American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  If the Atlantic had been for Americans an ocean of commerce and an arena of conflict—an arena of invasions, sea battles, blockades, privateers, filibusters—the Pacific had been pacific. What was known of the largest of oceans, aside from the reports of explorers, had been learned in pursuing the prodigious source of a few rather specialized products: sperm oil for the brightest, purest kind of light, as in lighthouse beacons; spermaceti, for the better grade of candles; whalebone, for corsets, stays, whips, and umbrellas; ambergris, for perfumes and aphrodisiacs. The source for all these was the whale—the humpback, the bowhead, the right, and above all the sperm whale.

  In their two- and three-year journeys to the southern and northern and western Pacific, whalemen explored new routes and charted distant islands, reefs, and shoals. They also left way stations and repair ports, the most important of which was Honolulu. By the 1850s, several hundred whalers were visiting the Hawaiian port every year. Its ship-repair facilities made it a vital naval station; inevitably Pierce and Marcy included Hawaii as part of the nation’s manifest destiny. Whalemen from Massachusetts found on Hawaii a large and energetic band of missionaries from Boston, who had built out of coral blocks a large stone church, in the image of a New England meeting house, that served also as a landmark for sailors.

  During this height of the era of whaling 600 whalers were bringing home over a quarter million barrels of sperm and whale oil a year, and 2.5 million pounds of whalebone. “Home” was a remarkably small number of ports—notably New Bedford and other New England seacoast towns and river ports like Poughkeepsie on the Hudson. Whaling flourished for a time in the island towns of Nantucket and Edgartown, but eventually they yielded ground to New Bedford. Collectively the whaling towns provided more than 15,000 men for crews and employed thousands more in building, outfitting, and repairing the slow, stubby, broad-beamed vessels strong enough to survive forty or more months of warring with wind, wave, and whale.

  Herman Melville had shipped out of Fairhaven, across from New Bedford, on a whaler bound for the South Seas, and no one pictured the romance of whaling as evocatively as he did. The long-awaited, transcending moment of excitement came with the chase by the speedy little whale-boats:

  …The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;—all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooners, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails.…

  A short, rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron of Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible push from astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the sail collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapor shot up near by; something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole crew was half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the white curdling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all blended together.…

  This was a romantic view of the whaler’s life; the view from the forecastle was markedly different. The forecastleman shared the hardships of the ordinary seaman—sleeping and living in a tiny, stinking compartment, with swill and vomit washing about under the wooden bunks, with almost no ventilation or light during cold or stormy weather, with men of a dozen lands and tongues smoking, spitting, cursing, quarreling amid greasy pans, sea chests, soap kegs, in sweat-saturated underclothes. For the whalers, whose voyages were long, conditions were even worse than for ordinary seamen. Their water turned foul, butter rancid, meat rotten, with bread so full of worms that it became common practice to scald them out or—more agreeably—to pour half a pint of rum into the bread casket ahead of time. On the “Nantucket sleigh-ride” a man could drown or lose a limb. Pay was poor. Whalemen lived wretched, oppressed lives, second in misery only to the lot of Africans on the slaver.

  The indomitable whalers sailed far beyond the Sandwich Islands to the Bonins, the South China Sea, and Japan. Ever since independence, and freedom from the British Navigation Acts, Americans had been conducting an active trade with the Chinese in tea and silks, working closely with the British, in the treaty ports of Canton, Shanghai, and other Chinese trading centers. A major obstacle in dealing with the Chinese was their conviction that the visitors were “foreign devils” and “barbarians,” while the Americans looked on the Chinese as quaintly mysterious. The inscrutable Orient and Occident had similar problems in Japan. Several American whaling men who had survived a shipwreck off the Kuriles were incarcerated by the Japanese for a year, and required to trample on a tablet picturing the Crucifixion.

  Yet trade was growing, and the Fillmore administration decided on a bold step: dispatching Commodore Matthew C. Perry to Japan to work out commercial understandings. The expedition cleared Norfolk in November 1852. Six months later the Japanese were awed by the spectacle of Perry’s small fleet steaming up the Bay of Yedo (later Tokyo) against the wind. They were apprehensive too:

  Thro’ a black night of cloud and rain,

  The Black Ship plies her way—

  An alien thing of evil mien—

  Across the waters gray.

  Through a skillful mixture of diplomacy and firmness, Perry worked out a convention for shipwrecked sailors. It was a small start, and disappointing to some traders at home, but within a few years the consul general, Townsend Harris, tactfully negotiated a commercial treaty that set the direction of Japanese-American diplomacy for another half century.

  “IT WILL RAISE A HELL OF A STORM”

  The railroads that forked out of Chicago and rolled across Illinois pointed toward Missouri and Iowa—and toward the vast Kansas-Nebraska Territory that lay beyond. Settlers particularly fastened their gaze on the sandy clay of the fertile river bottoms in eastern Kansas. Slave owners in northwestern Missouri, flanking the winding Missouri River north and south, dreamed of growing hemp and tobacco in the reaches southwest of the river. Land-hungry homesteaders throughout the north eyed the bottomlands and the rich clay loam of the upland prairies beyond.

  The territory in itself posed a hot issue, for the question of slavery there was still open. The area was also bound to lie in the vortex of other pressures rising throughout the land: the old issue of federal disposal of lands; the question of local and national treatment of long-beleaguered Indian tribes; and, in the frenzied transportation boom of the 1850s, federal choice of the routes for the transcontinental railroads that would link Atlantic and Pacific. In 1820 American politicians and their political system had handled such factors through a compromise that barred slavery north of 36º30?, and hence, by implication, Nebraska. In 1850 another compromise had endorsed the expedient of popular (territorial) control of slavery while seeming to leave the 1820 compromise intact. But the pressures now were more explosive and centrifugal than ever.

  Standing most exposed in this controversy was no Clay or Webster but the forty-year-old chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. Douglas looked like a giant who, beneath his great mane and high forehead, had been squashed flat into a broad swath of eyebrows, a wide mouth and neck, and dwarfed legs. Life indeed had tried to squash him flat. Fatherless shortly after his birth in Vermont, put out to farm work as a child by a taskmaster of an uncle, denied a full education, he wandered west, taking job after job, until he settled in Illinois to read law and enter politics. He lost a congressional election by thirty-five votes, and a Senate contest by five legislative votes, before winning a House seat in 1843 and a Senate seat four years later. In his one term in the upper chamber he had achieved a Senate and national reputation
as a quick-witted, resourceful, and pugnacious debater and yet also as a conciliator between northern and southern Democrats. Trained as a boy in woodworking, in his short life Douglas had become a master craftsman in the more unruly fields of railroad promotion, tariff making, public land disposal, river and harbor subsidies.

  Douglas had a most ingenious plan: to admit Nebraska as a territory, neither legislating slavery there nor legislating it out, leaving the decision on slavery to the people in the territory, and to do all this without openly repudiating the Missouri Compromise. This last requirement was crucial, because Douglas knew that millions venerated that compromise as virtually the holy writ of the Union, sanctified by Clay, Webster & Co. Yet Douglas could not act alone. He could only exert leverage among the great balances of the domestic mobile, and those balances were swinging against him as of January 1854. Two of these swung together: the growing southern influence over the machinery of Congress, and Pierce’s weak presidential leadership. Moreover, time did not lie on Douglas’ side; he was desperately eager to go about his principal business of organizing the Nebraska Territory before his enemies on both flanks could thwart him.

  For a time, after Douglas introduced his Nebraska bill in the Senate early in January 1854, it seemed that he might pick his way through the thickets. Providing that Nebraska, when admitted as a state, should be received into the Union “with or without slavery,” as its “constitution may prescribe” at the time of admission, the measure neither affirmed nor repealed the Missouri Compromise—it simply ignored it. Antislavery leaders were not unduly upset; it was hard to argue against local “popular sovereignty,” and they doubted that the territory would be hospitable to slavery anyway. But now the leading proslavery senators swung into action, a formidable phalanx: Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina, longtime disciple of Calhoun, champion of nullification, chairman of the Judiciary Committee; two states’ rights, proslavery Virginians, Robert M. T. Hunter and James M. Mason; and David R. Atchison of Missouri, a leader of the proslavery faction, chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, and bitter foe of Thomas Hart Benton, whom he had helped defeat for re-election in 1850. These senators lived and concerted together in Washington, in their famous “F Street Mess.”

  The phalanx saw its chance to strike the Missouri Compromise its deathblow. With their chairmanships, big Democratic majorities, and complaisant President, they could hardly expect such an opportunity again. Douglas, startled when proslavery Senator Archibald Dixon of Kentucky brought up an amendment that directly repudiated the compromise of 1820, pleaded with Dixon in the Senate chamber to avoid such a drastic step. Later, when Douglas asked Dixon to join him in a carriage ride so they could talk undisturbed, Dixon was so persuasive—he had the votes—that Douglas not only agreed to support Dixon’s amendment but proposed to sponsor it.

  “By God, Sir,” Douglas said, “you are right. I will incorporate it in my bill, though I know it will raise a hell of a storm.”

  Why this flip-flop by the “Little Giant”? politicians wondered at the time, and historians ever since. To Douglas, it was not a change of heart but a recognition of where power lay in the Senate and House, of the need to placate that power in order to move ahead on railroad-building and western development. Critics charged that he yielded to the Southerners because of his presidential ambitions, but he was playing better short-term congressional politics than long-term presidential. Long before the term “pragmatist” became popular, Douglas was an expert in calculating short-run advantage and step-by-step movement. He had no strong feeling about slavery, and even less understanding of how others could feel so strongly on the matter. He preferred to leave the future of slavery up to “the laws of climate, and of production, and of physical geography.…” Material forces, not moral, would decide.

  It remained only for Douglas and the Southerners to line up the Administration. Increasingly pressed for time, Douglas had only one day—a Sunday—to persuade the President, who would transact no business on the Sabbath. With the aid of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, Pierce’s reluctant assent was gained for a meeting with Douglas and a small group. Sensing that the measure would divide his party and the nation, but crippled by divisions within his Cabinet and within himself, the President could not resist the Senate junto; he even agreed in writing that the Missouri Compromise was inoperative. On January 23, 1854, Stephen Douglas brought in his Nebraska bill, embracing the fateful amendment.

  Waiting for Douglas’ move was a trio of antislavery senators: Chase, Wade, and Sumner. Salmon P. Chase of Ohio had been born in New Hampshire and had, like Douglas, lost his father in his early years; the uncle who took him in was the Protestant Episcopal bishop of Ohio. Settling in Cincinnati, Chase gained fame as the “attorney-general for runaway negroes” in his ardent defenses of fugitive slaves. A one-man antislavery party, he deserted the Whigs to work for the Liberty party in 1840 and the Free-Soilers in ’48. The deaths of three wives, and of four of six daughters, seemed to deepen his compassion. His junior colleague from Ohio, Benjamin F. Wade, born in Massachusetts and in poverty, rough of mien and coarse of speech, was a Senate neophyte experienced nonetheless in Ohio politics. The most arresting of the trio was Charles Sumner, Boston-born, Harvard-educated, friend of his fellow Unitarians Channing, Longfellow, and Emerson. His longtime denunciations of the cotton Whigs as “the lords of the loom” still alienated him from Robert Winthrop and the rest of the Whig establishment in Boston. Well over six feet tall, large of frame, pedagogical and humorless of bearing, he spoke, said Longfellow, “like a cannoneer…ramming down cartridges,” pressing a single idea with such doctrinal fervor that Francis Lieber complained of his “Jacobinical abstraction” and Winthrop labeled him a “Jesuit of the first water.”

  Chase and his Senate and congressional friends had ample time to prepare their counterattack. On January 24 Washington’s National Era blazoned forth with their “APPEAL OF THE INDEPENDENT DEMOCRATS IN CONGRESS TO THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES.”

  “We arraign this bill,” the appeal proclaimed, “as a gross violation of a sacred pledge; as a criminal betrayal of precious rights; as part and parcel of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region, immigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.…”

  This hyperbole set the tone for the whole manifesto. It offered little reasoned historical or legal analysis, or even a convincing attack on slavery, but rather paraded a series of horribles that would result from the bill: all unorganized territory would be open to slavery, territorial settlement would be slowed up, the transcontinental railroad would be sidetracked, the homestead law vitiated, the whole country placed under the “yoke of a slaveholding despotism.” Again and again the address returned to its main charge: the bill was a diabolical conspiracy against freedom, a plot contrived by a servile demagogue truckling to the South for the sake of his presidential ambitions. “Shall a plot against humanity and Democracy, so monstrous, and so dangerous to the interests of Liberty throughout the world, be permitted to succeed?”

  Editors and preachers and merchants had already been thundering against the assault on the Missouri Compromise; now the sheer force of this address, printed also in the New York Times and other newspapers, set off detonations across the North. Never mind the rhetorical absolutes in the address, the exaggerations and distortions, the conspiracy theory—its transcending moral conviction, its timeliness, and above all its reverberating call for the defense of liberty struck home to men and women determined, whatever their specific position on slavery, that this barbaric insult to freedom not be extended to “free soil.” Horace Greeley in New York, Samuel Bowles in Massachusetts, Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, Theodore Parker in Boston, Horace White in Chicago, were only the most noted of those who used the occasion to hurl their own thunderbolts from press and pulpit.

  Still underestimating the power of this moral tempest, Douglas predi
cted that the “storm will soon spend its fury.” It did not, because of its own intensity, because the bill lacerated the public as it wended its way through Senate and House, and because Douglas and his supporters, as well as the antislavery men and their allies, fought the congressional battle so furiously that the issue could not die. Douglas spent most of his time superbly managing the bill, but his angry speeches, laced with epithets, bristled in the press accounts. Greeley, fearing that the bill would “suffocate the moral force of liberty and equality within the young republic,” in Jeter Isely’s words, blasted the measure in a series of brilliant editorials—and watched his Weekly pick up another 35,000 readers nationwide during the first six months of 1854. The Tribune’s opposition could be expected; more significant was the spectacle of leading Democratic papers of Free-Soil tendencies—William Cullen Bryant’s New York Evening Post, the Rochester Union, Buffalo Republic, Cleveland Leader, and others—almost overnight turning against the Democratic party leadership.

  Would this wave of indignation pass over the North and then subside, like so many moral protests in the past? Or would it take form in some new and lasting political constellation? Looking back later, some historians saw an entire new movement and party spring to life as people mobilized against the Nebraska bill. Few did mobilize at the time, however. The editorial thunderbolts did not descend on people neatly arrayed in the Democratic and Whig parties. In the absence of strong party ideology or organization, Americans were perceiving and acting as members of a variety of subcultures.