Post # 16 ~ Gyascutus or Whig?

Gyascutus Activism

I learned from Tom Downey's book, Planting a Capitalist South: Masters, Merchants, and Manufacturers in the Southern Interior, 1790-1860 (2005), about currents of thought in Hamburg that alarmed many upstate planters. Political activism by Hamburg merchants and bankers (joined by like-minded businessmen from Augusta) angered the agrarian majority in South Carolina and Georgia, staunch Democrat party voters. Downey wrote of the Hamburg Whigs:

Their platform accused Van Burenites [Democrats] of hereditary pretensions and stifling the republican principle of rotation in office. In their stead, Hamburg Whigs called for political reform and an end to the corruption and cronyism they associated with the Democratic Party.

"Set-to between the champion Old Tip & the swell Dutcheman of Kinderhook - 1836." Political cartoon from the 1836 presidential campaign. LOC

Abundant evidence of this growing friction is found in newspapers from 1835-1860. Early on, the Hamburg Whigs were accused of supporting a national bank, which would erode states’ rights. Even worse, Hamburg merchants vigorously resisted South Carolina's popular, emotional call for secession. They opposed nullification, separate-secession, and the Democrat political machine. (And that was true. Henry Langford Jeffers and his colleagues worked for "co-operationist" goals for decades. But in 1860 they laid it aside - after Secession they joined with their state and their people.) 

It is amazing how roundly the Whigs were denounced - reminds me so much of current times. There are newspaper references to be found, "memes" we would call them, equating Whigs to the Gyascutus. Is that how John Abney Chapman came to mentally link the town of Hamburg and the beast? 

The 1848-11-03 Augusta Daily Constitutionalist boasted that the "staunch Democratic State of Georgia...have got the Whig wolf by the ears." After the upcoming election, the newspaper predicted, just after "sundown of the 7th of November...they can let the 'crittur' go. The Whig 'Gyascutus' can then be turned loose and nobody will be hurt."

The Gyascutus was a popular image in 19th Century political cartoons. (All factions used it; this one depicts the Confederacy as the Gyascutus monster.) LOC.

But that "Whig-wolf" Gyascutus of the 1848 election was still hanging around. On 1850-08-03 the Macon Southern Tribune declared the national Whig party to be a hideous, cheating "political gyascutus" which needed to be exposed:

We should like to see it uncovered. The Whig State Convention, which met at Montpelier, Vermont, on the 17th July, passed a resolution unanimously that slavery should be prohibited in all the territories and future new States.

And there you have it. 

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One more thing  - a little inside family-baseball note, maybe of interest only to descendants of William Henry Jeffers 1910-2008 (my father). I asked him once, many decades ago, where he got his Christian name. He said he was in a line of Jeffers named after President William Henry Harrison. I (ignorantly) thought he must be mistaken because that didn’t fit with what I knew about the south. But now, as he would say, I stand corrected. 

Whig campaign ribbon. LOC.

Reading in the old newspapers about Henry Langford Jeffers’ decades-long efforts to support the Whig platform, I can see why he would be a great admirer of Whig leader William Henry Harrison. Though Harrison did not win the presidential election in 1836, Henry and Eliza Ann Jeffers honored him by naming their first-born son after him: William Henry Jeffers. Thankfully, they didn't name him Tippecanoe.

William Henry Jeffers 1836-1890

William Henry Jeffers 1910-2008

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Harrison did win the presidential election of 1840, but he lived only one month after inauguration. Henry Langford Jeffers continued to organize and rally with the “Hamburg Whigs” right up until the mid-1850s, when he moved his office to Charleston. 

This could not have been an easy course of action for him; Jeffers needed and cultivated the business of large planters. The newspapers are full of stinging denouncements of the unpopular group in Hamburg - on the very same pages carrying H. L. Jeffers’ advertisements inducing planters to entrust their business to him. The man had self-confidence.