As a young newspaperman, Samuel Clemens had to observe a country on greased rails headed twards catastrophe, as an elder author and famous observer of the human condition he saw a country going to war for small cause and repeated bouts of corruption and reform.
Some of this time there was a dominant Democratic Party, some of the time there was a dominant Republican party.
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Correction: there was NEVER a dominant Republican Party before Lincoln. There was an occasionally dominant Whig Party There were four Whig presidents: William Henry Harrison, who died in office and John Tyler became president Tyler was expelled from the Party for his strong States Rights pro slavery views, Zachary Taylor was elected president and also died in office, leaving the Presidency to Millard Fillmore, the last Whig President. Lincoln, a railroad company lawyer, was a Whig, and dropped out of politics when the Whigs disbanded. Whigs were pro-industrial and urban and anti-immigrant and anti Catholic. The name Whig was used during the Revolution by the Patriots. In 1856, the Republican Party emerged from the remains of the northern Whig Party and nominated John C Frémont the explorer and son in law of Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton. The most Whiggish of the Whigs, Henry Clay, never managed to get elected, though he did get the nomination.
In Quincy, Illinois, the local Newspaper is called the "Quincy Herald-Whig", formerly the "Whig Independent".
Mark Twain considered running as an independent for Governor of NY, but dropped out due to the slanderous nature of campaigning.
(Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Even when it comes to the game of politics, Twain doesn’t pull any punches. In his satirical account of being nominated for the position of Governor of New York and having to endure the smear campaign that seems to decide politics more than the actual views of the candidates, he ends with:
"By this time there had grown to be such a clamor for an "answer" to all the dreadful charges that were laid to me that the editors and leaders of my party said it would be political ruin for me to remain silent any longer. As if to make their appeal the more imperative, the following appeared in one of the papers the very next day:
BEHOLD THE MAN! — The Independent candidate still maintains Silence. Because he dare not speak. Every accusation against him has been amply proved, and they have been endorsed and re-endorsed by his own eloquent silence till at this day he stands forever convicted. Look upon your candidate, Independents! Look upon the Infamous Perjurer! the Montana Thief! the Body-Snatcher! Contemplate your incarnate Delirium Tremens! your Filthy Corruptionist! your Loath some Embracer! Gaze upon him — ponder him well — and then say if you can give your honest votes to a creature who has earned this dismal array of titles by his hideous crimes, and dares not open his mouth in denial of any one of them!
There was no possible way of getting out of it, and so, in deep humiliation, I set about preparing to "answer" a mass of baseless charges and mean and wicked falsehoods. But I never finished the task, for the very next morning a paper came out with a new horror, a fresh malignity, and seriously charged me with burning a lunatic asylum with all its inmates because it obstructed the view from my house. This threw me into a sort of panic. Then came the charge of poisoning my uncle to get his property, with an imperative demand that the grave should be opened. This drove me to the verge of distraction. On top of this I was accused of employing toothless and incompetent old relatives to prepare the food for the foundling hospital when I was warden. I was wavering — wavering. And at last, as a due and fitting climax to the shameless persecution that party rancor had inflicted upon me, nine little toddling children of all shades of color and degrees of raggedness were taught to rush on to the platform at a public meeting and clasp me around the legs and call me PA!
I gave up. I hauled down my colors and surrendered. I was not equal to the requirements of a Gubernatorial campaign in the State of New York, and so I sent in my withdrawal from the candidacy, and in bitterness of spirit signed it,
"Truly yours,
"Once a decent man, but now
"MARK TWAIN, I. P., M. T., B. S., D. T., F. C., and L. E
