you are not fit to be in your saddle.” “Yes, general, I am,” replied Pierce, “in a case like this.” “You cannot touch your foot to the stirrup,” said Scott. “One of them I can,” answered Pierce. The general looked again at Pierce’s almost disabled figure, and seemed on the point of taking his irrevocable resolution. “You are rash, General Pierce,” said he; “we shall lose you, and we cannot spare you. It is my duty to order you back to St. Augustine.” “For God’s sake, general,” exclaimed Pierce, “don’t say that! This is the last great battle, and I must lead my brigade!

The commander-in-chief made no further remonstrance, but gave the order for Pierce to advance with his brigade.

Pierce rode on to bring more units into the fight, but at the end of the day, he was found passed out in a cornfield. The following month, the future president missed both the Battle of Molino del Rey (September 8), and the climax of the campaign, the Battle of Chapultepec on September 13, because he had diarrhea – a common and sometimes lethal affliction among US soldiers during the conflict. The diarrhea was overlooked by the Whigs in 1852, but the fainting was not.[2]

LEFT: 1852 Democratic campaign Poster of Pierce and King. Source: Wikimedia. Click to enlarge.

Campaign Attacks

In early July, one month after Pierce won the Democratic nomination at the national party convention in Baltimore, attacks on him began in earnest. The Louisville Daily Journal of Kentucky reported that “The Washington Union says that the Whig candidate and the Democratic candidate for the Presidency ‘are very different from each other.’ So indeed they are. Both of them are Generals, but one is a fighting General and the other a fainting General. Choose of ye freemen of the nation, between the fighter and the fainter.” It was a major volley, but it is unclear which side actually fired the first shot. “We will not retort invectives up on General Scott,” the Illinois State Register of Springfield responded, “plentiful as they may be garnered from the pages of his own history. A ‘fainting’ General is Frank Pierce!’ Do these whig slanderers forget that there are heroes in peace as well as in war? Do they forget that Frank Pierce never faltered or fainted when the constitution wanted friends?” Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, who later vied with Abraham Lincoln for a senate seat as well as the presidency, gave a speech in Richmond July 9 defending Pierce and attacking Scott. “They nickname him ‘the fainting general,’ and talk about his having fallen from his horse on the field of battle. While they do not dare openly to say that these acts are evidence of cowardice on his part, yet there are no other motives for the insinuation”. Douglas lauded Scott’s victories in the War of 1812, and in Mexico, but drew a line between battlefield and political leadership by rhetorically posing the question: “General Scott departs from his line of profession and from that course of duty in which he has acquired all his honors and his glory, [but Whigs believe] it is wise and patriotic to convert a good general into a bad president. [Great applause.]”[3]

As expected, both candidates refrained from engaging in personal attacks, but allowed their proxies to duke it out in the press. The ‘fainting general’ attack may have been a response from Pierce’s party supporters who claimed Scott was a coward when he declined to duel General Andrew Jackson in 1817 after the latter was incensed by public comments Scott made concerning Jackon’s professional conduct. Jackson made the correspondence public in 1819, and Pierce’s supporters were eager to resurrect the episode to demonstrate “the true character of General Scott” to the voting public. “That letter of Old Hickory to Gen. Scott,” the Lancaster Intelligencer of Pennsylvania reported in late July, using Jackson’s nickname, “which is now going the rounds of the Democratic press and which we published last week, has fallen like a bomb-shell among the Whigs.” Part of the issue for Scott was that he himself had challenged others to duels in the past, but backed down when confronted by a more intimidating Jackson. The Lancaster Intelligencer quoted another paper from Hollidaysburg to explain the situation:  

The friends of General Scott have nobody to thank but themselves for the production of this troublesome “leaf of history.” Had they been content to pursue the honorable, open mode of warfare against the Democratic nominees, this and other unpleasant reminiscences which are daily being developed would never have been brought to light… the nomination of General Pierce had scarcely been announced ere the bloodhounds of whiggery were set upon his track, his patriotism and courage doubted, and he sneeringly stigmatized as the “fainting General.” But as usual, they have been calculating without their host, and the probabilities are that unless they change their mode of tactics and adopt a more honorable course, they will get hold of the hot end of the poker.[4]

Election Rout

On November 2, the Whigs suffered the most astounding defeat in its party’s history. Scott won three states, Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Vermont, and Whig congressional candidates likewise suffered serious losses. How was such an unpredictable defeat possible? Whigs abandoned their principles in an attempt to win over everyone, and ended up alienating an electorate apathetic to personal attacks and avoidance of the important issue of slavery. Moreover, Scott’s insincere appeals to Irish Catholics fell flat – upsetting important segments of voting Protestants – while additional attacks against Pierce for being a drunk (Scott was a teetotaler) likely backfired with first-time German and Irish immigrant voters who imbibed. In the end, Scott’s popular appeal was somewhat of an illusion, as Pierce only drew 51 percent of the vote against Scott’s 44 percent, but the crux was that the Americans were ready to put the Mexican-American War permanently behind them. He was a war hero, but he was not cast from the common man. “A greater accumulation of new votes by Democrats”, Holt writes, “not a smaller Whig vote, explains Scott’s defeat”.[5]

RIGHT: 1852 Whig Party campaign poster of Scott and Graham. Source: Wikimedia. Click to enlarge.

On November 30 the Democrats held a victory party in Washington DC. Edson B. Olds, an Ohioan congressman who spoke gleefully of the rout, used the analogy of sweeping out corruption from Washington as one of the main reasons why Pierce was elected. Part of that analogy involved the party’s patriarch, Andrew Jackson, who even several years after death was able to effect a victory on the political battlefield over the man he once challenged to a duel:

I am aware, sir, that our political opponents have a thousand times asked us, “Who is Franklin Pierce?” …they have called him “General Obscurity.” You and I, sir, have heard… him denounced as the “fainting general.” But, thank God, Mr. President, the people seem to have known and appreciated Franklin Pierce… It is wonderful, Mr. President, that ever since the days of Jackson, our whig friends always “faint” at the sight of a hickory broom. If, sir, the people of Ohio have said anything through the medium of the ballot box, they have said to Franklin Pierce, “Sweep out the Galphins". (Tremendous cheering.)[6]

Bibliography 

(1) Michael Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 730.

(2) Timothy D. Johnson, A Gallant Little Army: The Mexico City Campaign (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 186; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Life of Franklin Pierce (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1852), 100–1; Justin H. Smith, The War with Mexico, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 415: “On account of illness Pierce had no part in the battles of Sept. 8 and 13. Probably in order to occupy a place in the reports he appeared at the Belén garita at about four a.m., Sept. 14 (though he belonged to Pillow’s division) on the ground that the Ninth Infantry was then serving under Quitman.” Hawthrone insinuated that Pierce took part in the Battle of Molino del Rey. “On the preceding day, (although the injuries and the over-exertion, resulting from previous marches and battles, had greatly enfeebled him,) General Pierce had acted with his brigade. In obedience to orders, it had occupied the field of Molino del Rey.” (Hawthrone, p. 104). See: Michael Holt, Franklin Pierce (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt and Co. 2010), 29. In his biography of Pierce, Holt claims Mexican cannon fire frightened Pierce’s horse, “causing it to buck and throwing Pierce’s groin violently against the saddle” until he “briefly lost consciousness and began to fall from the saddle. His horse tripped and fell on Pierce’s knee, resulting in a serious and painful injury.” Of Molino del Rey, Holt asserts that while walking Pierce “twisted the same knee injured in the previous fall and collapsed in acute pain” as his men marched into battle. “This time Pierce managed to hobble after his men, but by the time he reached them the serious fighting had ended.” As for the Battle of Chapultepec, Holt corroborates the story that Pierce “lay instead in a sick tent plagued with acute diarrhea.”

(3) The Louisville Daily Journal, July 13, 1852; “The Fainting General.” Illinois State Register, Springfield, July 8, 1852. (via the Pennsylvanian); “Speech of Hon. Stephen A. Douglas.” Washington Union, July 18, 1852.

(4) “Gen. Scott – Old Documents.” Nashville Union, June 23, 1852; “That Letter.” Lancaster Intelligencer, July 20, 1852 (quoting Hollidaysburg Standard); Timothy Johnson, Winfield Scott: The Quest for Military Glory (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 87–90.  

(5) Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, 754–6.

(6) “A Spicey Speech.” The Evening Post, Cleveland, Ohio, Dec. 23, 1852. See: William P. Brandon, “The Galphin Claim,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 15, no. 2 (1931), 113–5. “The term ‘Galphinism’ is a piece of American Political Slang which, though not in such common usage as it once was, is still found occasionally. The term originated with the famous Galphin claim in the Taylor administration and means, roughly, fraudulent raids on the treasury through the medium of false claims against the government. …The claim originated with one George Galphin, a licensed trader among the Creek and Cherokee Indians in the period just prior to the American Revolution, who, from his post on the east bank of the Savannah river, carried on a wide trade in both South Carolina and Georgia, especially the latter. He seems to have… attained a position of great influence among the natives, and to have been employed at various times by the British officials as mediator, interpreter, agent and so on, among them. The Creeks and Cherokees became indebted to Galphin and a number of the other traders to a large amount, Galphin’s claim against them being augmented by those of several of the other traders whose assignee he was. In 1773 the Indians, being unable to pay these claims, ceded to the whites, by the Treaty of Augusta, a large area of land in the present state of Georgia, with the express understanding that the claims of the traders were to be satisfied out of the proceeds of those lands.”