The 1852 presidential election reflected the country. It was a mess with little common ground.
The Whig race in ‘52, Daniel Webster out in front
The Whig Party split along North/South lines. Attitudes toward the Fugitive Slave Law was the breaking point. This election was their swan song. The Democratic party splintered, but held. Their candidates were more sympathetic to the needs of the South, but they had no easier time selecting a candidate.
Three candidates pushed for the 1852 Whig nomination. Daniel Webster, Stockton’s friend, the master orator and three-time secretary of state, General Winfield Scott, hero of the Mexican War for his capture of Mexico City, and President Millard Fillmore. On the 53rd ballot, Scott emerged as their candidate.
The Democrat’s selection process was equally chaotic. James Buchannan took the early lead at the convention in Baltimore, but Stephen Douglas, who had gotten Clay’s compromise of 1850 passed, stood in his way. Ten total candidates made it difficult for anyone to get the two-thirds votes needed.
Robert stayed out of the crowded field. He felt the position of President, “should not be desired or sought”. He mentioned the disruption to family and the unique ability to offend friends. He also hated the process of nominations by those in power. The original caucus system had been abandoned for conventions, but Robert wanted the people, not the cliques of politics to select their candidates.
Despite his attitudes, the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Courier printed that, “The public mind outside the Convention had settled down to the conviction that Commodore Stockton was to be the successful favorite and so unquestionably would, had his name been simply announced in compliance with the universal anticipation.”
After 35 unsuccessful ballots, the Virginia delegation looked for someone from the North with acceptable views on states rights and abolition. Amongst themselves, they selected two men, Stockton and Franklin Pierce from New Hampshire. Pierce won by a single vote, and they put his name into the ring on the 36th ballot. After the New Jersey delegation finally conceded to Pierce, he won the nomination after the 47th ballot. Had Stockton been their late entry, he would have easily been the nominee. "A narrow escape from being a Candidate," noted the Trenton State Gazette.
Franklin Pierce forced to bow to the devil for his support for the Fugitive Slave act.
Winfield Scott ran a poor campaign. The South strongly backed Pierce, who won the election easily. He is widely considered one of the worst Presidents of all time.
New parties would form. The new Republican Party, The Free Soil Party. The American Native Party, based on views on slavery, states rights, immigrant voting, and western expansion.
Stockton was rumored for Secretay of the Navy, but he showed no interest. His party had left him, and perhaps 1856 would be the time to unite the country.
Daniel Webster died before Pierce took office and Stockton praised his 30-year friend on the floor of the Senate in December without any reservation:
“As far as my researches into the history of the world have gone, they have failed to discover his superior. Not even on the records of Greece and Rome, or of any other nation are to be found the traces of a man with superior endowments as our own Webster.”
Robert passed his Senate seat on to his son-in-law John Renshaw Thompson, husband of his daughter Anna. He achieved preserving the ban on flogging sailors in the Navy, but he did not tolerate Senate politics well in the poisoned atmosphere of Washington DC. John Thompson had been running Stockton’s Joint Companies. So Stockton took over as President and Chairman of the canal and railroad monopoly.
At 58, he looked for a place to relax. He looked toward the Monmouth shore, Wall Township near where his grandfather had hidden during the British Occupation. A place fit for the richest retired man in the state.
Long Branch and Cape May were the two established ‘watering places’ at the Shore, but Stockton sought an easy trip from Princeton, privacy, and a place to impress important visitors. He had not given up on his Presidential aspirations. His vacation spot would have to be as impressive as Morven.
Four contiguous area farms became available in 1853.
The first was the estate of Dr. Charles Montrose Graham. “Oceanside” was located at the south end of the Wreck Pond Inlet. Dr. Graham had patented an improved set of dentures. He also owned a street of Townhomes in Manhattan and a farm in Harlem called “Content” as well as a copper mine in Northern New Jersey.
His will implied that he did not get along with his son, Charles II, and planned to leave Oceanside to his two grandsons. One of his grandsons died while on John Audobon’s ill-fated 49er gold expedition to California. Hit by a stray shot when someone dropped a rifle, Charles Montrose Graham III got gangrene and died on the trail.
Then Dr. Graham’s remaining grandson Edward Ennis Graham died while swimming in the ocean near the Wreck Pond inlet. Edward’s young son also died, leaving his wife Sarah Jane Graham to inherit the farm. But she married Thomas Bell Jr. who worked the farm for Graham. The Bells also inherited land in Eatontown from his father and looked to sell Oceanside. Bell Place in Sea Girt is a nod to the Bell’s Farm.
Thomas Shearman owned the middle piece of property, just to the south of Oceanside. Shearman left his property to his younger wife, but she also died, and the sons were old men with farms of their own.
Garrett Curtis’s land made up the west end of the plot which ran to Newberry’s Pond was also dead and buried in the Curtis graveyard near where the railroad tracks at 600 Sea Girt Ave, where a Verizon building stands. The bodies were re-interned at Atlantic Cemetery in the 1990s.
Curtis’ daughter Martha Elizabeth Curtis farmed this land for a time with husband Charles David Sayre White. The White's would keep a small farmette at Wreck Pond where they also ran a roadhouse which would eventually become Jimmy Byrnes Sea Girt Inn. The White’s daughter Arenda married Thomas Devlin who built the Parker House twenty-five years later.
Joseph Mount owned 120 acres to the Southeast and shared the beachfront and Newberry’s Pond with Squan. Captain Mount had been arrested during a British raid at Egg Harbor during the Revolution and imprisoned in Nova Scotia.
The Mount Farmhouse still stands in the National Guard fort at Sea Girt.
Stockton purchased the four plots in 1853 putting together an oasis. Over a mile of beachfront, room for a horse track, a cedar forest and farm. The land was bound by inlets on two sides.
In 1849 there was a dramatic book written about a Christian martyr named Zenon, by Reverend Richard Cobold. The Commodore may have derived the name for his “Sea Girt” estate from this quote by Zenon’s mother:
"Deeply, deeply indeed did the venerable lady seem to feel this truthful observation. Her eyes, swollen-with tears, were lifted up, yet lightened too with such a benign expression, that she became the personification of submission.”
“‘Preserve my country,’ she exclaimed, ‘preserve my sea-girt isle, my rock-bound shores, my wooded hills, my fertile plains! Preserve my brave people, my loved friends, my virtuous relatives preserve them from Roman tyrannies, Roman vices, Roman superstitions ! They are a free-born race, dear ladies, they are a generous people. They are not inhospitable, but they are subdued— they are not slaves. I am a Briton.’”
Stockton certainly wanted to preserve his country.
The Sherman Farmhouse might have sufficed, but the multi-millionaire insisted he wanted a mansion built on the edge of the dunes. A “Beach House”, with a basement built into the front of the dunes so that the main floor of the house was at the top of the sand. He had the finest virgin timber cut in the Mississippi woods near where his brother had his fatal argument and the logs were floated downriver and shipped from New Orleans.
Stockton’s mansion in 1883 atop the dunes. It was then the centerpiece of the Beach House Hotel.
The ocean facing side of the house was built to resemble a quarterdeck with a 15 foot wide piazza decking and railing. standing there with his spotting scope Stockton could feel as if he was truly on the water. His instructions were to build so close he could feel the spray from the surf on a windy day. The boat traffic down the coast allowed him plenty of ships to monitor and he moored his yacht just off the beach. The house dared the ocean to come in.
The “quarterdeck” piazza of Stockton’s Beach House. Marriott C. Morris took this and the photo above in 1883, and the Library Company of Philadelphia digitized it and has made it available.
Maria, frightened of being washed away at night, returned to the farmhouse every evening until a more suitable house would be built inland. The “Cottage”, (which was rebuilt in the 1930s as an inn) was her house and a portion of the structure survives as “Rod’s Tavern” on Washington Avenue, the main commercial street in Sea Girt.
For his prize thoroughbreds, a three-quarter mile crescent-shaped horse racing track was cut from the forested land just to north of the house. The home stretch was the beach. He ordered a rolling green lawn planted for games. The Commodore hosted his friends from Princeton, Philadelphia and Washington. He rode the estate on his white Arabian with black spots, touring the property for his guests who rode along on lesser horses. The seashore estate had no equal.
The initial brochure for the town of Sea Girt gives a view of the crescent race track which was to be preserved. It notes that Stockton could have lived anywhere on the coast, but chose this location.
Stockton with presidential thoughts for 1856 needed to work hard to impress guests as standards of dining and accommodation for the super wealthy and politically connected were just then on the rise.
With no trains from Princeton, they came to Sea Girt in a caravan of wagons and carriages. The parade from Morven with the family, famous friends, servants, stable boys and porters drew spectators at the beginning and end of each six-week season for twelve years. To keep them fresh, the racehorses rode in a covered custom carriage, which included an office for Stockton.