Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  The Wilmot Proviso was, like the Tallmadge Amendment in 1819, a paraphrase of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, whose sweeping ban against slavery Wilmot now wanted applied to the southwestern territories of the Mexican Cession. More than just a frank declaration against slavery, it was an even franker assertion that Congress (based on Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution) had the authority to make judgments about the future of the territories. Just as in 1820 with the Tallmadge Amendment, Congress quickly fractured along sectional rather than party lines. The Northern Whigs and all but four Northern Democrats in the House overrode Southern votes in the House and sent the appropriations bill with its lethal proviso to the Senate, where Polk and the Southern Democrats killed it.

  Polk was particularly mortified by the Wilmot Proviso, since the blow had come from a member of his own party. “If the Wilmot Proviso was engrafted on the appropriation or any other Bill and was made to apply to any portion of the acquired territory lying South of 36°30′, the Missouri compromise line,” Polk promised, “I would certainly veto it, be the consequences what they might.”16 As it was, the administration had its own plan ready to launch: extend the Missouri Compromise line all the way through the Mexican Cession. This does not seem like a particularly imaginative proposition, but the idea had behind it the indisputable fact that the Missouri Compromise had worked for twenty-six years in keeping the slavery issue from polarizing Congress, and it offered what looked like a solution that everyone had already agreed to earlier; most important of all, President Polk was prepared to swing all the weight of his office behind it. “The Missouri question had excited intense agitation of the public mind, and threatened to divide the country into geographical parties,” Polk reasoned. “The compromise allayed the excitement, tranquilized the popular mind, and restored confidence and fraternal feelings,” and he was confident that “a similar adjustment of the questions which now agitate the public mind would produce the same happy results.”17

  The trouble with merely tinkering with the Missouri Compromise, however, was that a good deal of angry water had flowed under the bridge since 1820, and a quarter century later, Southerners were no longer satisfied with the spoils they had been awarded then. The new Mississippi senator, Jefferson Davis, warned that “as a property recognized by the Constitution, and held in a portion of the States, the Federal government is bound to admit [slavery] into all the Territories, and to give it such protection as other private property receives.” On February 19, 1847, the white-haired and hollow-cheeked John Calhoun rose to offer a set of resolutions arguing that “the territories of the United States belong to the several States composing this Union, and are held by them as their joint and common property.” This meant—and Calhoun explained himself with frightening lucidity—that “Congress, as the joint agent and representative of the States of this Union, has no right to make any law… that shall… deprive the citizens of any of the States of this Union from emigrating, with their property, into any of the territories of the United States.”18

  By Calhoun’s logic, the territories were the common property of all of the states, not the federal government. Congress, in organizing and readying federal territories for statehood, was merely acting as a trustee on behalf of the entire people of the United States. Citizens of any one of the states had equal title to the territories, and therefore ought to be able to take any of their property, including slaves, into any of the territories. Hence, not only did Congress have no authority to enact the Wilmot Proviso, which banned the transportation of slave “property” to the territories, but it had had no authority in 1820 to enact the Missouri Compromise, which banned the transportation of slaves to some of the territories. With this one gesture, Calhoun swung the door of every federal territory open to slavery, and delighted Southern Whigs and Democrats fell in behind him, turning him into the South’s great political figurehead.

  The Northern Democrats, however, were less than enthralled with Calhoun’s logic. In December 1847 one of Polk’s chief rivals within the Democratic Party, Michigan senator Lewis Cass, brought forward yet another solution to the problem of the Mexican Cession territories. In a letter published in the Washington Union, Cass gingerly agreed with Calhoun that Congress had no authority to impose a settlement of the slavery issue on any of the territories. Surely, observed Cass, the people who were actually living in each of the territories had the right to adopt a “slave” or “free” settlement for themselves. Let the slavery question in the Cession be “left to the people… in their respective local governments,” he argued, and let the sovereignty of the people defuse the confrontations in Washington over slavery and free Congress from the responsibility of solving the problem. Congressional mandates of the sort Wilmot and Calhoun were seeking

  should be limited to the creation of proper governments for new countries, acquired or settled, and to the necessary provision for their eventual admission into the Union; leaving, in the meantime, to the people inhabiting them, to regulate their internal concerns in their own way. They are just as capable of doing so as the people of the States; and they can do so, at any rate, as soon as their political independence is recognized by admission into the Union.19

  Cass’s “popular sovereignty” proposal appealed to the fundamental American ideological instinct that a democratic people had the right to make their own political decisions. Cass’s letter might have taken him further along the road to the presidency if he had not already managed to make a host of enemies within the Democratic Party. As it was, an unpersuaded President Polk attempted to ram the Missouri Compromise solution through Congress during the summer of 1848, and came out at the end of the session with nothing more to show for his efforts than a single bill authorizing the organization of the Oregon territory without slavery. Chronically ill and disappointed at the defections from Democratic unity by Calhoun, Wilmot, and Cass, Polk announced that he would not seek a second term as president in 1848. The Missouri Compromise extension proposal fizzled.

  Worse for the Democrats was yet to come. The party’s presidential nominating convention, as might have been expected, picked Lewis Cass as its nominee. Agitated Northern Democrats wanted the Wilmot Proviso or nothing, and they suspected that if Cass and popular sovereignty were allowed to rule the future of the territories, the popular will could just as easily announce itself in favor of slavery as not. “I am jealous of the power of the South,” wrote David Wilmot. “The South holds no prerogative under the Constitution, which entitles her to wield forever the Scepter of Power in this Republic.” Wilmot added that if he could “strike an effectual & decisive blow against its dominion at this time, I would do so even at the temporary loss of other principles.”20

  Wilmot got his chance in June 1848, when a group of anti-slavery Northern Democrats met in Utica, New York, to organize a splinter movement based on the principle that Congress had full authority to ban slavery from the territories. Two months later, in Buffalo, a national “Free-Soil” convention assembled under a great tent, with luminaries as varied as Wilmot and Frederick Douglass among the delegates. In a decisive repudiation of the Democratic Party’s leadership, they nominated Martin Van Buren as the presidential candidate for the Free-Soil Party under the banner, “Free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men.”21 Even more ominous, the split-off of the Free-Soilers marked the movement of the slavery issue from a moral question to a sectional political issue capable of wrecking even the sturdiest of national institutions.

  The Whigs might have suffered the same splintering had it not been clear that the divisions among the Democratic Party were the Whigs’ golden opportunity. Rather than risk North-South bickerings within the party, the Whigs nominated Zachary Taylor for the presidency. Taylor’s victory at Buena Vista gave him instant name recognition; on the other hand, to the dismay of many anti-slavery Whigs, he was also a Louisiana slaveholder. Still, at least Taylor had taken no known stand on the territorial question. After reflecting upon the wisdom of nominating candida
tes with no inconvenient political views to disturb the voters, the Whig Party decided to do likewise, and adopted no party platform. By the end of the summer, it was plain that Taylor was going to beat Cass handily.22

  To nearly everyone’s surprise, Zachary Taylor turned out to be no blank slate on the issue of the territories. “No man of ordinary capacity can believe,” Taylor wrote, that Congress would allow slavery into the Mexican Cession or “will ever permit a state made from it to enter our Union with the features of slavery connected with it.” By the time he was inaugurated in March 1849, the California gold rush was in full swing, and Sacramento, the site of the original gold strike, had exploded from a village of four houses into a boom city with a population of 10,000. In order to provide California and the New Mexico territory with some sense of public order, a bill for territorial organization had to be offered at once, and Taylor dispatched his own personal emissaries to prod the California, Utah, and New Mexico settlers into writing state constitutions that would bypass the need for (and the inevitable wrangling over) territorial organization.

  Taylor was responding to more than just the practical demands of the California situation. A political novice, Taylor had fallen under the sway of some of the most radical anti-slavery Whigs, especially William Henry Seward of New York, and under their influence Taylor was determined that the California and New Mexico applications would be “free and Whig,” even at the risk of more Southern threats of disunion. By December 1849 Taylor had pushed the Californians to the point where they were ready to make an application to Congress for immediate statehood and thus “remove all causes of uneasiness… and confidence and kind feeling be preserved.” The application would be as a free state.23

  Southerners read President Taylor’s proposal as nothing less than the Wilmot Proviso in disguise, and in June 1850 a convention of representatives from the slave-holding states met in Nashville to discuss what their future could be in the Union. At the same time, Taylor faced a challenge from within his own party in the person of Henry Clay, who still believed, even at age seventy-three and after three unsuccessful nominations, that he would have made a better Whig president than Taylor, the “Military Chieftain.”24

  On January 29, 1850, Clay laid before the Senate a “comprehensive scheme” of eight resolutions that offered to settle the territorial dispute in practical little pieces rather than by sweeping formulas such as “common property” or “popular sovereignty.” Clay proposed to admit California as a free state (the California constitutional convention had already adopted free-state provisions and there was nothing gained by trying to force them to change their minds), but in order to show that this established no principle for the other territories, New Mexico and a separate Mexican Cession territory of Deseret (or Utah) would be allowed to organize themselves as territories on the basis of popular sovereignty (which left open the possibility that these territories might become slave states). To sweeten the loss of the “common property” principle for Southerners, Clay added a provision for a new Fugitive Slave Law, which would give slaveholders broader powers to stop the flow of runaway slaves northward to the free states, and he offered a final resolution denying that Congress had any authority to regulate the interstate slave trade.25

  Clay’s two-day presentation of his compromise was a rhetorical masterpiece, but he fell considerably short of winning the votes he needed for it. The partisans of slavery in the Senate regarded the concession of California as tantamount to accepting the principle, if not the fact, of the Wilmot Proviso, while Northern Free-Soilers regarded the popular sovereignty allowance for New Mexico and Utah as little more than surrendering the territories outright to slavery. Clay also committed a major tactical error by insisting that all the resolutions be voted upon together as one “omnibus,” without recognizing that while all of the senators would like some of the resolutions, only some of the senators would like all of the resolutions, and the senators in that group were not numerous enough to carry the day.

  In particular, Clay’s “comprehensive scheme” did not satisfy the mortally ailing John Calhoun. On March 4, 1850, Calhoun had another senator, James M. Mason of Virginia, read a lengthy and shrewd attack on Clay’s plan, calling again for “an equal right in the acquired territory… to cease the agitation of the slave question, and to provide for the insertion of a provision in the constitution, by an amendment, which will restore to the South, in substance, the power she possessed of protecting herself, before the equilibrium between the section was destroyed by the action of this government.” Otherwise, threatened Calhoun, “the Southern States… cannot remain, as things now are, consistently with safety and honor, in the Union.”26

  Three days later, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts took the floor of the Senate to deliver what many anticipated would be an equally scathing critique of Clay’s omnibus, this time from an anti-slavery position. To the amazement of the packed Senate galleries (and howls of indignation from anti-slavery Northerners), Webster rose “to speak today not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but an American. … I speak today for the preservation of the Union. ‘Hear me for my cause.’”27 From there, Webster’s great oratory rolled on for three hours, denouncing disunion and calling for the adoption of Clay’s omnibus. Webster paid dearly in Massachusetts for befriending Clay, with mutterings about treason and derangement.

  Clay and Webster were acting to save a Union that they could easily see was headed for the breakers, and a Union that Calhoun was only too ready to see hit them. Day after exhausting day, Clay dragged himself to the Senate floor to defend his resolutions on the wings of words that soared far above his own personal political ambitions for the presidency. “I conjure gentlemen”—Americans North and South—to stop and “by all 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 upon them such unnumbered blessings … to pause—solemnly to pause—at the edge of the precipice, before the fearful and disastrous leap is taken into the yawning abyss below, which will inevitably lead to certain and irretrievable destruction.” And if the grappling sections did hurl themselves over the cliff into civil war, Clay’s prayer was, “as the best blessing which heaven can bestow upon me upon earth, that if the direful and sad event of the dissolution of the Union should happen, I may not survive to behold the sad and heart-rending spectacle.”28

  One person, at least, who was moved by none of this rhetorical display in the Senate was President Taylor, and between the upper and nether millstones of Taylor and the Calhounites, the omnibus was ground to bits. When the Senate Committee on Territories finally reported out Clay’s resolutions as a single bill, its component pieces were hacked out by amendments and counterproposals, and on July 31, 1850, all but the provisions for the territorial organization of Utah had crashed to defeat. An enfeebled Henry Clay left the Senate, his political career effectively over, and sick with the tuberculosis that would kill him in less than two years; Webster returned to Massachusetts to be vilified by the anti-slavery press as a “fallen angel,” and he followed Clay to the grave four months later; John Calhoun was dead on March 31, 1850, less than three weeks after his last defiant speech in the Senate.

  At this last point before the abyss, the enemies of compromise obligingly removed themselves from the scene. The death of Calhoun in March was followed by the unexpected death of President Taylor in July, and his successor, a self-made and surprisingly capable anti-slavery New Yorker named Millard Fillmore, quickly proclaimed his support for Clay’s compromise. Clay himself withdrew from the Senate after the July 31 debacle, but into his shoes stepped the junior senator from Illinois, a short, scrappy Democrat named Stephen A. Douglas.

  Douglas had been born in Vermont in 1813 and half orphaned by the premature death of his lawyer father two years later. He was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker in upstate New York. At age twenty, looking for opportunities whose traces he co
uld see only as they led westward, Douglas moved to Ohio, then to St. Louis, then to Winchester, Illinois. He set up a school, earned enough money to support a year’s law study, and in 1834 was licensed to practice law in Illinois. At a stumpy five feet four inches, Douglas was anything but imposing-looking. But he had energy in overbrimming quantities, and a chip-on-the-shoulder attitude earned him the nickname “the Little Giant.” He was a “perfect ‘steam engine in breeches,’” and starting in 1840 he was appointed to the Illinois state supreme court, elected to Congress, then elected to the U.S. Senate. He was, from the start, a partisan Democrat. Whigs were nothing but the toadies of “consolidation, monopoly, and property privilege.” Douglas was also a man with an eye for the main chance, and he saw in an alliance with Henry Clay a straight path to political stardom.29

  Committed from the beginning of the debates to the principle of popular sovereignty, Douglas explained his détente with the figurehead of Whiggism as a joint project for the sake of the popular sovereignty provisions in the “comprehensive scheme.” Popular sovereignty, Douglas explained, is the principle “that each community shall settle this question for itself… and we have no right to complain, either in the North or the South, whichever they do.” Since he had never favored the omnibus approach, Douglas craftily split the omnibus bill into five separate bills and built separate congressional coalitions around each of them, with his fellow Democrats cajoled and caressed into supporting them. With President Taylor out of the way, Fillmore (in an unusual display of bipartisanship) linked forces with Douglas and pressured congressional Whigs to back the Douglas bills. By mid-September all five of them had been passed, and the substance of Clay’s compromise—if not the form—became law. “The difference between Mr. Clay’s Compromise Bill & my… Bills was a wafer,” wrote Douglas before the final votes, “and when they are all passed, you see, they will be collectively Mr. Clay’s Compromise, & separately the Bills Reported by the committee on Territories four months ago.”30