A Yankee Whig in Milwaukee
All told, Rufus King Jr.’s time in Milwaukee was relatively short, lasting from only 1845 to 1861. Yet his efforts in shaping the foundations of the city, which was granted its municipal charter in 1846, were significant. This is particularly true of his work developing Milwaukee’s first public, or “common,” school system, where his mark is still visible in the schools and streets that bear his name. King’s efforts were informed by a strong Whig ideology that he hoped would knit the expanding nation together—economically and culturally—through railroads, canals, newspapers, and, at last, government-sponsored, tax-supported schools.
Knitting the Nation Together
On August 12, 1855, newspaper editor, local school board member, and Whig Party crusader Rufus King Jr. boarded a train in Milwaukee, barely able to contain his excitement for what lay ahead. A native New Yorker who had relocated to the Midwestern city a decade earlier, King was embarking on a multiday journey to Saint Paul, Minnesota. This journey was of particular importance to him because it had been made possible by the recent extension of the Milwaukee and Mississippi Railroad, a project, both expensive and laden with delays, that finally connected King’s adopted home on Lake Michigan with the Mississippi River at Prairie du Chien.
From Prairie du Chien, King took the steamship War Eagle to Saint Paul. The cutting-edge swiftness of this final leg, he noted, “a distance of three hundred miles … [in] just thirty-six hours,” represented perfectly to him the connective power of the Mississippi, which he often referred to fondly as the “Father of Waters.” “Every minute of it was … unalloyed enjoyment,” he wrote, for “it was a new experience and almost a new life for us all.”
As the trip unfolded, King recorded his experiences in great detail, sending portions back to Milwaukee where they were published in lengthy installments in the Milwaukee Sentinel, the newspaper that King himself both owned and edited. More than basic travel writing, his documentation of the trip reads like an advertisement for the Milwaukee and Mississippi Railroad and the towns through which it passed. To those King met along the way in places like Whitewater, Madison, and Black Earth, the arrival of the railroad meant easier movement of manufactured and agricultural products. It also promised a host of new possibilities for the future of the state and nation, as well as the role that government and business, perhaps working together, might play in that future. Whether it was through railroads, canals, or ideas carried by newspapers and telegraphs and in schools, King was certain his Whig ideals were making life better for himself, and for the rest of America, too.
As American political parties go, the Whig Party operated for a short time, from 1833 to 1856. Obscuring its historical legacy further, the two presidents produced by the Party, William Henry Harrison (1840) and Zachary Taylor (1848), died a month and sixteen months, respectively, after taking office. The Whigs are often remembered nonetheless because the program of national development they advanced was straightforward and cohesive, and because it put them directly at odds with their formidable Democratic Party foes. In short, the Whigs were the big government party of the day, believing the federal government should protect domestic industries with tariffs, subsidize internal improvements, and, most divisively, permit a national bank to regulate currency and make tax monies available for government investment in private enterprises. Defenders of the Whig platform, though far from homogenous, tended to be elite businessmen or professionals, farmers with ties to larger markets, residents or natives of New England, and members of New England–style Protestant churches.
By contrast, the Democratic Party, the party of Thomas Jefferson and later Andrew Jackson, tended to believe in a small government, preferring to relegate powers to state and local
