The Loco Foco line and the Salt River

1841—W. H. Harrison sends the steam boat Van Buren up the Salt River on the Loco Foco Line
The entry in the Dictionary of American History explains that the phrase, 'rowing up Salt river,' emerged during the 1832 presidential campaign, which pitted Andrew Jackson against Henry Clay. Clay reportedly hired a boatman to bring him up the Ohio River to Louisville where he was scheduled to deliver a campaign speech. As a supporter of Jackson, however, the boatman, mistakenly or perhaps deliberately, rowed Clay up Salt River, a branch of the Ohio, thus delaying his arrival in Louisville and causing him to miss his speaking appearance. Clay eventually lost the election, but whether or not the boatman's wrong turn contributed to the loss cannot be proven. According to some scholars, the phrase emerged in an 1839 congressional speech, and by 1840 it had been adopted in campaign songs. 

As interesting as the story about Henry Clay is, it cannot be accurate, for the expression was commonplace before 1832, as witnessed in a letter that Franklin Pierce wrote that is dated 8 Oct 1831. In it on the third page, Pierce said, "the plotters need not now struggle to change the direction of their squadron, they are politically 'rowed up Salt river.'"

The Louisville (Ky.) Advertiser gives the following description of Salt River:  Salt River is a small stream in this State, which empties into the Ohio River about twenty miles below this city. In the neighborhood of Shepherdsville, where the phrase of 'rowing up Salt river' originated, it is filled with rapids, snags, rocks, sandbars, &c. Of course, the navigation is extremely difficult, and rowing up Salt River is a matter not to be sneezed at. The labor attending it was so well known to those residing in the vicinity, that it became common among them, whenever anyone spoke of some very arduous undertaking, to tell him that he would find it harder than trying to row up Salt River. When some bully had received a sound whipping, it also became common to say that he had been 'rowed up Salt river,' and the same remark was likewise applied to a defeated political party. If the defeat was overwhelming, they were said to be 'rowed very far up Salt River.'

According to Wikipedia, Locofocos were a faction of the Democratic Party that existed from 1835 until the mid-1840s.  The faction was originally named the Equal Rights Party, and was created in New York City as a protest against that city’s regular Democratic organization (“Tammany Hall”). It contained a mixture of anti-Tammany Democrats and labor union veterans of the Working Men's Party.

The name “Locofoco” derives from “locofoco,” a kind of friction match. It originated when a group of New York Jacksonians used such matches to light candles to continue a political meeting after Tammany men tried to break up the meeting by turning off the gaslights. The name Loco-foco was originally used by John Marck for a self-igniting cigar, which he had patented in April 1834.  Marck, an immigrant, invented his name from a combination of the Latin prefix "loco", which as part of the word "locomotive" had recently entered general public use, and was usually misinterpreted to mean "self", and a misspelling of the Italian word "fuoco" for "fire.”  Therefore, Marck's name for his product was originally meant in the sense of "self-firing". It appears that Marck's term was quickly genericized to mean any self-igniting match, and it was this usage from which the faction derived its name.

The Whigs quickly seized upon the name, applying an alternate derivation of "Loco Foco", from the combination of the Spanish word "loco", meaning mad or crack brained, and "foco", from "focus". Their meaning then was that the faction, and later the entire Democratic Party, was the "focus of folly".  The use of "Locofoco" as a derogatory name for the Democratic Party continued well into the 1850s, even following the dissolution of the Whigs and their reformation as the Republican Party.

Never a national party, the Locofocos reached their peak in 1840, when President Martin Van Buren and Congress passed the Independent Treasury Act, which fulfilled a primary Locofoco aim: complete separation of the federal government from banking.  In the 1840 election, the term "Locofoco" was applied to the entire Democratic Party by its Whig opponents, both because Democratic President Martin Van Buren had incorporated many Locofoco ideas into his economic policy, and because Whigs considered the term to be derogatory.

In general, Locofocos supported Andrew Jackson and Van Buren, and were for free trade, greater circulation of specie, legal protections for labor unions and against paper money, financial speculation, and state banks.