The Peggy Eaton thing is an interesting event. Imagine people calling John Edwards a whore and thus offending Obama so much he appoints Liz Edwards to the cabinet and then fires everyone else cause their spouses won’t invite John to parties. ;-D
Tennessee only went Whig cause of Van Buren? After 1832 I notice it didn’t go dem for President again till 1856. Even Polk lost it.
I notice the SC legislature didn’t back Jackson’s reelection (over his split with Calhoun and the nullifers I gather) and went with John Floyd in 1832 a nullifier who had been a National Republican. And a went with a local Whig in 1836 before returning to the dems thereafter.
I think Tennesseans were hoping Jackson would back his Senate successor, Hugh Lawson White (not that he could make him VP, since they hailed from the same state, but only give clear indications that White would be his preference for the 1836 election). I forget now if John C. Calhoun was also potentially jockeying for it, although he seemed to prefer to go back to the Senate over staying as VP (VP was a boring job, anyway), and the Eaton thing (and Jackson’s seeming distaste for Calhoun) wasn’t going to see Jackson support him, either. Van Buren seemed the only natural or logical choice for Jackson to support (although it was at the expense of pissing off the South — but had Jackson backed a Southerner, it might’ve similarly hacked off the North, so Jackson was going to have a problem no matter whomever he went with).
White, of course, switched to being anti-Jacksonian after Van Buren becoming VP. Even if Sen. White had been elected President, he wouldn’t have likely completed a full term, as he died in 1840.
SC was somewhat unusual in that it didn’t really have a Whig opposition in the state (at least most of the Southern states had either a respectable opposition, if not an outright Whig majority). The Nullifiers were the oppositionists, officially coming into being with 1831 (as a recognized opposition party, and they were the SC political majority). I’m surprised they didn’t officially become a longer-term majority party or become Whigs outright. Only Nullifier Sen. William Campbell Preston became a Whig (in 1837), but the remaining Nullifiers effectively returned en masse to the Democrat fold (disbanding effective 1839). Preston’s seatmate Calhoun (also serving as a Nullifier from the point at which he quit the VP post before its expiration in 1832), returned to the Dems at the same time Preston went to the Whigs.
SC only elected two Whigs in history to Congress (excluding Preston), that being Waddy Thompson, Jr. and his successor William Butler, Jr. (The Whig Butler was from the prominent Democrat family in the state - he was the brother of Andrew Pickens Butler, the Senator that was the subject of the vicious attacks by Sen. Charles Sumner).
I personally found it remarkable how the Whigs themselves managed to hold together as any sort of viable opposition (they remind me of the kooks around FR that exclaim we must vote against the Democrats just because they’re Democrats, no matter how viscerally odious that “R” is). I’d say many of the Southern Whigs were probably more pro-slavery than some of the Democrats ! They were more the party of the rich in the South. Many of them unapologetically joined the Confederate cause. Only a few of them were of the Conscience, rather than Cotton, vintage (such as those in East TN, who were more like anti-slave Northern Whigs, and went to the GOP and kept it that way now effectively 150 years without interruption).