Mass-meetings and songs--Crushing defeat of
the Democrats--First appearance of the slavery issue in politics--
Pro-slavery attitude of Harrison and Van Buren--Events favoring
the growth of anti-slavery opinion--Clay and Mendenhall--Texas
annexation and John Tyler.

Through the influence of early associations, I began my political
life as a Whig, casting my first presidential ballot for General
Harrison, in 1840. I knew next to nothing of our party politics;
but in the matter of attending mass-meetings, singing Whig songs
and drinking hard cider, I played a considerable part in the
memorable campaign of that year. So far as ideas entered into my
support of the Whig candidate, I simply regarded him as a poor man,
whose home was a log cabin, and who would in some way help the
people through their scuffle with poverty and the "hard times";
while I was fully persuaded that Van Buren was not only a graceless
aristocrat and a dandy, but a cunning conspirator, seeking the
overthrow of his country's liberties by uniting the sword and the
purse in his own clutches, as he was often painted on the party
banners. In these impressions I was by no means singular. They
filled the air, and seemed to be wafted on every breeze. Horace
Greeley's famous campaign organ, "The Log Cabin," only gave them
voice and fitting pictorial effect, and he frankly admitted in
later years that his Whig appeals, with his music and wood engravings
of General Harrison's battle scenes, were more "vivid" than "sedately
argumentative." No one will now seriously pretend that this was
a campaign of ideas, or a struggle for political reform in any
sense. It was a grand national frolic, in which the imprisoned
mirth and fun of the people found such jubilant and uproarious
expression that anything like calmness of judgment or real seriousness
of purpose was out of the question in the Whig camp.

As regards party issues, General Harrison, singularly enough, was
not a Whig, but an old fashioned States-Rights Democrat of the
Jeffersonian school. His letters to Harmar Denny and Sherrod
Williams committed him to none of the dogmas which defined a Whig.
No authentic utterance of his could be produced in which he had
ever expressed his agreement with the Whig party on the questions
of a protective tariff, internal improvements, or a national bank.
There was very high Whig authority for saying that the bank question
was not an issue of the canvass, while Van Bure