In the United States, the pope’s In supremo was read aloud by abolitionists in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, and Gregory XVI was cheered. During the 1840 presidential election campaign, Secretary of State Forsyth, a Democrat and slaveholder from Georgia, wrote to his former constituents in Georgia, trying to link the Whig candidate, Harrison, with the pope and abolitionism. Forsyth argued that the pope’s statement condemned the sale of slaves within the United States, not only the international slave trade. Bishop John England of Charleston, South Carolina, the leading Catholic prelate in the United States, made the response. Bishop England wrote articles asserting that the Catholic Church had always accepted domestic slavery, which was “not incompatible with the natural law.”[23]
The slave trade in America had changed dramatically since the early years. In the eighteenth century, most slaves sold in British North America were imported, from the Caribbean or directly from Africa. But, after the American Revolution, and dramatically more so after the import of foreign slaves was banned in 1808, the domestic slave trade blossomed. Most Southeastern states found they had a surplus of slaves, and the demand from the newly opened lands in the Southwest required a relatively massive redistribution of the slave population. The market value of a slave in Richmond now depended on what a buyer in New Orleans would pay.[24] The number of slaves in New Orleans in 1835 was larger than the entire population of the city in 1806.[25] The cotton gin led to the explosion of land devoted to cotton, and the new, easily available lands in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana were ideal. Since growing and harvesting cotton was labor intensive, slaves were needed. The Chesapeake Bay region (Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia) became the main source of slaves for the domestic slave trade, and “professional” slave traders developed and spread. Not only was this domestic slave trade an outlet for surplus slaves in that region; it also provided a channel for slave owners to get rid of “troublesome” slaves.
New Orleans was America’s third most populous city in 1840 and was a very cosmopolitan place. Its wharves groaned beneath the weight of “corn from Illinois, whiskey from Kentucky, cheese from Wisconsin, furs from the Canadian backcountry, and, of course, towering piles of the [Mississippi] Valley’s monarch: King Cotton arrayed in bales that reached for the heavens.”[26] In eleven months of 1835 alone, some 2,300 steamboats arrived in the port, and that did not include the thousands of river-bound flatboats and oceangoing vessels that competed for dock space.[27] New Orleans was originally an outback of the French Empire; Emperor Louis XV gave it to Spain in 1762. Judged by colonial standards, Spain’s rule was relatively progressive. When Spain withdrew shortly before the Louisiana Purchase (1803), “no other Southern city had as many taverns that catered to slaves or as many free people of color.”[28] Plantation owners’ best and most liquid asset were their slaves; and in New Orleans even free people of color made up a sizable class of slave owners.[29]
The Panic of 1837 caused the price of cotton to sink dramatically, and so the price for slaves dropped correspondingly. By the early 1840s, however, the markets for both began to rebound. The domestic slave trade was somewhat seasonal. Most slaves in the upper Southeast were sold in the fall, after they had worked the harvest. The slaves were transported to the lower southeast or to the southwest for sale and distribution there in the winter and early spring, so that they would be available for work during the spring planting. Auctioneers played a major role in these transactions. In Richmond, several firms had a lucrative business, sometimes selling hundreds of slaves a day from their auction rooms.
Abolitionists identified the domestic slave trade as the key to the destruction of American slavery. If that interstate trade could be prohibited, slavery could no longer survive. By the 1830s this became a major abolitionist theme. The issue was whether it was constitutionally permissible. Clearly, the federal government had no authority to ban slavery in the states. However, Congress did have power over interstate commerce and the commerce on the high seas. Abolitionists argued, sensibly, that if Congress had the power to outlaw the international African slave trade, as it did in 1808, surely it had the legal power to ban the domestic interstate slave trade. The defenders of slavery, in turn, argued that Congress could not interfere with property rights, and that the power to regulate interstate commerce did not include the power to destroy it.[30] The Supreme Court never rendered an opinion on the question before it became moot by the addition of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865.
The abolitionists’ arguments were brilliantly set forth in 1839 by William Jay, the son of the first chief justice of the United States, John Jay.[31] William Jay was a leading abolitionist and judge in New York; he had drafted the constitution for the American Anti-Slavery Society. William Jay’s 1839 book was titled A View of the Action of the Federal Government, in Behalf of Slavery.[32] It was a broad attack on the moral bankruptcy of slavery, the excessive political power held by the South, and the political weakness of the Northern political figures. It was also a legal attack on the misconstruction of the Constitution, as he saw it.
Jay referred to the most recent (1836) presidential election campaign, where the candidates were Van Buren, White, Harrison, and Webster, under the heading “The Obsequiousness of the Presidential Candidates.” Jay said Van Buren explained that he was “uncompromisingly” against any effort of the Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, Hugh White claimed that Congress had no power to do so, and General Harrison agreed. Only Daniel Webster, a failed Whig candidate, made no proslavery pledge, and he received no votes from any slave state. Jay attacked the Fugitive Slave Act for being a deviation from the Constitution. In a broad and biting comment, Jay charged that since the time of the adoption of the Constitution, the profits from cotton—and therefore slavery—had paralyzed “the conscience of the nation” and divested the nation “of the sense of shame.”
Jay described the problems that occurred during the War of 1812, when many slaves took the opportunity of the presence of British armed vessels to escape from bondage, and how the 1814 Treaty of Ghent—which ended the war—dealt with that problem. Under the treaty, the British had to return property (slaves) originally captured in forts, but there was no reference to slaves who had voluntarily sought protection on British ships. Jay reported that British Admiral Cockburn[33] refused to surrender any fugitive slaves, since the treaty did not require it!
A broadside published by the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1836, condemning slavery in the District of Columbia. The images on the bottom level illustrate slaves in chains, a ship loading slaves, and a slave holding pen.
Though his book was published two years before the Creole affair began, Jay was prescient in describing the experience of American coastal slave ships that were wrecked and their slaves freed in the British Caribbean colonies: the 1831 Comet, the 1833 Encomium, and the 1835 Enterprise. Jay attacked the use of American diplomacy to demand compensation from the British:
Thus, for six successive years did the Cabinet at Washington keep sending despatches [sic] to their agents [American Envoys] in England, urging them to obtain payment from Great Britain for these cargoes of human flesh. . . . Mr. Stevenson [the American Minister] tried the virtue of a diplomatic hint that the United States would go to war for their slaves.[34]
In bitter language, Jay exposed the power of slave interests over the federal government, both the Congress and the Executive. He pointed out that if a murderer should escape from England and land in the United States, the United States would refuse to surrender him. In contrast, “when West India [sic] authorities refuse to deliver two hundred and eighty-seven innocent men, women, and children, thrown by the tempest under their protection, into hopeless interminable slavery,” Congress pronounces it an outrage to the American flag! By so protecting the coastal slave trade, he claimed, the federal government was indeed protecting the slave trade, which all civilized nations outlaw.
Jay attacked a great variety of examples of what he termed the �
��Federal Government Slave Power”: the congressional gag rule (ban on slavery petitions), the refusal to recognize the government of Haiti,[35] the effort to secure independent Texas as a slave state, and the censoring of the mails. Finally, Jay suggested that the day might well come when the South would make an effort to secede. Interestingly, Jay then presented some of the arguments as to why secession would not be in the South’s best interests—including some used by Lincoln in his first inaugural address twenty-two years later.
The President
When Martin Van Buren became president in March 1837, his timing could not have been worse. Up until then, he had compiled an extraordinary resume: he was attorney general of New York (1815–1819), US senator from New York (1821–1828), governor of New York (1829), secretary of state (1829–1831), and US minister to Britain (1831–1832). In Andrew Jackson’s second term, Van Buren was the vice president (1833–1837). He was the Northern anchor of the Jacksonian Democrats. Van Buren was the first president who was not born a British subject. But that year also turned out to be the beginning of the worst recession America had known: the Panic of 1837 brought widespread bankruptcies and joblessness. It was no wonder, then, that Van Buren lost his bid for reelection in 1840, and the Democrats were damaged nationally.
The Whigs held their first national convention in Pennsylvania in early December 1839, almost a year before the next presidential election. The candidates were William Henry Harrison, a sixty-seven-year-old war hero from Ohio; Henry Clay of Kentucky, the Whig’s congressional leader with almost solid Southern support; and General Winfield Scott. Scott was a hero of the War of 1812, and managed the Second Seminole War in 1836 and the removal of the Cherokee Nation in 1838. Scott had also successfully reduced tensions along the New York and Maine borders with Canada, in early 1838 and 1839, respectively. A young Whig from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, came out for Harrison chiefly because he felt that old military heroes should be honored.[36]
General Winfield Scott, circa 1847.
Clay and Harrison were nearly tied on the first ballot, with Clay slightly ahead. Then, Scott seemed to have some momentum, but Thaddeus Stevens, a young Pennsylvania state legislator and abolitionist, passed a letter to the Virginia delegation that was purportedly from Scott to New York abolitionists expressing support. That letter was enough for the Virginia delegation to withdraw from Scott.[37] On the third ballot, Harrison clearly won. At bottom, suggests one scholar, the Whigs turned to Harrison because “he had a good war record, was personable and dignified, and had not held office long enough or recently enough to have much baggage.”[38]
The Whigs decided that, for vice president, they needed a Southerner in order to balance Harrison and also to soothe the unhappy Clay supporters. Serious Clay men were too bitter at their loss to agree to run. Perhaps the party leaders were somewhat desperate when they finally chose John Tyler of Virginia. Daniel Webster, and virtually everyone else who might have been a “first choice,” rejected the idea of accepting the vice presidential nomination—a post that traditionally was virtually meaningless. John Tyler had been a congressman, governor of Virginia, and a US senator when he was chosen as Harrison’s vice president. He had not been close politically to the Whig leaders, but that had been deemed unimportant for the vice presidential position. No president had ever died in office.
The presidential contest of 1840 is considered the first “modern” election campaign. It had great theater: torchlight parades, catchy slogans, and campaign songs. Harrison had defeated the Shawnee Indians in the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, and hence the slogan: “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.” One wag concluded that the ticket had “rhyme but no reason to it.”[39] Tyler remained inactive during most of the campaign, at Harrison’s request; his main contribution was his surname.[40]
President Martin Van Buren was a Democrat from Kinderhook, New York. Naturally, he became known as “Old Kinderhook.” Thus, the phrase “OK” entered the general vocabulary. “OK Clubs” were formed to ridicule Van Buren’s opponent, Harrison. A Democratic newspaper ridiculed Harrison for being old and ineffectual, and suggested that he would be happier in a log cabin with a barrel of hard cider.[41] Harrison and the Whigs turned this slap into an emblem of frontier honesty and honor: Harrison adopted the log cabin and hard cider as his campaign symbols—connected to the common man, in the style of the popular Andrew Jackson. (In reality, Harrison lived in a twenty-two-room mansion with a large wine cellar in Indiana.) The “common man” style was in contrast to the lifestyle of the Van Buren White House, which
sparkled with excellent food, fine wine, and witty conversation. [Van Buren] wrangled a sixty-thousand-dollar appropriation from Congress to refurbish the Executive Mansion and spent it on gold plate, goblets, marble mantles and Royal Wilton carpets. . . . Van Buren soon learned, however, that too great a love of luxury could be politically harmful.[42]
The election was a sweeping Whig victory. Harrison received 53 percent of the popular vote, and a landslide of 234 electoral votes to the Democrats’ 60. The election stimulated the participation of 80.2 percent of the eligible voters, the greatest percentage ever.[43] Although Harrison captured nineteen of the twenty-six states, the voting pattern was not sectional: the Democrats (Van Buren) captured the lead in New Hampshire in the North; Virginia, South Carolina, and Alabama in the South; and Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas in the West. Former president John Quincy Adams did not have a high opinion of Harrison. Adams had reluctantly appointed Harrison to be the US minister to Colombia in 1828, when Adams was president, but described Harrison as a “shallow mind, a political adventurer, not without talents, but self-sufficient, vain and indiscreet.”[44] Adams declined an invitation to attend Harrison’s inaugural.
After his election, Harrison’s first task was to appoint the members of his cabinet. Quite unlike today’s fifteen members of the presidential cabinet, there were only six cabinet positions for him to fill.[45] The first among equals in the cabinet was the secretary of state. Henry Clay and Daniel Webster were the powerful Whig leaders in Congress, and Harrison offered the position of secretary of state to Senator Clay, but Clay declined the offer. Clay recommended Webster, and Harrison agreed, as did Webster.[46]
Daniel Webster was probably America’s most renowned lawyer. He was “one of the greatest advocates who has ever appeared before the Supreme Court,” as judged by the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist.[47] Webster argued 171 cases before the US Supreme Court over thirty-seven years, a record never surpassed.[48] His cases include the landmark defense of his alma mater (Dartmouth) in 1819[49] and the famous case of Gibbons v. Ogden[50] in 1824, in which he supported a broad congressional commerce power. Webster’s friend from Massachusetts, the brilliant Supreme Court Justice William Story, was the source of the statement that whenever Webster spoke in court, “a large circle of ladies, of the highest fashion, and taste, and intelligence, numerous lawyers, and gentlemen of both houses of Congress, and, toward the close, the foreign ministers, or at least two or three of them” crowded in to listen.[51]
Webster had twice served in the House (1812–1817 and 1823), and in the Senate (1827–1841), where he was perhaps the greatest orator of his day. Indeed, the record of Webster’s dramatic debate encounter with South Carolina Senator Robert Y. Hayne on the nature of the Union in January 1830, at the opening of the 21st Congress, remains a basic document in American history.[52] The Webster-Hayne debate was a foreshadowing of the secession and Civil War thirty years later. It was in that debate that Webster’s famous peroration concluded: “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”[53] The Webster-Hayne debate continued for months, and involved twenty-one of the Senate’s forty-eight members in sixty-five speeches.
Secretary of State Daniel Webster, at the end of his first term of service as secretary, 1843.
Webster supported President Jackson’s actions to suppress South Carolina’s lurch toward nullification and secession, but, like Clay, opposed Jackson’s economic po
licies, especially Jackson’s campaign against the National Bank. Webster joined with Clay (and other former Federalists and National Republicans) to form the Whig Party in 1833. In 1836, Webster unsuccessfully sought the presidency. When the party nominated Harrison for president in 1840, Webster was offered the vice presidency, but declined.
Harrison filled out the rest of his cabinet with five Whigs, all lawyers, reflecting a geographic balance: Thomas Ewing, who had been a senator from Ohio, became the secretary of the treasury; on the advice of Webster, Harrison appointed John Bell, former speaker of the House from Tennessee, as secretary of war; Harrison appointed the senator from Kentucky, John Crittenden, as attorney general (John Quincy Adams had nominated Crittenden to the US Supreme Court in 1828, but the nomination failed); Francis Granger, a House member from New York was appointed postmaster general; and George E. Badger, a Whig political leader in North Carolina, was appointed secretary of the navy. None of Harrison’s cabinet members had strong ties to Vice President Tyler. Harrison had not sought Tyler’s advice on his cabinet appointments, and Tyler offered no advice. However, Tyler expressed to friends that Webster would not have been his first choice for secretary of state, because he feared that Webster’s selection would touch off a factional struggle.[54]
The Creole Affair Page 4