Retrieval

Beards, Bachelors, and Brides: The Surprisingly Spicy Politics of the Presidential Election of 1856

Of the presidential elections in early America, few have stressed the themes of sex and gender so spicily as the heated contest of 1856.

A beard, a bachelor, and a bride. The combination could provide the tagline to a modern sitcom. But the presidential election of 1856 was no laughing matter, as an unprecedented sectional feeling of tumult pervaded the nation. In May 1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina had caned Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Likewise, violent encounters between proslavery and antislavery forces racked the Kansas territory, so much so that the place had obtained a new moniker: “Bleeding Kansas.” In addition, a nativist coalition opposed to immigrants and Catholics offered a viable third-party challenge in the form of the widower and ex-president Millard Fillmore of New York (under the banner of the American Party or Know Nothings, as they were commonly called). Finally, social issues were insistently creeping like never before into the American consciousness, with cries of abolition, prohibition, and women’s suffrage being shouted in louder voices than ever before. In such an environment, for one man to be right, another necessarily had to be wrong.

With the political stakes that much higher in 1856, the nation was actually asking a much larger, gendered question: what makes for a “real man”? In the tumultuous political climate of 1856, the electorate of mostly white men could reach no easy consensus. Competing views of manhood, usefully delineated by the historian Amy Greenberg as “martial” and “restrained,” divided the nation along sectional lines. The more industrialized and urbanized North valued “restrained” forms of manhood, while the more agrarian, slave-holding South lionized “martial” manhood. These gendered differences routinely filtered into the political questions of the day. Conservatives derided pro-feminist proponents of women’s suffrage as “Aunt Nancy” men; abolitionists lambasted the destruction of black motherhood in the slave-holding South as morally evil; and filibusterers in Central America justified their conquest on racialized expressions of superior manhood. To a large degree, differences over gender had become as contentious as the traditional divisions engendered by sectional or party politics.

More than in previous presidential elections, political cartoons transformed visually the partisan battles of Democrats, Republicans, and Know Nothings into personal battles among fighting men. Usually distributed as standalone prints, the stunning visual imagery crystalized the meaning of political battles into pictorial, and very often gendered, terms. In “The Grand National Fight 2 Against 1 Fought on the 6th of Nov. 1856 for One Hundred Thousand Dollars,” Buchanan is depicted as a dignified but strong man, fully capable of knocking down his opponent Frémont in a match of fisticuffs. The caption above Buchanan reads “Look out now Young Mariposa for that hair on your face I will put in the ‘Right’ when you least expect it!” The allusion to Mariposa, a knock at the poor performance of the California State Militia in the so-called Mariposa War of 1850-1851, was meant as an attack on Frémont’s adopted state of California and implicitly on his manhood as well.