Lincoln's Mentors

by Michael J. Gerhardt

  V

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  Millard Fillmore was not much better known in 1850 than he is today. Taylor had barely given a second thought to the selection of his vice president, either at the convention or once they were in office. Their differences defined their relationship, or lack of one. At six feet, Fillmore towered over the short, weather-beaten ex-soldier. As a young man, Fillmore was regarded as strikingly handsome with brown wavy hair. Now his hair was white, and he had gained nearly fifty pounds. Prior to his selection as a compromise choice to be Taylor’s running mate, Fillmore had chaired the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. He tried but failed to win the House speakership in 1841 and New York’s governorship in 1844. He arrived at the convention as New York’s comptroller, a particularly unimpressive credential, but his nomination appealed to the delegates because he came from a rival wing of the party to that of Seward and Weed, who were already suspected of having positioned themselves to wield enormous influence within the administration if Taylor won. Thus Fillmore’s addition to the ticket was not only supposed to broaden Taylor’s support within the party but check the oversized influence of Seward and Weed.

  The plan failed. Taylor ignored Fillmore. Taylor didn’t listen to him; indeed, he barely let Fillmore say anything in his presence.

  Fillmore knew Lincoln but was unimpressed. As a modestly successful lawyer from the West, Lincoln offered little of interest to the new president as a one-term Whig congressman who told entertaining stories. Thurlow Weed, ever the self-interested matchmaker, arranged the first meeting between the two men in Albany, New York, on September 24, 1848. Weed had been instrumental to Taylor’s nomination, and he was the force behind William Seward’s rise in American politics. As someone who appeared aligned with Seward, Lincoln knew he could expect little if anything from Fillmore. Whatever was discussed at their meeting, it led nowhere. Lincoln never bothered to apply for any government post while Fillmore was president. The two men did not meet again in person until after Fillmore left office.

  Even before Taylor died in July 1850, Fillmore had told Clay that he intended, if he got the chance, to cast the tie-breaking vote to approve a compromise bill. Taylor had been angry over the news, for Fillmore seemed disposed to accept any compromise with the slave power, not just the one Clay forged. On the day that Fillmore became president, he told Daniel Webster, then a key proponent for compromise in the Senate, that he was withdrawing Taylor’s plan and was willing to accept any reasonable agreement approved by Congress. On Fillmore’s second day as president, the entire Cabinet resigned in protest over his pledge to Webster. Fillmore promptly accepted the resignations and underscored them by appointing Webster as secretary of state. Webster accepted the job, correctly realizing that his selection was a confirmation of Fillmore’s intention to approve any legislative compromise. Others in Congress read it the same way.

  Meanwhile, Clay was trying to craft an agreement through a series of separate bills, each appeasing a different constituency in Congress. Nearly six months before Taylor died, he began introducing these bills in a set of speeches that would eventually be remembered as among his greatest. Clay ended the first of them with a clever piece of theater. He said a man had come to his hotel earlier that day and given him “a precious relic.”90 Clay paused, and then produced it: “It is a fragment of the coffin of Washington.”91 He rhetorically asked if this relic was a bad omen for the Union and answered, “No, sir, no.”92 It was instead a warning for Congress “to beware, to pause, to reflect before they lend themselves to any purposes which shall destroy the Union which was cemented by his exertions and example.”93 The story never happened, but it served Clay’s purposes.

  Two months later, Clay delivered one of his longest and most memorable speeches, on February 5, 1850, to plead for a compromise to save the Union. Warning that disunion was an imminent threat, he begged his fellow senators, from both the North and the South, to “pause” before they took the final steps to destroy the Union through bloody civil war. He proposed a plan that had three goals: to settle once and for all every question arising from the problem of slavery; to craft a compromise that required neither side to sacrifice its core principles; and to ask the opposing sides to make concessions, “not of principle,” but “of feeling, of opinion.”94 He called for mutual forbearance from both parties, saying that flexibility would not be easy for either side, but asking each to overcome their distrust of the other or face the destruction of all they held dear.

  The next day, Clay returned to the floor of the Senate to continue pressing his case. He again predicted that secession—as threatened by John Calhoun and Jefferson Davis—meant civil war. Staring at Fillmore, who was sitting as the presiding officer of the Senate, Clay declared,

  I am directly opposed to any purpose of secession or separation. I am for staying within the Union, and for defying any portion of this confederacy to expel or drive me out of the Union. I am for staying within the Union, and fighting for my rights, if necessary, with the sword, within the bounds and under the safeguard of the Union. . . . Here I am within it, and here I mean to stand and die.95

  He then concluded his two-day plea:

  I implore gentlemen, I adjure them, whether from the South or the North, by all that they hold dear in this world—by all their love of liberty—by all their veneration for their ancestors—by all their regard for posterity—by all their gratitude to Him who has bestowed on them such unnumbered and countless blessings—by all the duties which they owe to mankind—and all the duties they owe to themselves, to pause, solemnly to pause at the edge of the precipice, before the fearful and dangerous leap is taken into the yawning abyss below. . . .96

  Clay took one final pause, again looking directly at Fillmore. “I implore, as the best blessing which Heaven can bestow upon me, upon earth, that if the direful event of the dissolution of the Union is to happen, I shall not survive to behold the sad and heart-rending spectacle.”97

  On March 7, 1850, Daniel Webster joined the debate with one of his finest speeches—some think the greatest he ever gave—declaring at the outset that “I speak today for the preservation of the Union.”98 After pleading for compromise between the contending sides, he concluded,

  We have a great, popular, constitutional government, guarded by law and by judicature, and defended by the affections of the whole people. No monarchial throne presses these States together, no iron chain of military power encircles them; they live and stand under a government popular in its form, representative in its character, founded upon principles of equality, and so constructed, we hope, as to last forever.99

  These words foreshadowed an even more troubling declaration he would make later, after Taylor’s death, which would effectively acknowledge the legitimacy of secession.

  Less than a week later, Seward denounced the slave power on the floor of the Senate in the harshest terms possible. He acknowledged that the Constitution provided for the recapture of fugitive slaves. “But,” he proclaimed, “there is a higher law than the Constitution. God’s law made slavery immoral and illegitimate, and God’s law commanded Christians to disobey laws, which they deemed unjust. Slavery subverted democracy.”100 Seward scolded his colleagues, “I confess that the most alarming evidence of our degeneracy which has yet been given is found in the fact that we even debate such a question.”101 He dismissed threats of secession as mere bombast. Inflaming the public did not bother him; he dared Congress to do the only sensible, principled, moral thing to do—end slavery. “Whatever choice you have made for yourselves,” he suggested, “let us have no partial freedom; let us all be free.”102

  At the end of March 1850, South Carolina’s John Calhoun died of tuberculosis. Earlier that month, he had foreseen the kinds of arguments Seward and others would make and had asked a colleague, James Mason of Virginia, to read what became Calhoun’s last statement on the floor of the Senate. Characteristically, it was a zealous defense of both slavery and secession. The prospect of war di
d not bother Calhoun. “What is it that has endangered the Union?”103 Calhoun had Mason ask rhetorically. The answer, for Calhoun, was the persistent meddling from outsiders with the “equilibrium between” the North and the South on the institution of slavery at the time of the founding.104 The movement to admit California into the Union threatened to create “disequilibrium” in the Union. “If you admit her under all the difficulties that oppose her admission,” Mason read, “you compel us to infer that you intend to exclude us from the whole of the acquired territories.”105 Calhoun argued that slavery was sanctioned in the original Constitution and therefore was indissoluble. The “agitation” over slavery portended disunion, and Calhoun wrote that the only protection against such disunion was to guarantee slavery in the acquired territories.106 He went further to call for a constitutional amendment to restore to the South “in substance the power she possessed of protecting herself before the equilibrium between the sections was destroyed by the action of this government.”107 He ended by suggesting that it was entirely up to the North, not the South, to decide if and how the “great questions” could be settled.108 He emphasized that it should all be done on the South’s terms: “If you who represent the stronger portion” of the Union “cannot agree to settle” these questions “on the broad principle of justice and duty, say so; and let the states we represent agree to separate and part in peace.”109 But, he warned at the end, “If you are willing we should part in peace, tell us so, and we shall know what to do when you reduce the question to submission or resistance.”110

  When Calhoun died, several senators praised his legacy, while many others denounced it. Henry Clay rose to honor Calhoun as a long-serving Senate colleague. Calhoun and Clay had battled against each other more than once for the presidency, but they had been allies early in their careers in agreeing on the need for internal improvements to connect the states more tightly together in one Union. “He has gone!” Clay cried, and lamented further,

  No more shall we witness from yonder seat the flashes of that keen and penetrating eye of his, darting through this chamber. No more shall we be thrilled by that torrent of clear, concise, compact logic, poured out from his lips, which, if it did not always carry conviction to our judgment, commanded our great admiration.111

  Clay cleverly used words beginning with hard c to subliminally reinforce a connection between adjective and subject. Webster praised Calhoun’s “undoubted genius,”112 while Democratic senator Thomas Hart Benton warned his colleagues, “He is not dead, sir—he is not dead. There may be no vitality in his body but there is in his doctrines. Calhoun died with treason in his heart and on his lips. Whilst I am discharging my duty here, his disciples are disseminating his poison all over my state.”113

  But, in the weeks immediately after Taylor’s death, compromise was elusive, even though Fillmore was now in the White House. Fillmore was dull but a true Clay Whig, who was disposed to follow the lead of Congress. Clay’s health continued to deteriorate, and on July 22, he rose for the last time to speak in his beloved Senate. Though physically drained, Clay held the floor for more than four hours. He did not begin with his usual dramatic flourish but instead peppered his comments with harsh asides directed at opposing senators. His tone was patronizing and angry because Southern senators had made no concessions to save the Union but instead offered fiery defenses of slavery and their right to maintain it and extend it into U.S. territories. Defending the omnibus bill that he had offered as the only option that could bridge the gulf between the contending sides, Clay said, “There is neither incongruity in the freight nor in the passengers on board of our ‘Omnibus.’ . . . We have no Africans or Abolitionists in our ‘Omnibus,’ no disunionists or Free Soilers, no Jew or Gentile. Our passengers consist of Democrats and Whigs,” who had abandoned their customary antagonisms to confront the nation’s crises like patriots.114

  At one point, Clay condescendingly asked, “What is a compromise? It is a work of mutual concession—an agreement in which there are reciprocal stipulations.”115 Uncharacteristically, but desperate for compromise, Clay defended slave-owners as benign masters, not monsters, and depicted abolitionists as the genuinely bad actors “who would go into the temples of the holy God and drag from their sacred posts the ministers who are preaching his gospel for the comfort of mankind,”116 and who, “if their power was equal to their malignity, would seize the sun of this great system of ours, drag it from the position in which it keeps in order the whole planetary bodies of the universe, and replunge the world in chaos and confusion to carry out their single idea.”117 Yet he also accused the extremists in the South of inviting war by arbitrarily interpreting the Constitution to suit their own interests. He pleaded: “All we want is the Constitution.”118 These extremists, too, had lost the ability to listen to the other side, he said, and their desire to carry slaves westward to the south of the Missouri Compromise line exposed the fundamental and hopeless contradiction at the heart of their position: “You cannot do it without an assumption of power upon the part of Congress to act upon the institution of slavery; and if they have the power in one way, they have the power to act upon it in the other way.”119

  Not even Clay knew that he was making the point that years later Lincoln would push Douglas to acknowledge in their great debates. In this debate, Clay asked (as Lincoln would almost a decade later), “What more can the South ask?” The compromise Clay was struggling to forge would have killed the Wilmot Proviso, strengthened the Fugitive Slave Law, and barred abolition in the District of Columbia. His omnibus bill remained, in his judgment, everyone else’s best option; it “was the vehicle of the people, of the mass of the people.”120 Without the bill, Clay warned, there would be war not only in Texas and New Mexico but throughout the country, for “the end of war is never seen in the beginning of war.”121 Americans wanted no war, he declared. “The nation . . . pants for repose, and entreats you to give it peace and tranquility.”122 Reaching for one final metaphor, he declared, “I believe from the bottom of my soul, that the measure is the re-union of this Union. I believe it is the dove of peace, which, taking its aerial flight from the dome of the Capitol, carries the glad tidings of assured peace and restored harmony to all the remotest extremities of this distracted land.”123 He collapsed in his seat as the galleries erupted in tears and applause.

  Nevertheless, the speech failed to garner a majority for any of the bills that Clay had introduced to save the Union. Dejected and sick, Clay left Washington for a desperately needed break.

  At that point, Stephen Douglas, the Senate’s youngest member, jumped into the center of the national stage. Clay had tried for half a year to move the Senate to compromise, but Douglas, chair of the powerful Senate Committee on Territories, needed only a few days to broker the deal that the Senate approved. It was not his speech that saved the compromise, though he had spoken for two days in March to assert his solution to the dilemma facing the country—popular sovereignty, letting a majority of white men in each territory and state decide whether to allow or bar slavery. Rather, it was his indefatigable work behind the scenes, tirelessly lobbying as the younger Clay had done, stitching together the different Senate coalitions that eventually supported each of the five bills that formed the historic Compromise of 1850. Clay, having briefly returned to Congress, worked by Douglas’s side to help House leaders overcome opposition from Northern Whigs to approve the Compromise of 1850. With this success, the thirty-seven-year-old Douglas had established himself as a force to be reckoned with.

  There were two essential steps left to put the Compromise of 1850 into effect. First, Fillmore signed each of the five bills into law—admitting California as a new state, abolishing the slave trade in the District of Columbia, organizing New Mexico and Utah as new territories, resolving the border dispute between Texas and New Mexico, and approving the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required that all escaped slaves, upon capture, be returned to their masters with the cooperation or assistance of officials and
citizens of the free states. Together, Fillmore declared, these bills provided “a final settlement of the dangerous and exciting subjects which they embraced.”124

  Now law, the compromise required a second element, no less important, to go into effect: enforcement. Fillmore, as well as Secretary of State Webster, promised to vigorously enforce each provision, including the Fugitive Slave Act. When nine Northern states enacted personal-liberty laws later in 1850 and in 1851, forbidding state officials from enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law or using their jails in fugitive slave cases, both Fillmore and Webster defended the law and denounced any such resistance as treacherous and no different from nullification and secession, both of which were unconstitutional. Fillmore even promised to send federal forces to Boston to put down riots against the law. In May 1851, the president and his Cabinet took the first train from New York City to the shores of Lake Erie to celebrate completion of the Erie Railroad. Along the way, Webster made side trips to defend the Fugitive Slave Law in Syracuse, Buffalo, and Albany. In Syracuse, he denounced the refusal to abide by federal law as treason.125 In Buffalo, he used the metaphor of a “house divided” to stress the need to “preserve the Union of the States, not by coercion—not by military power—not by angry controversies . . . but by the silken chords of mutual, fraternal, patriotic affection.”126 He reminded his audience that the Constitution, through its supremacy clause, made federal law supreme over state resistance, and he promised “to exert any power I had to keep that country together.”127

  In June 1851, Webster went a step too far in his argument. In Virginia, he likened the Constitution to a compact, in which no party had the freedom to ignore a provision that the parties had originally consented to. “A bargain cannot be broken on one side, and still bind the other side,” he said.128 “I am as ready to fight and to fall for the constitutional rights of Virginia as I am for those of Massachusetts. . . . I would no more see a feather plucked unjustly from the honor of Virginia than I would see one so plucked from the honor of Massachusetts.”129 Naturally, slaveholders took his language to mean that Webster supported secession, inferring from the Constitution’s barring any federal interference with slavery before 1808 as tacit recognition of its legality. Webster spent the remainder of his life trying to explain that he never intended that interpretation and that his wording, though infelicitous, was nonetheless consistent with his support of the Union.