The Fabric of America

by Andro Linklater

  For almost twenty years following his defeat by Andrew Jackson in 1828, Adams represented Massachusetts in Congress, and there, at least partly to expiate the aid he had given the pro-slavery forces, he became the spokesman, and often sole representative in the House, of the antislavery movement.

  “He never rebelled,” Henry Adams said disparagingly, “until the slave oligarchy contemptuously cut his throat.” Yet when he did rebel, he proved unshakable in the face of overwhelming, bitter hostility and a long campaign even to keep slavery from being mentioned in Congress. He began by presenting petitions that called for the immediate freeing of slaves in the District of Columbia, where the Congress had direct responsibility. But when pro-slavery representatives introduced the infamous “gag rules” to ban any discussion of slavery on the grounds that it stirred up insurrectionary ideas among slaves, Adams made stubborn and skillful use of House rules to have the subject talked about on every possible occasion. When his opponents tried to censure him, he used his right of self-defense to filibuster for two weeks about the iniquities of slavery and promised to talk another week until they withdrew the censure motion. Adams, said a Virginia congressman, was “the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of southern slavery that ever existed.”

  John Quincy Adams in 1847, by Mathew Brady

  What made his stance so unpopular was that by common consent most people who disliked slavery felt it right to censor themselves for fear of agitating the slaves. Southern leaders blamed each of the uprisings, planned or actual, of Gabriel in 1800, Denmark Vesey in 1822, and Nat Turner in 1831 on the resentment stirred up by criticism of the system or the propaganda of abolitionists, as though left to themselves slaves would gladly accept the paternalist care of their owners. To insulate slaves against infection from the north, the states’ legislation against teaching them to read was rigorously enforced. By implication, the few outright abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison were deemed to be plotting the murder of whites. “Are abolitionists doing the work of God?” demanded South Carolina’s James Hammond. “No! God is not there. It is the work of Satan.”

  The furious hostility of the south to any breath of censure silenced many more. Adams routinely received death threats, Harriet Martineau, a pioneering English sociologist who toured the United States in the late 1830s, was told: “They would hang me: they would cut my tongue out, and cast it on a dunghill; and so forth.” Elijah Lovejoy, an antislavery Illinois newspaperman, was in fact lynched, and in St. Louis, Missouri, Francis McIntosh, a free black, was burned alive merely for being suspected of abolitionist sympathies.

  The threat of financial loss silenced others. “There are millions upon millions of dollars due from Southerners to the merchants and mechanics of this city,” a New York businessman warned one antislaver, “the payment of which would be jeopardized by any rupture between the North and the South.” Even to discuss something as upsetting as slavery was regarded as rude. “Every liberty, personal and social,” Martineau wrote, “was sacrificed in the attempt to enforce silence on that one sore subject.”

  Against that background, Adams’s solitary courage stood out. His opposition to the annexation of Texas was equally fierce and unforgiving. With freezing accuracy he predicted that the advocates of annexation wanted more than Texas, they wanted war with Mexico.

  “What will be your cause in such a war?” he demanded harshly in Congress. “Aggression, conquest, and the re-establishment of slavery where it has been abolished. In that war, sir, the banners of freedom will be the banners of Mexico; and your banners, I blush to speak the word, will be the banners of slavery.”

  Annexation did make conflict with Mexico inevitable. As a young lieutenant in the U.S. army, Ulysses S. Grant saw at first hand how a dispute over Texas’s border with Mexico was manufactured by American commanders into a skirmish with Mexican forces in which eleven American lives were lost. Looking back at the incident in his sixties, Grant stated squarely, “The occupation, separation and annexation [of Texas] were a conspiracy, to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union.”

  The brilliant bloodless Tennessean, James Polk, brought about the annexation, created the cause of war, and thereby enclosed almost half of Mexico within the U.S. frontier. In his 1844 presidential campaign he promised to acquire California and Oregon, to reduce tariffs, and create an independent Treasury. His success in achieving all four goals reflects his formidable ability, unmatched by any other antebellum president except Jackson, to weld the southern-dominated arms of federal power, judiciary, and legislature into an instrument of the executive. Polk’s administration became, in Adams’s acrid phrase, “a military monarchy.”

  The Mexican-American War ended in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, just before Adams’s death. Its cost to the United States, beyond $15 million in compensation for war damage, was the destruction of the Missouri Compromise and the closer approach of Civil War, and, as the twenty-first century has revealed, the creation of a frontier that challenges the values of the United States. The questions posed by Polk’s imperial legacy do not go away.

  Against Polk’s formidable war machine, Adams had found one unexpected ally. The more extreme of Polk’s supporters wanted a victorious United States to annex all of Mexico and push its frontiers as far south as the Nicaraguan border. To John Calhoun, the high priest of slavery, this presented an unacceptable risk. “We have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race—the free white race,” he told the Senate. “To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of the kind, of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race.”

  Like so many of Calhoun’s pronouncements, this was an entirely logical deduction, but one based on the premise that the guarantees afforded to property and to individual freedom by the Constitution applied only to white males. So long as that concept of liberty as an exclusive privilege prevailed, it was possible to believe that other races stood at a lower, less free level, and that African-Americans in particular were destined for no better fate than to be the property of free white males. Up to eighty thousand Mexicans were brought within the new frontier—“We didn’t cross the border,” their descendants would say more than a century later, “the border crossed us”—creating another group somewhere below the whites. “Nothing can be more unfounded and false,” Calhoun stated flatly, “than the opinion that all men are born free and equal; inequality is indispensable to progress.”

  No such problems existed on the northern frontier. By 1845 some twelve thousand mostly white American settlers had moved into the territory on both sides of the Columbia River in what was called Oregon Country. On the basis of the Monroe Doctrine “that no future European colony or dominion shall, with our consent, be planted or established on any part of the North American continent,” Polk claimed the area from Britain, as far north as 54 degrees 40 north, the southern border of the old Russian empire and of present Alaska.

  Always the New Englander, Adams backed expansion to the northwest because it tilted the United States away from slaves, and toward the great tea and silk markets of China and Japan that were making New England shippers and traders rich. At the age of seventy-nine, he vigorously endorsed the slogan “Fifty-four Forty or Fight,” but the Oregon Treaty with Britain was a compromise between the American goal and the British claim for a frontier on the Columbia River. It ensured that the last thousand miles of the longest undefended frontier in the world would run along the forty-nineteenth parallel, excluding British Columbia but bringing Washington, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming as well as Oregon within the United States.

  Yet even this did not provide Adams with consolation for the values that motivated the new, enlarged United States. “Was all this a Utopian daydream?” he exclaimed in despair. “Is the one talent, entru
sted to man, to be hidden under a bushel? Is the candle, destined to light the world, to be extinguished by the blasting breath of slavery?” In one of his last public pronouncements, he abrasively denounced the Constitution as “a menstruous rag” stained by the taint of slavery. Soon afterward, he was felled by a stroke that left him incapable of speech.

  Two years later, in 1848, a second stroke killed him as he sat at his desk in the Congress. In the range of his dreams and the agony he felt at his failure, his life constituted a genuine American tragedy, a fact usually obscured by celebration of his brief moments of glory as author of the Monroe Doctrine and in his bitter defiance of slavery in Congress. “Americans,” said his acerbic grandson Henry, “have always taken their tragedy lightly.”

  Chapter 10

  The Values of Government

  We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN, Address at Baltimore, Maryland, 1864

  Looking back from the 1890s on the way that Congress had sliced and diced the immense continent, Woodrow Wilson was astonished by its insouciance. “States have, indeed, often been whimsically enough formed,” he wrote in the Atlantic Monthly. “We have left the matter of boundaries to surveyors rather than to statesmen, and have by no means managed to construct economic units in the making of States. We have joined mining communities with agricultural, the mountain with the plain, the ranch with the farm, and have left the making of uniform rules to the sagacity and practical habit of neighbors ill at ease with one another.”

  The process ensured that far from being an isolated activity, settlement of the prairie states was not only enclosed within a framework of law and government, but directed from Washington in a manner that only partially reflected the will of the people. In Congress, the Committee on Territories was the agency responsible, delineating the shapes of new Territories out of land allocated to Indians or from gigantic counties spawned by older states by giving them borders that occasionally followed rivers and mountains, but more often simply followed parallels and meridians.

  Minnesota, for example, came into existence like a Russian doll, emerging in 1849 from inside the larger Iowa Territory, which until 1838 had been concealed within a greater Wisconsin, originally part of the bigger northern “unorganized territory” that had once been contained within the huge Territory of Missouri, which was hidden inside the enormous District of Louisiana that in 1805 had been carved from the original gigantic Louisiana Purchase.

  The impetus for the committee’s work came from the spread of population beyond the old state boundaries, but it was a two-way process. The settlers’ need to have their claims recognized as legitimately owned property made the wildest and most freedom-loving among them as anxious to bring in government as any politician in Washington. In less than five years, for instance, the process transformed the frontier community of Blodgett’s Settlement on the Rock River into Beloit City in Rock County, Wisconsin, with a Board of Commissioners, a school district, a federal postmaster, a delegate to the territorial legislature, and a courthouse.

  In 1836 Caleb Blodgett, a forceful Vermonter, accompanied by his sons and some friends, established a squatter’s claim to some seven thousand acres of grass-covered bluffs on the border between Illinois and the future Wisconsin by building a log cabin and plowing a hundred acres. The claim overlooked the Rock River, and the following spring Dr. Horace White from Colebrook, New Hampshire, arrived and bought almost one third of it, about two thousand acres, on behalf of the New England Emigrating Society for $2,500. It was not just the location—on the edge of the prairies with woodland and the river at hand—but the chance of planting immediately on the plowed ground that persuaded him to buy, though at that point all he owned was Blodgett’s claim to the land. “Purchasers of claims took their chances of being able to hold what they had bargained for,” White’s son remembered. “What was paid for in such a case was the chance that the government land office would eventually recognize the claim as valid under the pre-emption laws, and give a patent for it.” Until then, they relied on the unofficial rules of claimants’ associations that based ownership not just on payment but on use and occupancy.

  This was the classic squatter’s progression, adding layer after layer of ownership from occupancy, possession, and improvement, through purchase and registration, until with the issue of a patent for the land it became official property. The final layers were added the following summer, when U.S. surveyors extended the federal Public Land Survey over Blodgett’s Settlement, locating it inside Section 35, Township 1 North, Range 12 East, 4th Principal Meridian.

  The system allowed every acre of public land to be given its own individual identification and put up for sale. So efficient had the survey become that in the mid-1830s, and again in the early 1840s, the income generated by the General Land Office, the agency that sold the squared-off land, amounted to roughly half of all federal revenue. Eventually the grid of squares laid out by an army of surveyors would transform the continent into more than one billion acres of property. By 1893, the year that Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his speech on the significance of the mythical frontier, the checkerboard of lines running north-south and east-west had provided the foundation for about three million farms, more than two thousand counties, and exactly thirty states and four Territories.

  Once the U.S. Survey had noted the claims to preemption of the fourteen settler families squashed into three log cabins, a delegate from the Blodgett settlement was promptly sent to the General Land Office in Milwaukee to pay the federal government the purchase price for the land. According to a series of Pre-Emption Acts passed since 1831, their receipt constituted a right of ownership until a formal patent could be issued.

  To cope with the hardships of the frontier life required courage and resilience. Horace White recalled that in the roughly constructed cabin he would wake on winter mornings “under an extra counter-pane of snow which had sifted through the crevices,” and until the first crops were harvested, the community had to live on what they could hunt and fish, and on barrels of flour carted in on almost impassably muddy tracks. Even so, lack of food forced them in their second year to slaughter an ox used for plowing and send an emergency team to buy a barrel of pork from a settlement downriver. The married women suffered especially. Worn down by giving birth and breast-feeding, with no respite from the need to farm and pickle, preserve and cook, several died in their thirties during the early years.

  Looking back over half a century, White could also remember the beauty of the untouched prairie. “Blackberries, strawberries, wild plums, wild grapes, hickory nuts, hazel nuts and black walnuts were to be had for the trouble of gathering them, and as for wild flowers I cannot begin to tell you how the prairies, the woods and the river banks glowed with them,” he told a commencement class at Beloit College in the 1880s. And the food shortages began to disappear once the farms were established. “We produced our own vegetables, and poultry, our own pork, and milk and butter. The cows grazed freely on the open prairie round about, and were lured homeward by an enticement of bran at the close of each day. We had a wood lot which supplied our fuel and I cut down the trees.”

  But what is most noticeable about the story of Blodgett’s Settlement, and a thousand frontier communities like it, is the inextricable connection with government. The federal government had provided the state line between Illinois and Wisconsin that put them just inside Wisconsin Territory and also served as the baseline for the Public Land Survey, where their preemption claim was first registered. They looked to the federally appointed governor, Henry Dodge, who nominated the chief justice, judges, and sheriffs, to maintain order, including protection of land records. And they registered with the Territorial
census of 1836 to be able to vote for their own legislature, which had the power to legislate for frontier needs. Until then the laws of Michigan, the territory’s parent state, remained in force.

  On the basis of the census, the Territorial government divided the eastern half of the Territory into four immense counties. This placed the pioneer families of Blodgett’s Settlement in Rock County and made them eligible to vote for a board of commissioners with responsibility for law enforcement and administration of the county.

  Thus even before the patent was issued confirming the settlers’ ownership of their land, and before the water-driven sawmill started turning out boards so that proper houses could be built to replace the log cabins, the settlement had three layers of government—county, Territorial, and federal. Within another three years, it had a federally appointed postmaster, and in 1841 a county courthouse was being constructed where prairie flowers and wild plums had grown a few summers before, in a town that now preferred to call itself Beloit rather than Blodgett’s Settlement.

  As Woodrow Wilson pointed out, there was nothing organic in the creation of a state like Wisconsin. In 1837 the Committee on Territories sliced away Wisconsin’s Upper Peninsula, which divided Lake Superior from Lake Michigan, and gave it to Michigan, when it became a state, as compensation for the 468 square miles around Toledo that it had lost to Ohio through a mapping error. The committee also chopped off the territory west of the Mississippi—the future Iowa and Minnesota—because the river had been accepted as a boundary ever since Jefferson had made it the western edge of the imagined states of Michigania and Assenisipia in 1784.