America Aflame

by David Goldfield

  Recognizing that the issue of slavery expansion had taken on a moral dimension, especially in New England, Webster warned against mixing “religious sentiments” with public policy, the result of which would be “a great degree of excitement” that would preclude an amicable settlement of differences. If politics was the art of compromise, religion, by its nature, allowed no ambiguity. Webster had believed in 1830 that defiance to southern extremism would save the Union; twenty years later, he felt that concessions to the South would produce the same result.10

  “Union.” The Great Triumvirate together for the last time during the debates over what became the Compromise of 1850: Henry Clay (seated on the near left), John C. Calhoun, and Daniel Webster each with a hand on the Constitution and surrounded by their colleagues. The Senate would dearly miss their brilliance and civility. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  New England was unforgiving. Daniel Webster, the conscience of a nation, had sold out to the Slave Power. His position broke apart the Whig Party in Massachusetts and led to his name becoming synonymous with “traitor” among the growing anti-slavery sentiment of New England. “Monster,” “fallen angel,” and “personification of all that is vile” were among the epithets that could be printed. An enraged and clearly overreaching William Lloyd Garrison accused the senator of maintaining a harem of “big black wenches as ugly and vulgar as Webster himself.” The storm overwhelmed him, and he died two years later. John Greenleaf Whittier poured the bitterness of his section into the poem “Ichabod,” Hebrew for “inglorious”:

  Of all we loved and honored, naught

  Save power remains—

  A fallen angel’s pride of thought,

  Still strong in chains.

  All else is gone, from those great eyes

  The soul has fled;

  When faith is lost, when honor dies,

  The man is dead!11

  It fell to William H. Seward, a fellow Whig from New York, to offer the rebuttal to Webster. Like Calhoun, Seward viewed Clay’s compromise proposals as a symptom of a much larger problem. But unlike Webster, he did not think religious faith was irrelevant to the discussion. A Chosen Nation could not take its mission lightly nor adjudicate major questions without an abiding faith in God. Slavery was clearly a sin, and to compromise with sin was a greater evil. Seward was not a theocrat, but, like many Americans, he held a deep belief in God’s particular benevolence to America. Whether necessity or the Constitution sanctioned slavery was quite beside the point. As Seward argued, “There is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over this domain, and devotes it to the same noble purposes.”12

  Seward’s “higher law” doctrine would be familiar to nineteenth-century American evangelicals who believed Peter’s order “to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). Americans cherished the Constitution, but it did not serve as the ultimate standard for personal action. Although God may have blessed the American government, “does it therefore follow that Congress may amend the ten commandments, or reverse the principles of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount …? Man could not, by any law, make right what God and his own conscience declared wrong.”13

  The Senate could not come to an agreement on what God or the Constitution said about Clay’s proposals. Even if the Senate agreed on a bill, President Taylor was clearly not in a compromising mood and, despite his deep southern connections, seemed to move closer to Senator Seward’s position with each passing day. As the Senate debate droned on, the president celebrated July 4, 1850, a very hot day, with the usual reception at the White House. He cooled off with copious amounts of cherries and milk. Five days later he was dead from gastroenteritis.

  Taylor’s death failed to break the Senate deadlock, and Henry Clay took the floor for the last time on July 22 to inspire his colleagues to support his compromise and save a nation he believed in great danger from splitting apart. The debate had generated so much acrimony and so many threats of disunion, especially from the southern members, that Clay believed only his compromise could put things rights again. Clay hoped that his proposal would perform a national “lustration”—an archaic term for a ceremony purifying people and places. The cleansing ritual would enable Americans to divest themselves “of all selfish, sinister, and sordid impurities, and think alone of our God, our country, our consciences, and our glorious Union; that Union without which we shall be torn into hostile fragments.” Americans would be born again into patriots instead of self-interested individuals. Without the compromise the world’s judgment on America would be harsh, Clay predicted. The United States would no longer be a beacon of hope to a world enveloped in the darkness of despotism. The failed revolutions of Europe would stand as a permanent monument to the futility of self-government, not just a temporary setback. “What will be the judgment of … that portion of mankind who are looking upon the progress of this scheme of self-government as being that which holds out the highest hopes and expectations of ameliorating the condition of mankind?” Clay’s plea went unanswered. Despairing, he departed for home. Within eighteen months he was dead.14

  Clay’s compromise would experience a resurrection in another guise. New Yorker Millard Fillmore, who as vice president succeeded Taylor, signaled he was amenable to compromise. Along with Stephen A. Douglas, the Democratic senator from Illinois, Fillmore believed that they could construct a bipartisan coalition from the men of the Border South and the Old Northwest to provide a core group to pass each of Clay’s proposals separately, first pairing with southern lawmakers on one part of the compromise, then with northerners on others. Such a strategy had forged the Missouri Compromise thirty years earlier. With Calhoun dead, Clay ailing at his home in Newport, Kentucky, and Webster now a member of President Fillmore’s cabinet, the Senate passed the series of measures collectively known as the Compromise of 1850. The border men had carried the day.

  Most Americans accepted the compromise as a whole, even if they did not like one or more of its constituent parts. The Union, they believed, and what it stood for—peace, prosperity, liberty, and the future of mankind—remained more important than sectional grievances. Many hoped with Stephen A. Douglas that the compromise represented the “final settlement” of the slavery issue. “Let us cease agitating,” Douglas implored, “stop the debate, and drop the subject.” His admonition was at once an order and a hope.15

  George Templeton Strong, a New York attorney and devoted Whig, summarized the prevailing view on the compromise: “Extreme people on both sides must be disgusted with the result, but the great majority satisfied and relieved.” Strong rejoiced to see “South Carolina spanked.” As for the abolitionists, “They deserve to be scourged and pilloried for sedition or hanged for treason.” Strong concluded his diary entry with an interesting confession, a point of view shared by many residents of the North: “My creed on [the slave] question is: That slave-holding is no sin.… That the slaves of the Southern States are happier and better off than the niggers of the North,… That the reasoning, the tone of feeling, the first principles, the practices, and the designs of Northern Abolitionists are very particularly false, foolish, wicked and unchristian.” The key issue for most Americans was the preservation of the Union, not slavery.16

  Northerners, even evangelicals, also drew back from Seward’s “higher law” doctrine. If each individual could determine what laws to obey based on a particular interpretation of Scripture, then anarchy would ensue. “Higher lawism” tilted the balance too far toward individual discretion. The appeal to God’s law also violated the separation of church and state. As Charles Hodge, a Philadelphia evangelical minister, noted, “Those who resist the magistrate, resist the ordinance of God, and … shall receive unto themselves damnation.” Southern evangelicals held this view as a matter of course, that evangelical abolitionists violated the intent of the Founding Fathers to separate church and state, thereby threatening not only religious freedom but government as well.17

  The Compromise of 1850 stifled
disunionists in the South, except in South Carolina. More typical of southern sentiment was the “Georgia Platform” of December 1850. The platform avowed that the citizens of Georgia cherished their “beloved Union” and accepted the compromise in total as an effort to secure the national compact. But that acceptance, Georgians warned, required a reciprocal acknowledgment among northerners. Otherwise, Georgians would consider their options “even to the disruption of every tie binding Georgia to the Union.” In the only state that held a referendum on the compromise, Georgians supported the pact overwhelmingly by nearly a two-to-one margin. Henry Clay, exhausted from his months-long ordeal in the Senate, rejoiced that the Georgia vote had “crushed the spirit of discord, disunion and Civil War.” Elsewhere in the South, a special convention in Mississippi resoundingly endorsed the compromise, and pro-compromise candidates for office won handily in Alabama state elections.18

  The Bible tells of Isaac and Ishmael, the one the offspring of Abraham and Sarah, the other of Abraham and a bondswoman. God looked upon Isaac as the future patriarch of His Chosen Nation. In order to secure that legacy, He banished Ishmael and his mother. For most Americans, the slave was an unworthy cause for which to risk the Union. To banish the slave from the political discourse, just as to banish the Indian and the Mexican from the land, was to preserve the Union. As a writer in the Southern Literary Messenger reasoned in January 1851, “Our nation is to enter Canaan as certainly as the Hebrew once did.… And shall any inferior nation stop us in our heaven-marked course?… Did the red men arrest us?… And who removed them from before our fathers, but the God who planted our fathers here?—the same God that has made us increase by the same manifest destiny by which he has made them wane and fade away. And shall the black man stop us? If one must yield, are we not right in saying—the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the free? Does not God by his providence say so too?” The writer concluded, “The dissolution of our Union, for the sake of a handful of bondmen,” would be a “wicked disregard of God’s word.”19

  As it turned out, the slavery debate did not dissolve and the Union did. It would take a civil war to banish the slave and the slaveholder, and yet another war to banish the “red men.” Other Americans could not agree that a loving God would exorcise one of His children, even a black slave. It was not the slave, they believed, but slavery that blocked the road to Canaan. They argued that a Union with slavery was a thing not worth saving. The principles of the nation’s founding and the destiny that God had designed for America stood in reproach to a Union without principle. The issue of slavery and the integrity of the Union could not be separated.

  The problem was more than philosophical for Frederick Douglass. A former slave who had stolen his freedom a decade earlier, he had served the abolitionist cause as an effective orator and writer. After the compromise he feared for himself, his family, and his free black friends in the North who suddenly found themselves vulnerable to slave catchers. Three weeks after President Millard Fillmore signed the Fugitive Slave Law portion of the Compromise of 1850, an angry interracial gathering of five thousand in Boston’s Faneuil Hall heard Douglass invoke the Revolutionary legacy and preach defiance of the law. “We one and all,—without the slightest hope of making successful resistance,—are resolved rather to die than to go back. If you are … prepared to see the streets of Boston flowing with innocent blood,… just give in … to the fugitive slave bill—you, who live on the street where the blood first spouted in defense of freedom.”20

  African Americans formed “leagues of freedom” to protect themselves and organize rescue from slave catchers if necessary. Some abandoned America altogether. More than three hundred African Americans from Pittsburgh resolved to migrate north of the border. Within ninety days of the law taking effect, more than three thousand free blacks left the northern states for Canada.

  With the Fugitive Slave Law, the northern and southern extremes switched sides: the former now strong defenders of states’ rights, particularly the right of a state to nullify federal laws, and the latter insisting on federal intervention. The reversed roles indicated that the debate centered on slavery, not on differing interpretations of the Constitution.

  Several northern states—Massachusetts, Vermont, Ohio, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island—had enacted personal liberty laws in the 1840s barring state officials from aiding in the arrest and detention of fugitive slaves. The Fugitive Slave Law voided these statutes, but lawmakers in several northern states called for either outright nullification or tacit nonenforcement of the federal law. Northerners, even those not particularly inclined toward anti-slavery politics, recoiled from the provision requiring them to actively participate in the capture, prosecution, and return of escaped slaves. Their involvement with slavery had heretofore been indirect: the clothes they wore, the profits they accumulated from the sale and manufacture of cotton, and the banks, railroads, and shipping companies that grew wealthy from the proceeds of human bondage and then shared those receipts with tens of thousands of workers and shareholders.

  Few northerners thought about these connections. The Fugitive Slave Law, however, suddenly threw them into direct contact with one of the most unsavory aspects of the institution. It commanded citizens “to aid and assist in the prompt and efficient execution of this law, whenever their services may be required.” Anyone caught providing food and shelter to an escaped slave, assuming northern whites could discern who was a runaway, would be subject to a fine of one thousand dollars and six months in prison. The law also suspended habeas corpus and the right to trial by jury for captured blacks. Judges received a hundred dollars for every slave returned to his or her owner, providing a monetary incentive for jurists to rule in favor of the slave catchers.

  Congress’s law had nationalized slavery. No black person was safe on American soil. The old division of free state/slave state had vanished, and with it Douglass’s faith in the power of American ideals. Invited to give the Fourth of July address at a meeting of the Rochester (New York) Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass declined. Instead, he gave his speech on July fifth because “I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me.… This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine.”21

  How could Americans rectify this hypocrisy? Douglass despaired of conventional means—persuasion and politics. “It is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” He put the situation in personal terms: “Cast one glance, if you please, upon that young mother, whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms. See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes! weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn!”

  These scenes were no longer part of only a southern tableau. “By an act of the American Congress … slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form. By that act, Mason & Dixon’s line has been obliterated;… and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women, and children as slaves remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of the whole United States.”

  The law exposed for Douglass the vast abyss between the nation’s Christian and democratic ideals and the reality for African Americans. “You profess to believe ‘that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth,’ and hath commanded all men, everywhere to love one another; yet you notoriously hate … all men whose skins are not colored like your own. You declare, before the world … that you ‘hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’; and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, ‘is worse than that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose,’ a s
eventh part of the inhabitants of your country.”

  The Fugitive Slave Law radicalized Walt Whitman as well. He expressed his anger in “Blood-Money,” a poem that foreshadowed his groundbreaking compilation Leaves of Grass. In “Blood-Money” Whitman used the common evangelical technique of applying biblical parables to contemporary events, echoing in literary form William H. Seward’s “higher law” speech:

  Of olden time, when it came to pass

  That the beautiful god, Jesus, should finish his work on earth,

  Then went Judas, and sold the divine youth,

  And took pay for his body.…

  The cycles, with their long shadows, have stalk’d silently forward

  Since those ancient days—many a pouch enwrapping meanwhile

  Its fee, like that paid for the son of Mary.

  And still goes one, saying,

  “What will ye give me, and I will deliver this man unto you?”

  And they make the covenant, and pay the pieces of silver.22

  It would fall to Harriet Beecher Stowe, though she could not know it yet, deep in her grief over Charley, to take the ideals expressed in the oratory of Douglass and the poetry of Whitman, take their admonishments to people of faith, take their shame over the rank hypocrisy of their fellow Americans, and take their belief that God placed America on this earth to do great things, and transform these expressions into a language both universal and personal.

  Harriet took her grief and her family to Brunswick, Maine. Her husband, Calvin, had received a teaching position at Bowdoin College. Although packing up and leaving Charley was not easy, Harriet looked forward to the more healthful environment of New England, her home.23

  Harriet set up a modest household for her family in Brunswick. She was well aware of her obligation to support her husband, take care of the children’s moral upbringing, and create a comfortable home for her family. She was also aware of the growing feminist movement in the North, especially in the cities, where middle-class women enjoyed an array of consumer options, employment, and education. Some of those women were clamoring for the vote, wider educational opportunities, and property and marriage benefits on the same ground as men. Neither Harriet nor her sister Catharine, who was already making a name for herself as a promoter of women’s education, was a feminist in the nineteenth-century sense of that word. They believed in separate though complementary roles for men and women and asserted that a woman’s stewardship of her family’s spiritual life exceeded any role men possessed in the larger society. The family and the home, woman’s domain, were the foundations of that society. They did not support woman’s suffrage, and they believed that a woman’s place at home, what Harriet called the “site of perfect love on earth,” afforded her significant power in shaping the future generation, in bringing family members to Christ, and in using that moral capital to support an array of causes from prison reform to temperance to the abolition of slavery. From Harriet’s perspective, that was fulfillment enough.24