The Creole Affair
Page 17
The evening that the court rendered its decision in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, John Quincy Adams read the Opinion, its concurrences, and the dissent. He was not happy. He wrote in his diary that the justices came to one terrible but overarching conclusion: “the transcendent omnipotence of slavery in these United States.”[49] Adams’s friend in the House of Representatives, Joshua Reed Giddings of Ohio, wrote, under the pen name of “Pacificus, a Whig from Ohio,” that if, according to the Prigg decision, state officials should never interfere with a slave rendition, then, if a slave defends himself by killing his master, then the state should not care.[50] It is not clear whether Giddings had the Creole killing in mind when fashioning that assertion.
Interestingly, none of the nine justices dealt with the fact that Margaret had given birth to at least one child while she was in the free state of Pennsylvania. The status of that child—a rather fundamental issue, one would have thought—was simply not addressed. Underneath lay the broader question of whether all children of a slave become slaves themselves, or whether the place of birth determines one’s status as a slave. In the context of the Creole story, the same issue was present: whether the location of those slaves in free Nassau meant that they were free, or whether their status as slaves, at the time they left Virginia, remained with them wherever they were.
Many severely disappointed abolitionists now realized that the Constitution was accepted by the Supreme Court as inalterably pro-slavery, and that the only ultimate remedy was disunion. As one great constitutional scholar noted, if this kidnapping action by Prigg in Pennsylvania, against Margaret and her children, was now constitutionally protected behavior, as the court held, “it was open season on free blacks everywhere in America.”[51]
Most slaveholders were relieved and pleased by the court’s decision, though others remained suspicious, because of the confused sets of reasoning among the eight justices. Nevertheless, Southerners took the Prigg decision as evidence that at least the court was with them, that their hold on their “peculiar institution” remained firm. One can imagine that Secretary of State Webster was elated that the South felt placated—at least on the explosive issue of fugitive slaves—and so perhaps the South would be relatively less upset and demanding with respect to the slave issues arising out of the Creole affair. This certainly would make Webster’s negotiations with Lord Ashburton a bit easier when he arrived in Washington the following month.
1. In the penultimate paragraph, Tyler urged Congress to move more quickly to apply the funds received under the will of “Mr. Smithson, of England, for the diffusion of knowledge.” Ultimately, this led to the formation of the great Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
2. Webster had written to Edward Everett, the US minister in London, on November 20 about all of these issues as outlined by the president.
3. For an excellent description of New Orleans and the slave life there in the 1840s, see John Bailey, The Lost German Slave Girl (New York: Grove Press, 2003).
4. Edward B. Rugemer, “Slave Rebels and Abolitionists: The Black Atlantic and the Coming of the Civil War,” Journal of the Civil War Era 2, no. 2 (June 2012): 204.
5. Black’s Law Dictionary, 5th ed. (St. Paul: West Publishing, 1979), 1101.
6. See, for example, the Richmond Enquirer of December 21 and 22, 1841.
7. Quoted in the Richmond Enquirer, December 25, 1841, 2.
8. Rugemer, “Slave Rebels and Abolitionists,” 203.
9. As quoted in the Richmond Enquirer, December 25, 1841, 2.
10. The Richmond Enquirer of January 6, 1842.
11. Journal of the Senate of the United States of America, 1789–1873, Monday, January 10, 1842, 77.
12. Quoted in the Richmond Enquirer of January 27, 1842, 3.
13. One scholar views Webster’s dispatch in a sinister fashion, in that it “coded the conflict as a property dispute between national powers and discursively erased both the control of the rebels over the vessel and the agency of the people of Nassau. . . . Webster’s dispatch defended the property claims of slaveholders over the rebels’ struggle for personal liberty.” Maggie Montesinos Sale, The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 131.
14. The Richmond Enquirer, February 22, 1842.
15. From Webster’s diary, as quoted in Robert V. Remini, Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time (New York: Norton, 1997), 541.
16. Joseph Wheelan, Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams’s Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), 189.
17. Harlow Giles Unger, John Quincy Adams (Boston: Da Capo, 2012), 297.
18. The rule had been expanded at each session, and now provided that “No petition, memorial, resolution or other paper, praying for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, or any other state or territory, or the slave trade between the states and territories of the United States where it exists shall be received by this House or entertained in any way whatsoever.” See Unger, John Quincy Adams, 298.
19. See the Richmond Enquirer, February 10, 1842, 2.
20. Thomas Marshall, a Kentucky congressman and nephew of Chief Justice John Marshall, moved to censure Adams for having committed high treason for having submitted such a petition, but Adams demanded that the clerk read from the Declaration of Independence pointing to the right and duty to “throw off” injurious government. See Unger, John Quincy Adams, 298–99.
21. William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress (New York: Knopf, 1996), 449.
22. Ibid.
23. Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 111.
24. In contrast, an “expulsion” requires a two-thirds vote. There have only been five expulsions, the first three of which took place during the first year of the Civil War.
25. The first member censured was Rep. William Stanberry, also of Ohio, in 1832, for insulting the Speaker, Andrew Stevenson, later the American minister to Great Britain (1836–1841). The most recent member censured was Rep. Daniel B. Crane of Illinois, in 1983, for sexual misconduct with a page.
26. The text of the letter, along with Adams’s diary entry, is found in Miller, Arguing About Slavery, 453.
27. Joshua R. Giddings: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness (Ashtabula, OH: Ashtabula Historical Society, 2006), 8–9.
28. House Document No. 215, 27th Congress, second session.
29. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic, 109.
30. William Glyde Wilkins, ed., Charles Dickens in America (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2005; 1911), 153.
31. Jessica M. Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 166. (The author erroneously dates Dickens’s visit in 1841, rather than 1842.
32. Charles Dickens, American Notes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 125.
33. Dickens was unhappy with Fuller’s, along with almost everything else in Washington. Dickens described the backyard of the hotel: “Clothes are drying in this same yard; female slaves, with cotton handkerchiefs twisted round their heads, are running to and fro on the hotel business; black waiters cross and recross with dishes in their hands; two great dogs are playing upon a mound of loose bricks in the center of the square; a pig is turning up his stomach in the sun, and grunting ‘that’s comfortable’; and neither the men, nor the women, nor the dogs, nor the pigs, nor any exalted creatures takes any notice” of the residents’ call for a servant. The Surratt Courier XXXVII (2012), 7.
34. An interesting fictional account portrays Dickens’s view of Daniel Webster, after Webster called on Dickens at the hotel, that, of all the famous people who have called on Dickens since his arrival in the United States, “Mr. Webster was the most artificial, the
most posturing, the most self involved of the lot.” In contrast, Dickens found Henry Clay to be “the warmest, kindest, most self-effacing (despite his considerable political power) man you could ever wish to meet.” The account is taken from a fictional lost diary of Mrs. Dickens: Daniel Panger, Hard Times: The Lost Diary of Mrs. Charles Dickens (Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts, 2000), 63–64.
35. Dickens, American Notes, 116.
36. For an interesting and full account of her role as hostess, see Christopher J. Leahy, “Playing Her Greatest Role: Priscilla Cooper Tyler and the Politics of the White House Social Scene, 1841–44,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 120 (2012): 237.
37. Wilkins, Charles Dickens in America, 167.
38. Ibid., 178.
39. The nasty habit of tobacco chewing, and spitting, so upset Dickens that he devoted as much time in his letters and in American Notes to it as he did to slavery. See Jon Acheson, “Charles Dickens in America: The Baltimore Letters,” Maryland Historical Magazine 102 (2007): 329.
40. Acheson, “Charles Dickens in America,” 321.
41. Ibid., 325.
42. Ibid., 331.
43. Ibid., 186 and 189.
44. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London: Vintage, 1999), 380.
45. Dickens, American Notes, 120. Dickens’s view of Washington’s political life was not rosy. He said he saw “Despicable trickery at elections; under-handed tampering with public officers; cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shield, etc.”
46. Chief Justice Hughes laid the cornerstone for the Supreme Court’s building on October 13, 1932, and it opened in 1935.
47. The noted legal scholar, especially with respect to slavery, Prof. Paul Finkelman, suggests that the Prigg case represented the first example of the modern notion of “unfunded mandates.” Paul Finkelman, “Teaching Slavery in American Constitutional Law,” Akron Law Review 34 (2000): 280.
48. This sensible suggestion is made by H. Robert Baker in his superb Prigg v. Pennsylvania: Slavery, the Supreme Court, and the Ambivalent Constitution (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2012), 139.
49. Baker, Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 152.
50. Ibid.
51. Akhil Reed Amar, America’s Constitution: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2005), 263.
Chapter 6
Enter Diplomacy; Crisis Averted
Governor Cockburn’s dispatch of November 17, 1841, to Lord Stanley arrived in London in mid-December. It is likely that Cockburn’s alarming dispatch of November 24—expressing worry that American warships would descend on a virtually defenseless Nassau—also reached London shortly thereafter. One can imagine that Lord Stanley, responsible for war and the colonies, quickly met with Foreign Secretary (and former secretary for war and the colonies), Lord Aberdeen, since it was obvious that this Creole incident could well be a tipping point toward war. Relations between Britain and America had been tense for a decade, and the Creole incident contained incendiary elements—slavery, murder, and mutiny—especially for the new slaveholding American President Tyler. There could be no doubt that, unless some dramatic step was taken to defuse this issue, and, ideally, to reset the general relationship with the Americans—from the Canadian border problems to the antislavery squadrons of the coast of west Africa—war could ensue. There could be little doubt that, while the US-Canadian border issue was the most long-standing and important, this new Creole problem could create a volcano of emotion in both countries. Emotion in diplomacy was dangerous.
Therefore, on Christmas Eve 1841, after consulting his two senior secretaries, Prime Minister Peel solemnly informed Queen Victoria that a third war with America was on the horizon. He proposed a special mission to Washington to resolve the host of problems between the two countries and so to preserve the peace. Queen Victoria quickly approved this proposal. This diplomatic technique—a special mission, rather than relying on existing representatives—made sense in this instance, because the British minister in Washington, Henry Fox, had not distinguished himself since he arrived in Washington in 1836, and was not well regarded. (The American minister in London, Everett, had the advantage of being close to Secretary of State Webster, but he was too fresh in his post to be an ideal channel and negotiating partner.) A special British mission, however, carried the risk that failure could be more difficult to shield from the press.
Aberdeen suggested that Alexander Baring, the 1st Baron Ashburton, be appointed a special envoy with full powers to settle all matters in dispute. Lord Ashburton, born just before the American Revolution, now sixty-seven, was a wealthy banker and head of Baring Brothers & Co., one of the greatest financial houses in the world. It was said that there were six great powers in Europe: Britain, France, Austro-Hungry, Russia, Prussia, and Baring Brothers. He had served in Parliament from 1806 until 1835, and had served as Master of the Mint. Lord Aberdeen had negotiated the financing of the Louisiana Purchase.[1] He owned large land holdings in the United States—including one million acres of land in Maine—and he had married an American woman, Anne Louisa Bingham, daughter of Senator William Bingham of Pennsylvania. She received a large inheritance that helped Alexander acquire his partnership in Baring Brothers.
Alexander Baring, 1st Baron Ashburton and Anne Louisa Bingham (the daughter of Senator Bingham of Pennsylvania) were married in 1798. This image was created around that time. Courtesy of the Fort Kent, Maine, Historical Society.
Anne Louisa Bingham. Courtesy of the Fort Kent, Maine, Historical Society.
During the summer of 1839, Senator Webster and his wife, Caroline, had been presented to Queen Victoria at a ball, during the Websters’ visit to London. They had had dinner earlier with Alexander Baring; Webster had served as legal counsel to the financial firm of Baring Brothers since 1831. The foreign secretary at that time, Lord Palmerston, suggested that the Queen invite the Websters to the ball, along with the American minister, Andrew Stevenson. Stevenson was gracious to Webster, even though Webster had voted against his confirmation in 1836. This relaxation of court etiquette was considered by Palmerston to be a wise long-term investment in the prominent Daniel Webster.[2] Webster spent a small fortune outfitting himself (and his wife) in appropriate court dress: he wore white silk stockings, diamond knee and shoe buckles, a coat lined with white silk, and lace frills over his hands.[3] In late September, while still in London, the Websters attended the marriage of their twenty-one-year-old daughter, Julia, to Samuel Appleton.
On December 27, 1841, Foreign Secretary Aberdeen informed the US minister, Everett, of the queen’s approval of this special mission. For Everett, this must have created very mixed emotions: on the one hand, having a special mission, especially one led by such a distinguished man as Lord Ashburton, was a mark of respect for the United States; on the other hand, it had to be clear to Everett that the main task of improving US-UK relations would move from his office in London to Ashburton’s mission in Washington. On New Year’s Eve, the London press announced the appointment, and Everett wrote to Webster with the news. Ashburton wrote officially to Webster a couple of days later about the appointment.
In Washington, Tyler and Webster welcomed the news with a sigh of relief. The idea of sending a special mission to the United States was generally welcome to Americans, since it was a somewhat unusual step, especially for the mighty British. Lord Ashburton’s selection was considered proof of “a genuine desire on the part of England to negotiate upon a sincere and friendly basis.”[4] Webster, in particular, welcomed his friend Alexander Baring. These were the perfect men to negotiate the resolution of the serious problems between the two countries. Since the mass cabinet resignations six months earlier, Tyler and Webster had grown closer. Tyler saw Webster as the head of the cabinet, and Webster had earned his complete confidence. Tyler and Webster “saw each other every day, dined together often, and kept each other informed of their thoughts and expectations.”[5]
Foreign Secretary Aberdeen drafted instructions on February 8, 1842, for A
shburton to take with him to Washington. While these instructions gave a rather free hand to Ashburton, they did present issues in the order of importance to Aberdeen: the Canadian boundary (including Oregon and the northwest border),[6] the Caroline problem, and the right to search—or to visit, as the British preferred say—American vessels off the African coast. Oddly, Aberdeen had told Everett on December 31 that he thought a solution to the right of search would be the most important issue.[7]