Odd Wisconsin Archive
Our First Presidential Candidate
Gov. Tommy Thompson’s potential run for the White House prompted us to investigate the first Wisconsin resident floated as a presidential candidate. That turns out to have been Isaac P. Walker and, as is so often the case, his story has a strange twist.
Walker (1813-1872) was the younger brother of George H. Walker, one of the founders of Milwaukee. He was born in Virginia but trained in the law in Illinois; he and Abraham Lincoln, though belonging to opposing parties, were legal colleagues in Springfield. He came to Wisconsin in 1841 to practice law and entered Democratic politics.
Walker was soon elected to the Territorial legislature and when Wisconsin became a state in 1848, his colleagues chose him as one of our first two senators. Though born in the South and a member of the party of Jefferson and Jackson, he did not support slavery: “I am uncompromisingly opposed to the extension of chattel slavery into territory either now owned or which may hereafter be acquired by the United States,” he said in 1848. It was a view supported by many Wisconsin voters, and he served in Washington until 1855.
Two of Walker’s legislative priorities were election of senators by the people, instead of in party conventions, and direct taxation of citizens according to their wealth. He also supported women’s rights. His chief concern, however, was to enable the easy acquisition of frontier land by immigrants and homesteaders. He fought against the interests of large real estate speculators and urged that tracts up to 160 acres be given free to the landless. He became the pre-eminent advocate for radical land reform, and his ideas would bear fruit in 1862, after he had left the Congress, in the famous Homestead Law.
In 1850 land reformers in New Jersey urged his nomination as the Democratic candidate for president in 1852. The New York political machine known as Tammany Hall followed suit, as did the National Industrial Congress, a nationwide reform organization. But Walker’s presidential bid was undermined by a stand he’d taken on conscience, which cost him the support of Wisconsin party leaders.
During his term, the Congress was trying to avoid a national conflict over slavery by alternately admitting new states where the practice was admitted and states where it was prohibited: every new slave state was followed by a new “free soil” one. Their intention was to keep a balance between pro- and anti-slavery lawmakers in Washington. In Wisconsin, however, public opinion was firmly against extending slavery to any new states at all.
When the case of California and New Mexico came up early in 1849, Wisconsin Democrats instructed the state’s Congressional delegation to oppose the bill admitting them to the U.S. because slavery was not explicitly outlawed in it. Walker broke party ranks and didn't follow their instructions. He was afraid that the controversy might break apart the Union, and if the choice was between preserving the Constitution and stopping the possible spread of slavery, he would support the Constitution.
“If the Constitution will extend slavery to the land,” he wrote in explanation, “then let it go. If by the Constitution slavery is extended, I am willing to stand by that Constitution. If we cannot put a check on slavery without doing violence to the Constitution, I say let it be unchecked. For slavery and the opposition to it are creating a feeling disastrous — a state of things from which our country can reap nothing but disaster, in my opinion, and the agitation of which must enhance that disaster.” Abolitionists called him a traitor, and Wisconsin Democratic leaders tried to recall him from Washington (he refused to come home) and never forgave him.
So when New Jersey and New York reformers suggested him as a possible candidate of their party for president two years later, his own state’s leaders refused to support him. “Good Lord deliver us!,” wrote the Watertown Register. “There is less chance of his getting the nomination by the people of this state than there is for his being struck by lightning."
He served out his Senate term and in 1856 returned home to a farm near Eagle, in Waukesha County. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Union cause during the Civil War, and repeatedly argued that he'd never intended to support slavery. In 1864 he resumed his law practice in Milwaukee, where he died in relative obscurity in 1872.
:: Posted in Odd Lives on January 10, 2007
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