The Half Has Never Been Told

by Edward E. Baptist

  The Seneca Falls gathering helped launch a movement for women’s rights in the United States. This development would have long-term effects on politics that would be as radical as anything done in Europe in 1848. At the time, few male politicians took the Seneca Falls gathering seriously. The revolutionary ferment in Europe was more widely discussed, yet it seemed far away. Far more pressing, judging from the obsessive interest of newspapers and the inflammatory rhetoric of politicians both inside and outside the Capitol dome, was the still unresolved question of the Mexican territories and its potential effect on the fall presidential election. National party leaders, seeking to contain destabilizing confrontations, tried to nominate centrists who could appeal to both sections. The Whig convention chose Zachary Taylor, one of the Mexican War’s victorious generals. Virginia-born, first cousin to James Madison, Taylor was a southwestern planter who owned more than one hundred people in Louisiana, and he had the useful virtue of possessing no political biography. The Democrats did something similar. Brushing off a convention walkout by southern extremist William Lowndes Yancey, they nominated Lewis Cass of Michigan.37

  Cass’s campaign circulated region-specific campaign biographies—one for the North and another for the South, with predictably targeted emphasis. But the new Free Soil Party still won 10 percent of the national popular vote, showing that pressure initiated by the Wilmot Proviso had opened seams in the party system. Ironically, Free Soil votes helped put a slaveholder in the White House: in New York, Van Buren and the Barnburners pulled enough ballots from the Empire State’s Democrats to allow Taylor to collect all thirty-six of the state’s electoral votes. The general also swept most of the South. Southern whites assumed that the president-elect would support slavery’s expansion into the Mexican Cession.

  Yet Calhoun did not trust either Taylor or the party system. In January 1849, he and four other southerners in Congress issued a printed “Address”: it warned that if the North’s anti-southern attitudes continued to grow, and the South did not respond, slavery’s expansion—and slavery itself—would end. A Congress dominated by the likes of John Palfrey the younger would ban the interstate slave trade. Then there would be no injections of new capital, and no stick to hold over enslaved people’s heads. An expanding black population would demographically drown whites, and forced emancipation would follow. After that, interfering northern whites would demand for ex-slaves “the right of voting and holding public office,” resulting in “the prostration of the white race”—political servility and forced interracial marriage—“a degradation greater than has ever yet fallen to the lot of a free and enlightened people.”38

  The only way to avoid this disastrous future was for southern whites to unite in demanding equal access to the territories. As Calhoun argued in a southern caucus called to discuss the address, “the South could take their slaves into California and New Mexico. . . . Congress was bound . . . to put it [slavery] on the same footing with other property. It required no law of Congress to authorize slavery there.” A united southern front behind this substantive-due-process interpretation would force the North to a “calculation of consequences.” Inevitably, the North would back down, and the expansion of slavery would be implanted permanently in the nation’s constitutional landscape, even as new territories became slave states. Most of all, political victory would compensate enslavers for the economic losses they had suffered since the late 1830s, which had lost them control over the economic rudder of the United States, since new slave-state recruits in the halls of Congress would block all future antislavery measures.39

  One might be tempted to view pro-slavery-expansion zealots as extremists who were more interested in intellectual abstractions than in actually expanding slavery. But in little more than a decade, these people would launch a war to achieve a redefinition of the United States in which the national government made an explicit and perpetual commitment to defend and spread slavery. They were serious. And they were inking these ideas about slavery as a fundamental property right protected by the Constitution, with all that implied, into the common assumptions of southern politics. In 1849, the propagandizing so far by advocates of substantive due process as a southern right was already working. The “Address” drew widespread support in the southern press. Editors reminded common whites that the struggle to keep slavery’s borders open was their fight, too. If the slave frontier closed, the risk of a repeat of the Haitian Revolution would increase. Even without a massive rebellion, poor whites would be taxed to compensate enslavers for mandated emancipation. Afterward, the rich man could use wealth “to maintain his position,” but the common white man would lose “that native, free-born, and independent spirit which he now possesses.” Constituents responded to this kind of talk, and Mississippi state politicians organized a “Slaveholders’ Convention” for October 1849. Senator Henry Foote, Calhoun’s Mississippi ally, began to organize an 1850 region-wide convention—an implied threat, a gathering that could be repurposed into a body ready to deliberate on nation-un-making.40

  In Congress, meanwhile, southern Democrats maneuvered to commit the federal government to new guarantees of expansive definitions of slaveholders’ property rights. They started with the recovery of fugitive slaves. Justice Story had conceded in Prigg that the South had constitutional leverage on this question. Proslavery Democrats were determined to make the federal government take ownership of enforcing the Constitution’s fugitive clause. If they operationalized the federal government’s commitment to protecting enslavers’ ownership of property when said property ran away into another state, Congress would also find it hard to deny enslavers the right to move property into federal territory. Senator James Mason offered a bill that would eliminate the trial of accused fugitives by northern local juries, a bill that potentially would allow white southerners to accuse anyone of escaping from slavery, with little proof of ownership, and haul them south.41

  Southern enslavers were coalescing around key principles, raising their demands, and increasing the pressure to find a solution to the territorial issue. Meanwhile, news from California made it clear that gold veins first struck in 1848 would dramatically enhance the US financial system’s ability to promote growth. But the fevered migration of more than 80,000 American “49ers” to California in 1849 increased the tension of the territorial debates. The majority of the migrants were northerners, yet southern whites who came often brought slaves to work the mines. Mexico had abolished slavery in California some twenty years prior, but enslavers saw no reason why California had to be a free state. It even could be two states: north and south; free and slave. Yet Congress couldn’t create a territorial government until it resolved its ongoing impasse, so for now lawless uncertainty reigned in California.42

  The Congress elected in November 1848 would not be officially seated until December 1849. But shortly after his March 1849 inauguration, President Taylor secretly encouraged some California and New Mexico settlers, mostly northerners, to hold conventions. The state constitutions they’d write would ban slavery. When southern Whigs, who would soon face their own very southern constituents, found out, they rushed to condemn Taylor’s betrayal. Back home, politicians and editors began to plan an all-South convention, scheduled for Nashville in July 1850. As the thirty-first Congress finally convened in December, many wondered if this would be the last gathering of all the states’ representatives in Washington. Party alliances showed little sign of cohering again. The House took sixty-four ballots to name a Speaker, finally changing its rules so that a Georgia Democrat won. Relieved, it turned to the business of hiring an official “door-keeper”—an employee position similar to sergeant-at-arms. But then northern and southern representatives turned that, too, into a fight: Should they hire a proslavery or antislavery man? Then, in his official Presidential Message, Taylor boldly asked the gathered representatives and senators to admit California and New Mexico under constitutions that banned slavery. Congress collapsed into a chaos of roiling, seething rhet
oric: threats of disunion (the southerners); proclamations of joy at the prospect of slave rebellion (a few Free Soil men); insistent claims that northerners would not be bullied (Democrats and Whigs from the free states); shrieks of “bad faith” and “cheating”; and complaints of insults and dishonorable exclusion from territories won by southern blood (the southerners again).43

  After two months of shouting that threatened to rend all comity forever, a troop of wrinkled old men rode into the breach. On the night of January 21, 1850, Henry Clay had visited Daniel Webster at his lodgings in Washington to confirm that his fellow old Whig would back his play. On the 29th, the Kentuckian rose in the well of the Senate Chamber, where he had spent much of the last four decades. Clay presented eight resolutions that set off advantages for one section with those granted to the other, and he offered them all together, a pill to swallow, all-or-nothing. Historians often say that the Compromise of 1850, which these resolutions initiated, provided the North with a crucial decade in which to become strong enough to defeat the South when war eventually came. Whether that is true or not, Clay himself came close to scuttling his own union-protecting efforts. He insisted that the unitary nature of his proposals forced the warring sides to commit to all the bargains at once, but opponents accused him of egotistical motives—pointing out that a single large proposal identified the compromise with its author. Moreover, while a real compromise is a win-win solution, in which each side can claim victory, it is also possible for parties in conflict to view a bundle of alternating surrenders as a lose-lose solution. Such an outcome might be not the end of conflict but the fertile source of new ones.44

  So what did Clay propose, in order to achieve what became called, ominously, a “final resolution” of the territorial conflict? First, he said, admit California as a free state. Second, New Mexico and the rest of the new southwest would be organized as territories “without respect to slavery”—that is, the choice on slavery would be deferred until a territory’s actual population could choose. The hope here was that southern partisans would accept this plan as nonexclusion of slavery by Congress. Clay and others denied that slavery could prosper in New Mexico and Utah. Many assumed that this expedient would allow the territories themselves to ask quietly for admission as free states.

  Although the loss of California was going to be a hard pill for southerners to swallow, Clay had some goodies for them as well. The United States would fund the outstanding debts of the Republic of Texas. This would make New Orleans investors happy, fourteen unpaid years after they had financed the enslavers’ war against Santa Anna. Clay did suggest something that abolitionists had desired for years: a ban on the slave trade inside the District of Columbia. But he paired that with a resolution stating that Congress had no power to obstruct the internal slave trade between states. And one final resolution might also make northern partisans likely to think that they had “lost” the compromise. This was a call for an ironclad, watertight fugitive slave bill like the one recently introduced by James Mason. Enslavers complained that their territorial concessions left them hemmed in by free states that would drain the slave population by a kind of unchecked osmosis. A fugitive slave act would put teeth into Prigg, making the federal government the servant of enslavers by helping them to control their property in human beings, as if Calhoun’s substantive-due-process interpretation of the Fifth Amendment was the legitimate one.

  Clay had thus built his proposed compromise on the backs of African Americans, whom he condemned to an endless future of slavery—the expansion of which would be limited, but which would still continue. And by bundling together the issues, Clay pre-twisted northern votes for compromise into legitimation of extreme southern viewpoints, making a free-state congressional majority normalize ideas that to many northerners seemed antithetical to the Constitution. Debate on his bill was in consequence long and bitter. Taylor demanded California’s immediate admission, without slavery. Southerners demanded half of California, all of New Mexico, and more territory for Texas. Jefferson Davis, Henry Foote, James Mason, and a host of southerners, preaching a proslavery Constitution, paraded the full array of substantive-due-process claims through the House and the Senate. The climax of their drama came when Calhoun, dying of tuberculosis, was carried into the Senate chamber on a stretcher. The South Carolinian shivered under blankets as Mason read his final speech for him. This one laid out no arguments about due process, instead warning in emotional terms that the long conflict over slavery and its expansion was snapping the cords of union that bound southern and northern whites. Religious, intellectual, and now political associations were fracturing along the lines of slave and free labor. (He did not add financial associations, which were being repaired.) The gist of the speech was this: the hardest of hard-core southerners were ready to accept a fugitive slave bill, to be sure, but little else of Clay’s compromise.

  A few days later, William Seward, a New York senator, delivered a speech insisting that constitutional guarantees or not, a “higher law”—the law of God—impelled antislavery northerners to block the expansion of the institution. Still more galling to enslavers was Seward’s air of arrogance about the other “higher law” that had supposedly given greater power to the free states: the laws of political economy. The free labor system, he stated, had enabled New York, “by her own enterprise, [to secure] to herself the commerce of the continent, and is steadily advancing to command the commerce of the world.” It was as if New Yorkers had never bought or sold a bale of cotton.45

  Yet southerners in Congress and at home were unsure about how far to go. In the states where expansion mattered most, the debate over whether or not to send delegates to the Nashville Convention—and which delegates to send—ran white hot during early 1850. At the same time, pro-compromise meetings sprang up across the South. Many southern whites weren’t ready for secession, which was what the extremists suggested. When the Nashville Convention gathered on June 3, far fewer delegates were present than radicals had anticipated. None came from Louisiana, and only one from Texas. Clay’s compromise would pay off Texas debts, many of them held by Louisiana-based creditors.46

  There was still hope for a Washington compromise. Months of debate had passed with little change in positions, but time moved the pieces on the board all the same. Calhoun, exhausted, died on March 31, depriving the southern radicals of the one figure who could have welded them into a weapon. Clay’s increasingly bitter confrontation with Taylor, whose “treachery” to southern enslavers had helped fire up radicalism in Congress and in the southern press, ended on July 5, when the president suddenly died. Vice President Millard Fillmore, an upstate New Yorker with close ties to Clay, succeeded the maverick Taylor. The Whigs still could not unite behind Clay’s bill, however, and the Senate defeated it at the end of July. The Nashville Convention delegates, sitting by the telegraph, had nothing to reject.

  To judge from his letters to his wife, Clay had spent all spring basking in premonitory adulation. Now he gave up on compromise and fled north to Newport, Rhode Island, his favorite resort town, where the spent old man could play cards, bet the ponies, and flirt. Back in Washington, a new force, Illinois Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas, appointed himself the floor general of compromise. Separating the omnibus into its constituent parts, he deftly assembled a series of coalitions—southerners and a few northerners for the pro-southern aspects, the opposite for elements like the admission of California as a state—and pushed the compromise through the Senate as multiple bills. At the beginning of September, he drove the Senate bills through the House, from whence they were sent back to the Senate for reconciliation. On September 20, almost ten months after the Thirty-First Congress had first been seated, Fillmore signed the compromise bills into law. Cannons boomed in Washington, DC. Crowds outside of boardinghouses and hotels serenaded the congressional leaders, who were inside drinking themselves into stupors of relief.47

  In communities like Springfield, Illinois, newspapers called for “national j
ubilation.” The New Orleans Picayune said the territorial question was “definitely settled.” In December, in his message to Congress as it opened a new session, President Fillmore referred to the Compromise of 1850 as “in its character final and irrevocable.” Around the country, both northerners and southerners seemed to be cooling down and accepting the results. In the South, organizers quietly canceled state secessionist conventions. The white southern electorate was obviously relieved not to have to consider armed resistance to the Wilmot Proviso, although that, of course, did not stop Democratic congressional candidates in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina from doing well that fall by running against the Compromise.48

  Still, the questions provoked by the Mexican War and northerners’ more persistent opposition to the expansion of slavery had not been solved, despite four years of devoting the entire political process to solving them. The newly confident North, angered by Texas and all the other issues that men like John Palfrey had branded with the label “Slave Power,” had stumbled upon the Wilmot Proviso as a line to draw, and then united behind it. The proviso promised to corral slavery, leaving it to decay, and end enslavers’ attempts to dominate the North and the nation. The slave South, battered by depression and demographic sluggishness, had seen a moment of great danger. It codified the mode by which it would defeat danger and then regain lost relative power: the federal government itself would be made to guard enslavers’ property rights, which were protected (southerners argued) by the Constitution, especially in new territories.

  What hung on the political question of whether slavery would expand as a legally defined institution into new territories, first and foremost, were the futures of 3 million enslaved people. Neither side had succeeded in imposing its solution on them and on their futures. And both sides were still well-armed and primed, not only with adrenaline, but with literal powder. During one of the 1850 debates, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, an old Potterite brawler, bull-rushed Henry Foote as the Mississippian gave a speech. Foote pulled out a pistol, but fellow legislators dragged the two men apart. But loaded weapons were planted everywhere in the Compromise. One of its least-discussed but most important elements was the “organization” of the New Mexico and Utah territories. Taylor’s attempt to establish New Mexico as a free state had provoked southern outrage, so Clay suggested these territories be organized without protections for or restrictions on slavery. Most textbooks speak of the final outcome as if Clay’s proposal prevailed: New Mexico and Utah were to be testbeds for a demographic contest between slave and free-soil settlers. Yet while the committee that hammered out the New Mexico and Utah acts gave territorial legislatures power to legislate on slavery, proslavery and free-soil committee members cooperated to bake something else into the law. Their clause stated that if someone brought a lawsuit challenging the territory’s slavery laws—perchance a disgruntled enslaver whose property ownership was not protected by a territory that had enacted laws denying him the “right” to own slaves—the lawsuit would be fast-tracked straight to the Supreme Court. And then the Court would decide whether slave ownership and its expansion were protected by the Fifth Amendment, or the Fifth actually protected people’s ownership of themselves.49