Andrew Jackson Donelson, August 25, 1799 (Nashville, Tenn.) – June 26, 1871 (Memphis, Tenn.)
VP candidate for American (Know-Nothing) Party 1856
Running mate with nominee: Millard Fillmore (1800-1874)
Popular vote: 873,053 (21.53%)
Electoral vote: 8/296
The campaign: This was the first presidential election in American history where the two mainstream parties look familiar to us today-- the Democratic and Republican parties.
Starting as a secret society, the Native American Party morphed into the American Party, aka, the Know Nothings (as in "I know nothing and will not talk.") This conspiracy-based movement was anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant, targeting the Irish in particular. It was also a populist political force that eschewed expertise, career politicians, and what they viewed as elitism. The Party also relied on gang violence to rally the vote as they took political control of several major cities.
Most of the now disenfranchised Whigs helped to form the new Republican Party, but the American Party also had a large number of former Whigs join their ranks, including the last Whig President, Millard Fillmore. It was thought that Donelson, as biologically Jackson as a Jackson Democrat could be, would balance the ticket. Many people wondered why Fillmore or Donelson would join such a party since they both represented the very type of political figures the Know-Nothings despised.
By 1856 the American Party had grown into a national force with a significant number of elected officials including in the US House and Senate. But after this election they quickly vanished from the political radar as the Civil War introduced a whole new era.
With the Republican Party still in an embryonic state in 1856, only half of the states presented a three-way choice on the ballot, mostly in the North. In those races, the American Party took Maryland with 54.63% of the vote and were the runner-ups in California. They placed second in the other half of the country where the Republican ticket was not offered as a choice, nearly winning in Louisiana. After the election the American party members migrated to the Republican or the Constitutional Union parties.
Election history: None
Other occupations: soldier, attorney, private secretary to the President (Jackson), United States Chargé d'Affaires to Texas 1844-1845, United States Envoy to Prussia 1846-1849, newspaper editor
Buried: Elmwood Cemetery, Memphis, Tenn.
Notes:
Buried in the same cemetery with many Confederate military figures, as well as Civil War historian Shelby Foote (1916-2005).
Upon the death of his father in 1804, Donelson and his two brothers were adopted by their aunt, Rachel Donelson Jackson and her husband Andrew Jackson. The Donelson brothers were raised in the Hermitage.
He married his first cousin, Emily Tennessee Donelson, who later became the acting-First Lady for part of the time Andrew Jackson lived in the White House. She died in 1836.
Donelson's second wife Elizabeth Martin Randolph was a widow of Meriwether Lewis Randolph, a great-grandson of Thomas Jefferson.
Drummed out the Democratic Party by 1852
Delegate to the Constitutional Union Party in 1860
Owned "scores of slaves" between his plantations in Memphis and in Mississippi until the Emancipation Proclamation and then subsequently complained about having to pay his labor force.
Died in the original Peabody Hotel in Memphis, which had also served as home to Jefferson Davis during the same era.
