American Experiment
Page 66
By 1848 Texas, the war, Oregon, and calls for “Free Soil” had immensely enlarged the antislavery movement. In the Democratic party the movement now included the “Barnburners,” so named because they had repudiated a New York Democratic convention in 1847 rather than accept its conservative platform, on the model of the Dutch farmer who had burned his barn to get rid of the rats. This action had left “Hunkers”—conservative party regulars—in control of a diminished Democracy. As the radical wing of the party, Barnburners turned increasingly toward antislavery in their national posture.
The Whigs, based more in the North, were even more divided over slavery than the Democrats. For some years there had been developing within that party an antislavery movement enjoying the agreeable designation “Conscience Whigs.” Arrayed against them in increasing numbers were the “Cotton Whigs,” so called for their support of cooperation with southern moderates and their close financial and political connections with the cotton growers of the South. Spiritually and intellectually based in Boston’s Unitarianism and Concord’s Transcendentalism, Conscience Whiggery took a moral stand on slavery that aroused compassionate Americans throughout the North and Northwest. Leaders of the two Whig factions seemed often to hate each other more than the common Democratic foe. It was not a Democrat but a Whig who labeled Cotton Whig moderation as a conspiracy between “the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.”
As 1848 approached, antislavery leaders within and outside the major parties stepped up their efforts to offer a presidential candidate clearly opposed to the extension of slavery. What should be the strategy? Purist abolitionists clung to their policy of scorning parties and elections in favor of moral appeals. Old Liberty party leaders and anti-extension Democrats and Whigs began to think the unthinkable—abandoning their parties and joining a new movement pledged to the Wilmot Proviso. The old “Liberty men” faced difficult choices. Should they exchange the moral impact of their intense single cause for the wider electoral support they could gain through coalition? Under the leadership of Salmon P. Chase, a forty-year-old Cincinnati lawyer who had fought the 1793 fugitive-slave law up to the Supreme Court (and lost), many Liberty men moved toward a broad Free-Soil movement. They would pay the price of compromise through collaboration, for despite all their vaunted militancy the Free-Soilers would be, as Eric Foner has pointed out, the first major antislavery group to avoid the question of Negro rights in their national platform. But it was this kind of concession that made it possible for the Free-Soil movement to embrace strong anti-extensionists, moderate Conscience Whigs, and those Barnburners who were far more concerned with the impact of slavery on whites than on blacks. The desertion of their parties by anti-extension Democrats and Whigs eased tensions within the two major parties, which continued their middle-of-the-road strategy of conciliating pro- and anti-extension delegates in their presidential conventions.
With basic strategic choices made, presidential election politics now unfolded as if following a master scenario.
November 1847: The Liberty party convenes in New York and nominates Senator John P. Hale, New Hampshire apostate Democrat, for President.
May 1848: The Democratic national convention, fiercely divided over slavery extension, meeting in Baltimore, promptly splits apart over the question of seating contested delegations of Barnburners and Hunkers from New York; when compromise efforts fail, neither delegation sits in the convention. When the convention nominates Lewis Cass, veteran Democrat, ex-general, opponent of Free Soil, advocate of “squatter sovereignty,” the Hunkers pledge their support; the Barnburners pointedly do not.
Early June: The Whig national convention assembles in Philadelphia to decide among the often nominated but never elected Henry Clay and a choice of two generals of Mexican War fame, Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott. The Whigs, like the Democrats the month before, oppose congressional power to control slavery in the territories. They choose war hero Taylor.
Now into this scenario intrudes a new anti-extensionist leader but a moderate of yore—the old fox of Kinderhook, ex-President Martin Van Buren himself. As the master organizer and unifier of the Jacksonian Democratic party, Van Buren had always taken a soft position on slavery; in particular, he had fought the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, amid the taunts of the abolitionists. Since his defeat in 1840 he had reluctantly moved toward a strong anti-extension position. Old Democratic party comrades broke with him, but he had the support of his handsome and personable son John, who doubled as a kind of Democratic party Prince Charming and as an eloquent adversary of slavery. Could the old man now be trusted? Free-Soilers asked, and the verdict was generally yes. Besides, he was immensely available, with his big national reputation and following.
Late June: The seceding Barnburners hold their own convention in Utica and nominate Van Buren for President.
August: Liberty-ites, Barnburners and other antislavery Democrats, and Conscience Whigs hold the national convention of the Free-Soil party in a huge, broiling tent in Buffalo and also nominate Van Buren for President, after sidetracking Hale. The Free-Soilers proclaim their slogan: “FREE SOIL, FREE SPEECH, FREE LABOR, FREE MEN!”
November: Taylor defeats Cass by 1,360,000 to 1,220,000 in the popular vote, 163 to 127 in the electoral college.
A striking aspect of the 1848 results was the mottled voting pattern; Taylor carried eight slave states and seven free; Cass, eight free and seven slave. Hence the Whigs, like the Democrats under Polk and Van Buren, would govern with their political support and obligation fixed in slaveholding as well as anti-extension constituencies. Another key outcome was Van Buren’s failure to carry a single state with his 291,000 votes. His main role—ironic for the Democracy’s supreme organization man—was to help pull his old party down. The Barnburners were gleeful—they had set fire to a big barn and they had punished some proslavery rats. But to what avail was this, if a huge new log cabin packed with southern and Cotton Whigs stood in its place?
Americans had come to expect a period of calm following presidential elections. The arguments had been made; the people had spoken; let the new man show what he could do. But the election of 1848 seemed to bring little surcease. Late in January 1849, even before Taylor took office, a caucus of southern senators and representatives, under the leadership of John Calhoun, after heated debate issued a “Southern Address” that charged the North with “acts of aggression” against southern rights. If the North did not moderate its position on fugitive slaves and territorial slavery, the address proclaimed to the South, “nothing would remain for you but to stand up immovably in defense of rights, involving your all—your property, prosperity, equality, liberty, and safety.…” At heart the address legitimated the need for southern separatism on the ground that the North was bent on demanding emancipation and racial equality. When Congress convened in December the House immediately became the theater of a struggle between southern Democrats and northern Whigs over the Speakership. Only after sixty-three ballotings and bitter threats on both sides was Democrat Howell Cobb of Georgia chosen over Whig Robert C. Winthrop of Massachusetts.
Three thousand miles to the west, something had happened that would affect all the calculations of the geometry of balance. Sutter’s man James Marshall, boss of the mill, had looked into the stream and seen golden specks dancing amid the churning tailrace. Gold! Marshall rushed to Sutter, and soon the news was sweeping through the valley and out into the world.
Indians had often brought small quantities of gold dust to the Spanish missions in California, and white settlers in the early 1840s made two strikes that had aroused little excitement. But as the water coursed through the millrace near the Sacramento River, it led the way to a billion-dollar fortune. By midsummer of 1848, the U.S. military governor reported that “mills were lying idle, fields of wheat were open to cattle and horses, houses vacant, and farms going to waste” the entire length of the territory, as most of the population hurried to the gold fields. The prospectors pri
ed nuggets from the ground with knives and picks, or built dams to uncover the grains of gold in the streambeds. They sifted heavy gold dust from the black river gravel with any tool from a pan to an elaborate wooden frame operated by several men. Word reached the East of yields of fifty or even a hundred dollars a day.
Easterners remained skeptical of the golden tales from California until December, when 230 ounces of almost pure metal arrived in Washington. Then newspapers, shipping lines, and thousands of citizens from every walk of life went wild. The gold seekers rushed to California by sea around Cape Horn, across Panama or Mexico by mule, over the Great Plains in wagons. More than 40,000 people arrived in 1849, with even more to follow in the succeeding years. In San Francisco Bay lay five hundred ships abandoned by their crews, while the sleepy village of San Francisco became a city of several thousand inhabitants in just a few months.
As adventurers from every state and a dozen nations scrambled to reap the golden harvest, law and order broke down. The white and Mexican Californians watched with anguish as the newcomers seized their lands, murdered and hanged one another, and trod over the local Indians in the race for gold. The territory needed government, and quickly. In August 1849 voters from each district met to choose delegates—lawyers, farmers, merchants, and a scattering of professional men—to a convention on statehood. When they gathered in Monterey in September, the town had no hotels and some of the state-makers had to sleep under the open skies. The delegates’ deliberations were brief and occasionally stormy. Everyone wanted the state capital to be located in his district; the Mexicans, remembering Fremont’s Bear Flag revolt, objected to the inclusion of a bear on the state banner. Nonetheless, all agreed to a constitutional provision that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude…shall ever be tolerated in this state.”
The Californians’ decision on slavery accelerated the conflict in Washington. President Taylor urged Congress to admit California into the Union with its free-state constitution. Southerners bridled at the idea of admitting a free state without compensation to southern rights. Debates in the House and Senate raged over slavery extension. When Representative Charles Allen, Massachusetts Free-Soiler, mocked the Southerners for their vain threats against the Union, asserting that “their united force could not remove one of the marble columns which support this Hall,” H. W. Hilliard of Alabama rebuked him: “I say to him and to this whole House, that the Union of these States is in great peril.” He had never known such deep and settled feeling in the South, Hilliard added. If the North persisted in its threats to the South, “THIS UNION CANNOT STAND.” The Northerners were accused of an act of aggression against the South. To many persons, North and South, the nation appeared on the verge of war.
By 1850 the great balances of the American system seemed to be collapsing. Constitution, parties, Congress, the presidency were no longer acting as resilient, stabilizing foundations for the flexible bonds of union. It was at this point of extreme crisis that two men who had embodied the spirit and calculus of compromise appeared on the scene for one last titanic effort.
Early on the evening of January 21, 1850, Henry Clay plodded through a Washington snowstorm to visit Daniel Webster in the latter’s house. Clay had a bad cough; he was leaner now, an old man entering his mid-seventies, but he was as courtly and charming as ever, and although the visit was unexpected, the two rivals fell into an intense discussion. Clay had a plan—to gather all the issues dividing Congress into one omnibus package of conciliation that might unite it. Clay would admit California as a free state, compel Texas to relinquish its claim to New Mexico but reward it with federal assumption of Texas’ unpaid debt, leave slavery untouched in the District of Columbia but abolish the slave trade in the District, enact a more effective fugitive-slave law, have Congress declare that it had no power to deal with the interstate slave trade, and, as for the rest of the territory acquired from Mexico, Clay would grant it territorial governments with no slavery provisions at all. For some time the two men talked—Clay lean and nervous, as a witness remembered, the play of emotion on his expressive face; Webster grave, intent, inscrutable. Encouraged by Webster’s response, Clay began planning his speech to the Senate.
Eight days later, Clay presented his omnibus proposal to the Senate. The chamber was so jammed with people that the temperature rose to 100 degrees. He had witnessed many periods of anxiety and peril, he said, but he had “never before arisen to address any assembly so oppressed, so appalled, so anxious.” Clay seemed almost like a death’s-head, with his long, iron-gray hair, sunken cheeks, pinched nose, and black costume. Yet he was able to talk for three hours that day and the next, presenting his plan in detail and beseeching Congress to rise above its sectional animosities. He admitted that the omnibus proposal offered more to the South than the North; the richer and more powerful North could afford to be generous. His final words were to “conjure gentlemen…by all their love of liberty” and for posterity to draw back from the precipice, and he implored Heaven that if the Union should dissolve, “I may not survive to behold the sad and heart-rending spectacle.”
Even the Great Pacificator’s oratory seemed inadequate now. Senators still put their own sectional claims above union, and Congress soon again dissolved into a war of factions. Abolitionists in the North and proslavery extremists in the South were loudly calling for dissolution. Most moderate southern Whigs and northern Democrats favored Clay’s plan, while northern Whigs stood by President Taylor in opposition. Jefferson Davis spoke for southern ultras: the South would yield nothing. On March 4 John Calhoun came to the Senate, though mortally ill. His speech had to be read for him, but the message came through strongly. If California should be admitted, it could only be “with the intention of destroying irretrievably the equilibrium between the two sections,” and the South would be forced to leave the Union.
Three days later, Webster rose in a chamber even more oppressive and crowded than when Clay had spoken. Fashionable women sat in any available chair and gathered around the steps leading to the rostrum. The nation’s notables were there: “Old Bullion” Benton, Clay, Lewis Cass, Davis, Stephen A. Douglas, and a flock of personages from the House. Webster thanked another senator who had yielded his place so that Webster could speak, and began:
“Mr. President, I wish to speak to-day, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a northern man, but as an American.…I speak to-day for the preservation of the Union. ‘Hear me for my cause.’…” It was a long speech, studded with historical allusions, references to increasing disunion such as the rift within the Methodist Church, constitutional arguments. On occasion Calhoun feebly intervened, but for the most part, peering out of cavernous eyes shrouded by a mass of snow-white hair, he sat in deathly stillness. Webster’s address was, in effect, a long historical essay, in which he handed out praise and blame variously to South and North, like some supreme arbiter. He ended on a personal note. What would happen if the Constitution actually were overthrown? What states would secede? What would remain American? Where would the flag remain? “What am I to be—an American no longer?” He ended with poetry’s tribute to his great love, Union:
Now, the broad shield complete, the artist crowned
With his last hand, and poured the ocean round;
In living silver seemed the waves to roll,
And beat the buckler berge, and bound the whole.
If Congress were good theater, the marvelously conciliating speeches of Clay and Webster and others would have come to an early climax in dramatic confrontations as final votes were taken on the omnibus proposal. But Congress was not good theater. Rather, through the complex, fracturing effect of powerful committees, legislative procedures, and personages, the omnibus was stripped apart and converted back into individual measures, which could be picked off in turn by shifting majorities. To make matters worse for the Unionists, President Taylor, while supporting some of the proposals individually, opposed Clay’s omnibus compromise as such. The proposals seemed headed for defe
at when Taylor suddenly died of cholera a few days after taking part in the festivities of a Fourth of July celebration of the building of the Washington Monument. Eager to strengthen his relationship with northern Whigs, Taylor had been willing for Webster to be denounced by New Englanders as a traitor and moral renegade for his compromising stand.
The new President was Millard Fillmore, a conciliatory fifty-year-old New Yorker who had been pursuing a lackluster career as a state and congressional politico when he was tapped to balance a presidential ticket led by a southern soldier. Fillmore was more agreeable to the omnibus proposals than Taylor. Unlike his predecessor, he was not expected to veto a general compromise. By now Clay, tired and ailing, and Webster, newly appointed as Fillmore’s Secretary of State, were no longer the central figures on the congressional stage. The measures had passed into the hands of younger, more practical men who may have lacked the grand Union vision of a Clay or Webster but who knew how to bargain and maneuver, wheedle and pressure. The compromise that Clay and Webster, as supreme transactional leaders, had seen emerging from a carefully calculated geometry of balance, bringing sections and interests and ideologies into a stable and creative equilibrium, the new men saw as a matter of arithmetic, adding here, subtracting there, in a linear series of transactions. California admission, the fugitive-slave bill, and the other key measures went through in a rush in September 1850. The Great Compromise—tattered, battered, mutilated, but still a great compromise—was law.