by Conrad Black
The new legislation admitted California as a free state by a heavy majority; divided the acquired territory between Texas and California into two territories, Utah and New Mexico, where, in the kernel of the compromise, applications for statehood from component parts could be accepted whether slavery was included or not, “as their constitution may prescribe at the time of their admission”; tightened the discouragement of fugitive slaves; and abolished the slave trade in the District of Columbia. The Fugitive Slave Act passed the Senate 27 to 10 and the House 109 to 76, illustrating that the North was more concerned with the conceptual irritation of slavery as an institution than with helping individual slaves rebelling against their state of hopeless servitude.
This act set up special U.S. commissioners who could issue warrants for the arrest of alleged fugitive slaves after a summary hearing solely on the affidavit of a claimant. Commissioners received $10 for every such application granted and $5 for every one refused, a clear and egregious incitement to the avoidance of a fair finding. The commissioners could form posses, and those accused of being fugitive slaves but denying it had no right to a jury trial or to give evidence themselves. Those abetting the flight of slaves, deliberately or negligently, were subject to fines of $1,000, indemnity of the economic value of the fugitive slave(s), and imprisonment for up to six months. It was a disgraceful law that effectively entrenched the principle that African Americans were subhumans without civil rights, unless they were emancipated, at which point they miraculously metamorphosed into citizens.
It was inherently absurd that an act of emancipation by the ostensible owner would transform an animal without rights and subject to starvation, sexual violation, whipping, or even murder, without recourse, into a citizen with civil rights identical, theoretically, to those of the president of the United States. And the Fugitive Slave Act was a dramatic setback to human rights in America, considering that when Benjamin Franklin had been the president of Pennsylvania 65 years before, any slave who spent six consecutive months in that state was automatically free, and now all states were pledged to yield to these draconian enforcement procedures of the federal government. Northern abolitionists said from the start that they would not comply with the Fugitive Slave Act, and some states, such as Vermont, countered the Fugitive Slave Act with expanded guarantees of civil liberties. People trying to recover slaves were sometimes abused and hampered and the federal commissioners responsible for enforcement had a very difficult time in some northern states, and had problems getting local courts to enforce the act. There were riots, some entailing loss of life, in a number of northern cities, particularly New York, Boston, and Baltimore.
Mexican War. Courtesy of the U.S. Army Center of Military History
It was a high price for the Union but seemed to stabilize public policy and settle the political atmosphere. Secessionist candidates were defeated by Unionists throughout the South in elections in 1851, while the strenuous abolitionist Charles Sumner was elected U.S. senator from Massachusetts the following year. The Compromise of 1850, as it was called, contained a time bomb that could have been foreseen as mortally dangerous: the provision that each territory applying for statehood would determine itself whether it would be a free or slave state was an invitation to civil war in each state as the date of its application approached. Clay and Webster had done their best and they were great legislators and great patriots, but they were trying to palliate an intractable issue. Either slavery was morally acceptable or it was not. Endless expressions of distaste or disapproval among the free-state majority only provoked southern ambitions to secede; by not abdicating the right to denounce or restrict slavery, the North pushed the South toward the only apparent means available to it to secure slavery: the dissolution of the Union. And there was no method of ending northern discomfort with slavery except turning a permanent blind eye to it, which was impossible as long as it was expanding, or going to war to suppress it, or acquiescing in the break-up of the country.
Webster was right that it was nonsense to contemplate slavery in places where African American laborers were not more productive than Caucasian workers. There was no economic rationale for slavery in cooler climates than the cotton-producing South. Calhoun’s demand for the imposition of a false equality of regions was preposterous, as people vote with their feet in such matters, and slave-holding was an odious system. And the demand for the establishment of slavery in places like New Mexico, where there was no possible economic use for it, was insolent. By not eliminating the recurrences of frictions, the Compromise of 1850 assured their escalation. This was clear enough with the publication in 1852 of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a dramatization of the problems of the life of the slave that sold a completely unprecedented 1.2 million copies in a little over a year. The Compromise of 1850 bought time.
It would have been better to produce a continuation of the 1821 Missouri Compromise line to the California border, and to produce a magnanimous scheme whereby the federal government would incentivize emancipations generously, or even to impose a code of treatment that at least gave the slaves the rights accorded later by legislation against cruelty to animals. None of this would have been easy to pass, but it wasn’t tried, and the Compromise was going to lead quickly to renewed and intense friction, though it earned Clay the title, with the usual American hyperbole, “the Great Pacificator” (as Calhoun, before he became a robotic and belligerent slavery apologist, was called “the Young Demosthenes,” and as Webster was long known as “the Godlike Daniel”). As with all resolutions of tense impasses that are not comprehensive, such as the Versailles and Munich Conferences (Chapters 9 and 10), when the problems it had been hoped were settled rose up again, it was with increased venom and escalated hostility between the factions that had thought the problems composed.
As a solution and durable extension of the Jackson system, the compromise was a stopgap, but as strategy—and this may not have been in Clay’s mind but it might have been in the thoughts of some others, possibly including Douglas—it was decisive to the survival of the country. In the ensuing decade, the U.S. population would increase by another 35 percent, from 23 to 31 million, 22.4 million in what would be the North (all but 448,000 free, and the slaves were in Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland, and would be relatively easy to emancipate) to 8.7 million in the South, and of those, only 5.1 million whites. Even if Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, all contested states but with northern majorities, are divided between North and South, it only narrows the 22-to-5.1-million advantage of northern over southern Whites to about 21 to 6 million. In that decade, almost three million people arrived in the United States as immigrants, more than four-fifths to the North (plus all of the 800,000 immigrants who arrived in the first half of the 1860s). The northern states would mobilize more than three times as many men to their armed forces from 1861 to 1865 as the South and had a vastly larger industrial base to support an armed enforcement of the Union. Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay kept together for a further 30 years the Union that Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Adams had founded and led for nearly 40 years, so that the greatest of all American leaders could make the Union “one and indivisible,” and permanent, at last.
While the country was absorbed by the struggle for the Compromise, there were some foreign policy developments. Taylor’s secretary of state, John M. Clayton, negotiated a treaty with the British minister in Washington, Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer (the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty), after both countries had been active in Nicaragua, preparing to build an isthmian canal between the Atlantic and the Pacific. The two agreed not to seek or assert exclusive control over, nor fortify, such a canal; guaranteed jointly the neutrality and security of any such canal; agreed to keep the canal open to the ships of both countries equally; and promised not to infringe on the sovereignty of any of the Central American states.
In December 1850, after the Austrian government’s charge in Washington, Johann Georg Hülsemann, registered a protest t
hat the American diplomat A. Dudley Mann had encouraged Hungarian revolutionaries, Clayton’s successor, Daniel Webster (back at State for a second time), wrote a bombastic letter in reply to Hülsemann, asserting America’s right to support factions and movements in Europe that appeared, as did those of 1848, congruent with “those great ideas of responsible and popular government” that inspired the American Revolution. He went on grandly to inform Hülsemann that America had vastly rich and fertile lands compared with which “the possessions of the House of Habsburg are but as a patch on the earth’s surface.” This bumptious disparagement of what was still a substantial if polyglot empire, though it showed the unfamiliarity of even so worldly a man as Webster with accepted diplomatic style, also illustrated the disintegration of the residual Holy Roman Empire, just two years after the fall of Metternich. It was at about this time that this empire’s condition was described as “hopeless but not desperate.” These upheavals in Europe only reinforced the comparative eminence of august and unchallenged early Victorian Britain. The Hungarian revolutionary leader Louis Kossuth was accorded an immense reception when he arrived in New York in December.
There was a farcical expedition in 1851 against Spanish Cuba, led by General Narciso López, a Venezuelan-born Spanish general who had sided with the anti-Spanish faction in Cuba. López was apprehended and publicly garroted. Fifty Americans who accompanied López were executed and more than 70 others shipped back to Spain in unsatisfactory conditions and only released when the United States handed over $25,000 to cover reparations for the sacking by angry crowds of the Spanish consulate in New Orleans on August 21, 1851, following the execution of the 50 Americans. (The fiasco of the landing and the ransoming of the hostages presaged, at least to a slight degree, the debacle of American-backed guerrillas in the Bay of Pigs shambles in 1961, and the seizing of the American hostages in the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1980–1981, Chapters 14 and 16.)
8. THE SLIDE TOWARD DISUNION
The Democrats met, again at Baltimore, in June 1852, and there was a fierce contest for the presidential nomination between the narrowly defeated (by Van Buren’s spoiler anti-slavery candidacy) General Lewis Cass, senator from Michigan and former governor, minister to France, and secretary of war; Polk’s able war secretary and former judge, senator, and three-term governor of New York, William L. Marcy; Illinois’s capable and energetic Senator Stephen A. Douglas; and Polk’s indecisive doughface secretary of state, James Buchanan of Pennsylvania. None of the four could get a majority of votes, much less the two-thirds majority required for nomination, so for the third straight Democratic convention a dark horse emerged, Franklin Pierce, former general and former U.S. senator from New Hampshire and now that state’s governor. His views on slavery were not well-known, so he could be supported by all the factions, though all the leading candidates except Buchanan would have been better candidates and much better presidents. The vice presidential candidate was Alabama senator and former minister to France William R. King, who, although he and his family owned 500 slaves, was a Unionist and a moderate on the issue of slavery. King shared a house with James Buchanan for 15 years, and Jackson, in particular, had implied with his usual causticity that they were homosexuals, but that has never been substantiated.
The Whigs met in the same place as soon as the Democrats departed and also had a long struggle, between President Fillmore, who ran for reelection as champion of the Compromise of 1850; the anti-slavery general, Winfield Scott, who had fought in every American war (and significant skirmish) since 1812, and was the commanding general of the United States Army for 20 years; and the septuagenarian secretary of state, Daniel Webster. Finally, Scott prevailed on the 53rd ballot. This development eliminated any Whig support from pro-slavery elements and effectively divided the North between those who wanted to restrain or abolish slavery and those who were prepared to abide by the implicit but not unlimited expansion of it foreseen by the Compromise of 1850. The vice presidential candidate was Navy Secretary William Graham of North Carolina.
The platforms were virtually identical, but because Scott, though an upholder of the Compromise of 1850 and a Virginian, was known to be anti-slavery, and Pierce was a doughface appeaser of the South, though also a supporter of the Compromise, Pierce took the slave states en bloc and had the upper hand in the North, where the majority hoped the Great Compromise had solved the slavery controversy. Pierce was a distinguished general, who had served under Scott in Mexico, and as a governor and senator was a more apt campaigner (there was almost no physical campaign) than the stolid and rather guileless Scott, who was 71 and weighed about 300 pounds. Given his many advantages, it was not surprising that Pierce won with 1.6 million votes to 1.39 for Scott, 50 percent to 44 percent. (Almost all the rest went to the old Free Soil Party that Van Buren had led in 1848.)
The Compromise was holding, but its greatest authors were gone; Clay had died, aged 75, at the end of June, and Webster, who had contested the Whig nomination in June, died in October, aged 70. (Webster was succeeded as secretary of state by his most assiduous disciple, Edward Everett, former governor of Massachusetts and minister to Great Britain.) President Fillmore returned to be the most prominent citizen of Buffalo, New York, an undistinguished president, but one who had made a vital and positive contribution at a critical time by supporting the Compromise of 1850. He had also sent Commodore Matthew Perry to open the ports of Japan, an important mission completed by his successor. Douglas was now the leading figure in the Congress. The new vice president, William R. King, was suffering from tuberculosis, for which he went on a curative trip to Cuba. His condition worsened, and he was inaugurated by special act of Congress, at the consulate in Havana, and died after just 45 days in office at his home in Alabama, without ever having got back to Washington. The leading figures in the cabinet were the astute William L. Marcy as secretary of state and the strident Calhounite Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as secretary of war.
The Whigs had effectively become a party that could more or less tolerate the continuation of slavery if the Union depended on it but was opposed to its extension. They could no longer challenge successfully by selecting candidates who were fuzzy on the issue, as Harrison and Taylor, and in his way, Clay, had been. The Democrats were the sole continuators now of the Jackson settlement. There were many northern Democrats who were uncomfortable with the possibility of any expansion of slavery outside cotton, tobacco, and sugar-producing areas. The old Whigs had effectively disintegrated and gravitated toward a new party, alongside the anti-slavery Democrats and the Free Soilers.
On March 31, 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry, whom President Fillmore had sent to Japan, signed an agreement (Treaty of Kanagawa) opening two Japanese ports to the U.S. Perry brought gifts, including a miniature railway and telegraph, which did impress the locals. This was the beginning of the process that brought Japan out of its isolation and turned it very quickly into one of the world’s Great Powers. In June of 1854, the Canadian Reciprocity Treaty resolved many and long-standing fishing disputes, essentially by opening up the waters of each country to the fishing of the other.
Between 1855 and 1860, there would be a series of private attempts led by the adventurer William Walker to take control of Nicaragua to promote an isthmian canal. Pierce professed not to approve the initiative, but Walker purported to be the president of Nicaragua from 1855 to 1857, during which time his emissary was received by Pierce, seeming to legitimize what was again looked upon in the North as another effort to extend the frontiers of slavery illicitly, out the back door of America in an unjustifiable act of aggression. This was reminiscent of the hostile Whig take on the Mexican War. Walker was chased out by Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who owned the local railway. Walker returned a hero to the South, and reinvaded Nicaragua in 1857 unsuccessfully. The whole Ruritanian farce would come to an end with another invasion in 1860, in Honduras, where the local authorities defeated, captured, tried, and executed Walker with commendable efficiency. American public
thinking on slavery had by then vastly transcended this type of farcical gasconade.
Pierce was a fine-looking, good-natured, charming, and well-intentioned man, and had been a competent general of division and was a popular governor of New Hampshire. Selected by the Democrats because of the ambiguity of his views and thus the possibility of selling him to a wide range of voters on the omnipresent slavery issue, he had poorly thought-out opinions and little grasp of the strong tides and currents that swept over the country, and no real principles from which to try to hold the country together. Jackson had been a strong and decisive leader, albeit with some primitive opinions; Van Buren was a cunning operator with flashes of principle; Tyler was muddled and inept and unscrupulous in method, though dogmatic in policy matters; and Fillmore was better but clumsy; but they were accidental presidents. Polk was as sly as Van Buren and more discerning, though less formidable than Jackson. Taylor equivocated well and didn’t last long.
But Pierce was a weak leader at a dangerous time. To hold together the coalition that elected him, he would need a sophisticated knowledge of the background and political landscape of the country, and be settled in his views and effective in their implementation, as only Jackson and Polk were, among the presidents of the time; and as Clay, and up to a point, Webster, Douglas, Benton, and the one-term Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln were among the legislators. Pierce missed on all counts, and he and his successor would reveal the vulnerability of the Jackson system. It always depends on leadership, whether the political center is a fulcrum of strength or a vortex of weakness. Jackson and Polk were border-state southerners who knew the South but had held federal offices (army commander and senator for Jackson, Speaker of the House for Polk), and they broadly understood the shoals around them and the possibilities available.