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

by Allen C. Guelzo

  What, exactly, did this great Compromise of 1850 do? In general, it averted a showdown over who would control the new western territories, and that was the chief reason people around the country celebrated the passage of the bills with bell ringing, and in Congress with a drunken spree. In specific terms, the Compromise of 1850 allowed the Missouri Compromise to stand for the old Louisiana Purchase territories, but it established the principle of popular sovereignty as the rule for organizing the Mexican Cession. California, of course, was allowed to dodge both compromises completely and enter the Union directly as a free state without passing through the debated stage of territorial government. The territory of Utah, which lay above the 36°30′ line, and New Mexico, which lay below it, would be allowed to make their own determinations about slavery or nonslavery as they saw fit. The Compromise also added a new Fugitive Slave Law to the federal code and promised noninterference by Congress in the interstate slave trade. After the deaths of Calhoun, Clay, and Webster, Douglas would emerge as one of the most powerful men in the Senate.31

  The abyss of disunion had been avoided, but only for the time being. In only six years, a train of unsuspected consequences would throw an entirely new light on the popular sovereignty doctrine, and both it and the Compromise of 1850 would be wrecked with the stroke of a single judicial pen.

  THE FAILURE OF COMPROMISE

  The Compromise of 1850 had been created by a Whig (Henry Clay) and pushed through at last by the influence of a Whig president (Millard Fillmore). The laurels for this victory went to Stephen A. Douglas and the Democrats, and the Democrats used the political capital that the Compromise gave them to regain their political wind and win the presidential election of 1852. Both parties ran Mexican War heroes—the Whigs nominated Winfield Scott and the Democrats nominated Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, who had begun the war as a private and ended up as a brigadier general—but Scott proved dull and aristocratic, while the handsome, likable Pierce stood on a pro-Compromise platform and won election easily.

  There was a fly in the ointment of the Compromise of 1850, however. With all the attention in the debates of 1850 focused on the Mexican Cession territories, few people paid attention to the contents of the new Fugitive Slave Law, which Clay had included in the Compromise as a sop to wounded Southern feelings over California and popular sovereignty. There had actually been a Fugitive Slave Law on the federal books since 1793 (based on Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution) which allowed Southern slaveholders to pursue and retrieve runaway slaves even in the free states. For that reason, until 1842 runaway slaves such as Josiah Henson had found it safer to run until they had made it to Canada and the safety of British law (where slavery was illegal and where the presumption of the law had always been in favor of freedom).

  As Northern opinion turned colder and colder toward slavery, the free states offered pursuing slaveholders less and less cooperation, until in 1842 the Supreme Court (in Prigg v. Pennsylvania) ruled that the 1793 federal law did not necessarily require the cooperation of state magistrates and justices of the peace, especially where slave recaptures encroached on state due-process laws. The result, of course, was that numerous Northern state officials refused to cooperate at all in capturing runaways, and in some instances prosecuted slaveholders for kidnapping.

  The new Fugitive Slave Law was an attempt to plug the holes Prigg v. Pennsylvania had put in the 1793 law. A federal enforcement apparatus was created, consisting of United States commissioners with powers to issue federal warrants for fugitive slaves and to make judgments in fugitive cases without a court hearing on the basis of as little as a simple affidavit of ownership from a slave owner (the commissioner was to receive a $10 fee for each fugitive returned to slavery and only $5 otherwise, so it was clear from the start what the preferred judgment would be). Ominously, the new law established no statute of limitations for runaways, which meant that runaways from as long as twenty years before (and more) could be captured and reenslaved. It threatened both local marshals and citizens with fines of up to $1,000 and liability for civil suits if they harbored fugitives or refused to cooperate in capture proceedings.32

  This last provision was the most potentially explosive, for it virtually made every Northerner an accomplice to the betrayal and seizure of runaway slaves. Northerners who had enjoyed little or no contact with slavery, or who thought of slavery as merely an unpleasant moral abstraction, now were forced to consider how they would act if a slave owner or federal marshal in hot pursuit of a runaway should summon them to join a federal slave-catching posse.

  Neither Clay nor Douglas had expected the Fugitive Slave Law to attract much controversy, if only because the actual number of runaways was fairly small compared to the entire slave population of the South. They at once learned how badly they had underestimated Northern reaction. Northerners who had never entertained a serious anti-slavery thought before were now treated to a series of public captures and extraditions of runaway slaves that only showed off slavery at its most revolting. Overeager slave owners and hired slave catchers tracked down longtime runaways such as Henry Long, who was haled before a federal judge “as the fugitive slave of John T. Smith, of Russell County, Virginia,” and carted off to Richmond, Virginia, to be sold at public auction on January 18, 1851; Euphemia Williams, who had run away from “William T. J. Purnell, of Worcester County, Maryland,” twenty-two years before, and whom they tried to drag, along with the six children she had raised in Philadelphia, back into slavery; or “a colored man, named Mitchum,” who was arrested in Madison, Indiana, in February 1851 by “George W. Mason, of Davies County, Ky.,” who had convinced a local justice of the peace that Mitchum “had left his service nineteen years before,” and who took him back to Kentucky.33

  Not all of these pursuits ended well for the slave hunters, however. In September 1851 a Maryland slave owner named Edward Gorsuch crossed into Pennsylvania in pursuit of four runaways. Gorsuch enlisted the aid of a federal marshal and a posse and tracked the runaways to the home of William Parker, a free black, in Christiana, Pennsylvania. There the runaways and their allies shot it out with the posse, killing Gorsuch; Parker and the runaways immediately fled for Canada. Frederick Douglass, then living and editing an anti-slavery newspaper in Rochester, New York, sheltered them and got the fugitives on board a Great Lakes steamer. At parting, one of them gave Douglass a memento that he treasured all his life: Edward Gorsuch’s revolver.34 Across the North, prisons were broken into, posses were disrupted, and juries refused to convict.

  The most dramatic of these cases, and the one that added the most fuel to the fire of opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act, occurred in Boston, almost under the nose of Garrison’s Liberator. On May 24, 1854, an escaped Virginia slave named Anthony Burns was seized by three federal deputies as he walked home from the Boston clothing store where he worked. White and black Bostonians at once assembled, and on the evening of May 26, a party of abolitionists led an assault on the prison where Burns was held, only to fail in their attempts to retrieve him. President Pierce was determined to demonstrate his support for the Compromise laws and sent in federal troops and Marines to ensure that Burns was put on a ship to carry him back to Virginia. Two Bostonians actually offered to pay Burns’s market price, and more if necessary, to Burns’s owner, an Alexandria merchant named Charles Suttle. The Pierce administration was determined to return Burns to Suttle for the symbolic importance of the gesture. So on June 2, 1854, while thousands of silent, pale Bostonians looked on, Burns was marched to a waiting ship between files of soldiers. The Burns affair was a massive public disgrace, and it drove many Northerners to conclude that slavery itself was a disgrace that deserved extermination rather than assurances. Amos Lawrence, a pro-Compromise Whig, remembered that after the Burns affair, “we went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad abolitionists.”35

  Even the anger stirred up by the Fugitive Slave Law was limited to the relatively small number o
f fugitive slave warrants that were actually issued and the even smaller number of fugitives who were actually returned to slavery (probably around eighty in all).36 What brought the plight of the runaway under the Fugitive Slave Law into every Northern parlor was a novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the wife of a theology professor at Bowdoin College in Maine. Stowe was the daughter of Lyman Beecher, a New Englander and one of the best-known Northern evangelicals; her sister, Catharine, was an educator, and her brothers, Edward and Henry Ward Beecher, were both anti-slavery clergymen.

  Uncle Tom’s Cabin was Stowe’s first novel, but it drew on a wealth of observation she had acquired when living in Cincinnati in the 1840s while her husband was a professor at Lane Theological Seminary, and a wealth of reading she had done in slave narratives (including that of Josiah Henson, who turns up in Uncle Tom’s Cabin as one of the models for Uncle Tom). In 1851 her sister-in-law urged her to “use a pen if you can” to denounce the Fugitive Slave Law and “make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.” “I will if I live,” Stowe announced, and one Sunday shortly thereafter in church, the plot and characters of the novel broke upon her “almost as a tangible vision.” The novel poured out of her pen in a matter of weeks, sentimental and mushy and short on story line, but faultless in its character construction and perfect in its appeal to a sentimental and mushy age.37

  The plot can be stated briefly: Tom, the faithful slave of the Shelby family, is sold away from his Kentucky home to pay the debts of his guilt-ridden master. He is purchased by a Louisiana planter, the disillusioned Augustine St. Clare, who believes that slavery is wrong but who cannot imagine a way of life without slaves. Tom wins the hearts of the St. Clare household, especially St. Clare’s frail daughter, Little Eva. In what may be the most saccharine-laden chapter in American literature, Little Eva dies and the remorseful St. Clare resolves to free his slaves. Before that can happen, St. Clare is stabbed in a brawl, and when he dies, Tom is not freed. Instead, he is sold to Simon Legree, whose unalloyed villainy drives him to murder the hymn-singing Tom just before George Shelby, the son of Tom’s old master, arrives to purchase to his freedom. As if this were not enough, Stowe throws in some hair-raising adventure to off set the tackiness of the plot: the escape of the runaway Eliza Harris, who eludes the slave catchers by dashing across the wintry Ohio River, her infant son in her arms, leaping precariously from ice floe to ice floe, and a shootout between Eliza’s husband, George Harris, and the slave-catching posse.

  The real genius of the book, however, lies in the care with which Stowe made her chief attack on slavery itself rather than merely taking quick shots at slaveholders. Slavery, for Stowe, was a nameless evil that held well-intentioned Southerners such as the Shelbys and St. Clares as much in its grip as any slave. Stowe made her readers hate slavery, and she made them hate the Fugitive Slave Law, too, for her immediate objective was to awaken Northerners to the hideous realities the new law was bringing to their own doorsteps. “His idea of a fugitive,” wrote Stowe of one stunned Northern character, John Bird, who finds a half-frozen Eliza Harris in his kitchen,

  was only an idea of the letters that spell the word… The magic of the real presence of distress,—the imploring human eye, the frail trembling hand, the despairing appeal of helpless agony,—these he had never tried. He had never thought that a fugitive might be a hapless mother, a defenseless child,—like that one which was now wearing his lost boy’s little well-known cap.38

  Uncle Tom’s Cabin began as a serial in the anti-slavery newspaper National Era on June 2, 1851, and ran until April 1, 1852. When it was issued in book form, 3,000 of the first 5,000 copies flew from booksellers’ stalls on the first day of publication; within two weeks it had exhausted two more editions, and within a year it had sold 300,000 copies.39

  The controversial captures of runaways and the sensational impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin made the Fugitive Slave Law into the Achilles’ heel of the Compromise of 1850. Northerners who were otherwise content to leave slavery where it was so long as it stayed where it was now found themselves dragooned into cooperation with the South in supporting and maintaining slavery. And as they turned against the Fugitive Slave Law, they began to question the entire Compromise of 1850.

  They had good reason, too, especially as the much-vaunted cure-all, popular sovereignty, increasingly came to seem more like a placebo. Initially, the Compromise had allowed the organization of the New Mexico and Utah territories by the popular vote of the people of the territory, which gave some superficial hope that popular sovereignty might be the key of promise; that, in turn, tempted politicians such as Stephen Douglas to talk a little too confidently from both sides of their mouths. Although Douglas personally had little desire to see slavery taken into the territories, popular sovereignty allowed him to tell Southerners that they had no one but themselves or the climate of the territories to blame if slavery failed to take root there; while to Northern audiences Douglas could claim that since New Mexico and Utah were poor candidates for cotton growing and would be unlikely to apply for statehood for another hundred years, popular sovereignty was the safest guarantee that slavery would not be transported to the territories. To both North and South, Douglas could promise that popular sovereignty would ensure a normal and democratic result to the process of territorial organization.

  It was this apparent ease with which popular sovereignty promised to charm away all difficulties that led Douglas to carry it one step too far. Eager to open up the trans-Mississippi lands to further settlement (and, incidentally, position Douglas’s Illinois as a springboard for a new transcontinental railroad), Douglas and the Senate Committee on Territories (which he chaired) presented a new bill to the Senate on January 4, 1854, which would organize another new territory—Nebraska—on the basis of popular sovereignty, with “all questions pertaining to slavery in the Territories, and in the new states to be formed therefrom… to be left to the people residing therein, through their appropriate representatives.” (After some brief reflection, Douglas agreed to split the proposed Nebraska Territory into two separate territories, with the southernmost section to be known as the Kansas Territory.)40

  This proposal dismayed Northern congressional leaders, not only because they remained uneasy about popular sovereignty but also because the proposed Kansas and Nebraska Territories both lay within the old Louisiana Purchase lands and above the old 36°30′ line, in the area the Missouri Compromise had forever reserved for free settlement. The compromisers of 1850 had agreed to use popular sovereignty as the instrument for peacefully organizing the territories acquired in the Mexican Cession; no one had said anything in 1850 about applying the popular sovereignty rule to the Louisiana Purchase territories. The state of Iowa, for example, had been organized as a free territory and admitted as a free state in 1846 precisely because it lay within the Missouri Compromise lands and above 36°30′, and there were many in Congress who assumed that Kansas and Nebraska ought to be organized under the same, older rule.

  By 1854 popular sovereignty had whetted Southern appetites for more. Douglas knew well that the South would balk at the organization of two more free territories in the area the Missouri Compromise reserved for free settlement. They would balk even more as soon as they realized that if the proposed Kansas and Nebraska Territories were organized on the Missouri Compromise basis as free soil, the slave state of Missouri would be surrounded on three sides by free territory. It would become nearly impossible for Missouri to keep its slave population from easily decamping for freedom, and that would tempt Missouri slaveholders to cut their losses, sell off their slaves, and allow Missouri to become a free state that would block further slave state expansion westward. “If we can’t all go there on the string, with all our property of every kind, I say let the Indians have it forever,” wrote one Missouri slaveholder. “They are better neighbors than the abolitionists, by a damn sight.”41

  Douglas also knew equall
y well that Northerners would howl at the prospect of scuttling the Missouri Compromise and opening Kansas and Nebraska to so much as the bare possibility, through popular sovereignty, of slavery. Salmon P. Chase, the anti-slavery Democratic giant of Ohio, tore into Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska bill with “The Appeal of the Independent Democrats” in the National Era on January 24, 1854, savagely attacking Douglas and accusing him of subverting the Missouri Compromise in the interest of opening Kansas and Nebraska to slavery. “The thing is a terrible outrage, and the more I look at it the more enraged I become,” Maine senator William Pitt Fessenden confessed. “It needs but little to make me an out & out abolitionist.” Mass protest meetings were held in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, in New York City, and in Detroit, as well as in Lexington, Ohio, and Marlborough, Massachusetts—at least 115 of them across the North—and resolutions attacking the Kansas-Nebraska bill were issued by five Northern state legislatures.42

  Douglas was a gambler, and he was gambling that the song of popular sovereignty would lull enough anti-slavery sensibilities to get the Kansas-Nebraska bill through Congress. He was right. He had the ear of the Pierce administration and the whip handle of the Democratic Party in Congress, and on March 3, 1854, he successfully bullied the Kansas-Nebraska bill through the Senate. It was a closer call in the House, where Kansas-Nebraska slipped through on a thirteen-vote margin on May 22, but it gave Douglas what he wanted. James M. Mason, who had read the dying Calhoun’s demand for an open door into the territories for slavery in 1850, happily prophesied that the Kansas-Nebraska bill “bore the character of peace and tended to the establishment of peace.” His fellow senator from Ohio, Benjamin Franklin Wade, could not have disagreed more. Instead, declared the acid-tongued Wade, the Kansas-Nebraska bill was “a declaration of war on the institutions of the North, a deliberate sectional movement by the South for political power, without regard for justice or consequences.” As the Senate cranked ponderously toward its vote, Wade pointed to a portent of gloom: “Tomorrow, I believe, there is to be an eclipse of the sun.” How appropriate that “the sun in the heavens and the glory of this republic should both go into obscurity and darkness together.”43