A startling moment during a forgotten presidential rally
by Jack Neely
That week in the fall of 1856, the Whig Party was nearly done for, but you might not have guessed it from the crowds.
They arrived by the thousands, most of them by the new railroad, and paraded down Gay Street to the sounds of brass military bands playing patriotic favorites. Brownlow's Knoxville Whig estimated the crowd at upwards of 20,000. Some said 40,000. For a city with an official population of only about 5,000, it was unprecedented.
Men in top hats and long coats carried silk banners that declared, "No South—No North—One Constitution—One Country—One Destiny." Across the top was the name MILLARD FILLMORE.
We don't always recall that Millard Fillmore could arouse this much passion. His supporters saw the former president as America's greatest champion against the Democrat James Buchanan, and the upstart third-party threat, Republican John Fremont. The not-yet-grand, not-yet-old party was too radical to have many followers in the South.
The melancholy Whig Party, the anti-Democrat coalition founded only 20 years ago as a reaction to President Jackson, had already elected two presidents; Harrison and Taylor had become the first and second U.S. presidents to die in office. They had showed a talent for compromising some issues, but they left the scariest and most important ones, like slavery, alone.
Knoxville had been a Southern hotbed of the Whig Party. To some Americans in the 1850s, Knoxville's claim to fame was that it was the hometown of the late Whig godfather, Hugh Lawson White.
Striking for his lean, emaciated appearance, during his heyday in the 1820s and '30s, Sen. White had been known up in Washington as the Skeleton. An old friend and ally of Davy Crockett's, he had outraged his old friend Andrew Jackson when he became the first Whig ally to run for president. It was back in the strange election of 1836, the year the new, barely organized anti-Jackson coalition had nominated three candidates—White, William Henry Harrison, and Daniel Webster—to run against Van Buren. They lost, of course, but maybe helped break the country in for Harrison's Whig victory of 1840.
White had died that year, during the dramatic Harrison campaign, but he was still very much on people's minds. In 1856, a Philadelphia firm published what would be a popular book about White and his complicated career.
By then, the Whigs were disintegrating into pro- and anti-slavery contingents. They gave up on running an official nominee that year, but held a convention to back former president Millard Fillmore, who'd been nominated by another party.
The thousands who came to Knoxville that day were mostly Whigs and former Whigs, but came to attend a four-day event they called "The Feast of E Pluribus Unum"—or, more prosaically, as "The Rally of the Americans of East Tennessee."
In 1856, the word American had a peculiar meaning; the sudden American Party was better known as the "Know-Nothings," the semi-secret political organization named for what they said if you asked them prying questions. They had an even more tortured platform than the Whigs had. The Know-Nothings had a reputation for being against a lot of varieties of people, including Masons and Catholics, though some of the Knoxville Know-Nothings vigorously denied they were anti-immigrant. They nominated New Yorker Millard Fillmore for president, to run against Democrat James Buchanan.
Anyway, they were all here that day, the Whigs and the Know-Nothings, and some of them spoke at the courthouse—among them was Horace Maynard, the young, longhaired Massachusetts intellectual in the early days of his influential career in Tennessee politics. Cooks prepared for the massive feast, with 1,300 feet of tables at which they'd serve barbecued chicken and turkeys.
Then the assembly turned and proceeded en masse across First Creek toward Old Methodist Hill, just east of downtown overlooking the river. That knoll was sacred to Tennessee Whigs. The Skeleton himself had once owned this hill—his old house still stood there. Though he was not a religious man himself, he had donated his hill to the Methodist Church, which established a chapel and graveyard there, hence its name. Methodist Hill had also been the scene of several memorable Whig gatherings. Few could forget the one in 1838, a rousing convention where Sen. White himself spoke—just before he and many other attendees fell ill with "the pestilence," a horrible disease of uncertain origin. Several Whig dignitaries died in the 1838 plague. The elderly White survived the worst of it, but never fully recovered. In 1840, he died in his house there on Methodist Hill.
Several of the Whigs of 1856 weren't even old enough to remember the Skeleton. William T. Haskell hadn't been quite old enough to vote for White, but in 1856, he was one of the Southern Whigs' most celebrated orators, a hero of the Mexican War. Though the Americans won the decisive battle of Cerro Gordo in 1847, Col. Haskell's Tennessee Volunteers had suffered heavy losses in a gallant charge. He was such a hero that, upon his return, his district promptly elected him to U.S. Congress.
Col. Haskell arrived in Knoxville that Thursday to greet the throngs. He was suffering from what they called the ague, but he thought he could carry out his promise to address this impressive assembly.
He stepped up on the Stand on Methodist Hill, removed his long coat, and spoke. It was "a speech of thrilling eloquence, of burning and biting sarcasm, manly argument, and of unsurpassed power and effect," Brownlow reported, "only equaled by the roar of brass cannons on a neighboring summit." Col. Haskell somehow kept the attention of 20,000 people for four hours and ten minutes.
What made it especially effective was something peculiar that happened during the course of it. A 17-year-old aspiring reporter named William Rule was there. He recalled that day as an old newspaper editor, many years later.
Haskell was paying homage to Whig saints, as any orator would. He evoked dead Whig heroes Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Then he turned to the former house of the Skeleton. Gesturing at the house, he "evoked the spirit of Hugh Lawson White to come forth."
At that moment, something about Haskell's presentation changed. It was, Rule recalled, as if Haskell spoke with "a voice from the grave." Suddenly Haskell possessed the voice, the personality, the soul of Hugh Lawson White.
"There were suppressed shrieks from the women," Rule recalled. "Thousands of men blanched in dread of a supernatural presence."
Then, of course, they all sat down at that long, long table on the hillside and had some barbecue.
"TENNESSEE IS SURE FOR FILLMORE...." declared Brownlow's Whig. They were wrong. Tennessee went for Buchanan, as did most of the nation. Republican Fremont came in second; the once-mighty Whigs were suddenly a third party.
The Know-Nothings disappeared after 1856. Soon after, even the Whig Party was lost in the smoke of the war. Many, probably most of those who rallied on Methodist Hill in 1856 would be Unionists, and later Republicans; some would be Confederates, and later Democrats.
We don't know which way the charismatic young Col. Haskell would have gone; he died in an asylum in early 1859, two and a half years after he made the ladies gasp in Knoxville.
October 26, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 43
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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