The Creole Affair

by Arthur T. Downey

  After Tyler’s administration, all of the presidents until Lincoln (except for Polk) were weak, and none had a second term: Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan. Sectionalism grew. Political parties realigned: the Whigs collapsed, giving way to the Republicans—a Northern party only—and the Democrats split on sectional lines. This led to Lincoln’s election. And to civil war.

  What happened to some of the key figures prominent in the Creole affair? Here is a summary in alphabetical order:

  John Quincy Adams: On June 17, 1843, there was a great celebration at the Bunker Hill Monument in Massachusetts. The chief orator at the ceremony was Daniel Webster, who had made a famous speech at that site in 1825, at the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill. There was a crowd of one hundred thousand to hear Webster, and also President Tyler. But John Quincy Adams and other abolitionist congressmen boycotted the event. Adams wrote in his diary that the arrival of Webster and Tyler “and his cabinet of slave drivers, [would] desecrate the solemnity” of the celebration. How could he have “witnessed all this at once, without an unbecoming burst of indignation, or of laughter?”[1] Adams wrote: “My life must be militant to its close.”[2] Attorney General Legare, who had just arrived in Boston for the Bunker Hill ceremony, died suddenly, possibly from appendicitis; the presidential party carried Legare’s body back to South Carolina for burial.

  In December 1844, at the beginning of the 2nd Session of the 28th Congress, the seventy-seven-year-old Adams finally succeeded in securing a vote (108–80) to abolish the House Gag Rule. In September 1845, Adams suffered a mild stroke, but within a few months he was back in the House, where he had been assigned the most accessible desk. By July 1846, at seventy-nine, he was back swimming in the Potomac River each morning for thiry minutes. In late November 1846, while in Boston, Adams suffered another stroke, but on February 13, 1847, he returned to the House, where the members rose as one to greet their patriarch. Congressman Andrew Johnson—later, Lincoln’s vice president and successor—immediately vacated Adams’s former seat.

  On March 2, 1847, the day before the adjournment of the 29th Congress, Adams delivered his only speech of the second session—on a subject he knew well—the only subject that stirred him to anything like his old-time passion.[3] Spain was demanding $50,000 in reparations for the loss of the Amistad and its Africans. Secretary of State Buchanan recommended payment, but Adams was strongly opposed: “God forbid that any claim should ever be allowed by Congress which rested on such a false foundation.” After Adams spoke, the House defeated the reparations motion, 94–28. That summer of 1847, Adams turned eighty, and he and his wife Louisa celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. In November, when he left Massachusetts for Washington to attend the 30th Congress, Adams had an uneasy premonition that he was leaving home on his last journey.

  On February 21, 1848, at his desk in the House, Adams suddenly flushed and became unconscious. He was moved to the Speaker’s office in a coma. All congressional activities and Washington’s Birthday celebrations were canceled. Two days later, Adams died in the Speaker’s office. (Lincoln was appointed to the large House committee on funeral arrangements.) Some said the eighteenth century died with him. The outpouring of public grief was the greatest since the death of Washington and until the death of Lincoln.[4] For two days, 15,000 people filed past his bier in the Capitol rotunda. Daniel Webster wrote the words for the plaque on his casket, including the statement that Adams had served his country for fifty years and “enjoyed its highest honors.”

  The death of John Quincy Adams, February 23, 1848, in the office of the speaker of the House of Representatives.

  Adams’s legal arguments against the gag rule and his defense of the right of self-emancipation of the African slaves on board the Amistad formed the basis for the arguments by abolitionists before and during the Civil War. “Indeed, after the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts Charles Sumner learned of the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, he waved copies of Adams’s speeches in President Lincoln’s face, defying him to live up to Adams’s arguments.”[5]

  Lord Ashburton died six years after his negotiation with Webster, leaving nine children; his eldest son, Bingham Baring, became the 2nd Baron Ashburton. The great financial House of Baring fell apart in 1995 as a result of a massive fraud arising out of its Singapore branch. The Dutch bank ING bought the bankrupt Barings in 1995.

  John F. Bacon was replaced as US consul in Nassau by Timothy Darling in April 1842. It is unclear whether this move was a normal rotation of personnel, or whether the Bacon-Cockburn relationship had so frayed during the Creole incident that Bacon could no longer work effectively in Nassau. But Bacon returned to serve again as US consul in Nassau 1845–1850 and 1852–1853—when he, once again, was succeeded by Timothy Darling. Bacon died in Nassau on February 25, 1860, at age seventy-one.

  Judah P. Benjamin was elected in 1852 by the Louisiana state legislature to serve as a US senator; he took office, as a Whig, in March 1853. Just before his term began, outgoing President Millard Fillmore proposed to nominate him as associate justice of the US Supreme Court, but Benjamin declined, preferring to serve in the Senate. Benjamin was the first acknowledged Jew to hold a US Senate seat.[6] He served again, as a Democrat, in 1859. During the debate on the issue of extending slavery to Kansas, the abolitionist senator from Ohio (and former law partner of Joshua Reed Giddings), Benjamin F. Wade,[7] goaded Benjamin, pointing out that Moses had “enticed a whole nation of slaves” to run away, and that he was probably denounced as an abolitionist, and that Benjamin was “an Israelite in Egyptian clothing” to which Benjamin replied: “It is true that I am a Jew, and when my ancestors were receiving their Ten Commandments from the immediate Deity, amidst the thundering and lightning of Mt. Sinai, the ancestors of my opponent were herding swine in the forests of Great Britain.”[8]

  Benjamin withdrew from the US Senate in February 1861 and became the attorney general in the Provisional Confederate States of America (CSA). From August 1861 to February 1862, Benjamin was CSA secretary of war, and then became CSA secretary of state until the end of the Civil War. Benjamin’s face was pictured on the Confederate $2 bill. Having sold his plantation in 1850 with its 140 slaves, Benjamin was the only member of the CSA cabinet who did not own slaves. Near the end of the war, John Surratt Jr.—the son of Mary Surratt—was a dispatch runner for Benjamin’s agents in Canada. One scholar suggests that it might have been Benjamin, who “had the mindset, motive, means, and opportunity to execute this plan during the last week of March in 1865,” who ordered the execution of President Lincoln.[9]

  After Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in April 1865, Benjamin advised CSA President Jefferson Davis that surrender was the only option, but Davis disagreed. At that point, Benjamin fled to Florida, took an open boat to the Bahamas Islands (Bimini), and landed at Nassau.[10] From Nassau, he made his way to Havana, St. Thomas, and then to Liverpool, England. Liverpool was home to the largest number of Confederate sympathizers, and they would welcome Benjamin’s legal services. He was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn on January 13, 1866, and quickly published the first comprehensive treatise on English commercial law two years later, Benjamin’s Treatise On the Law of Sale of Personal Property, With Reference to the American Decisions, And to the French Code and Civil Law. Today, his treatise is commonly known as Benjamin’s Sale of Goods. The eighth edition of that book was published by Sweet & Maxwell Ltd. in London in 2010.[11] Most English law students and lawyers have no idea that the original author had a prior political and legal career in the United States.

  Benjamin became Queen’s Counsel in 1872—an elevated status conferred by the Crown, recognized by the courts, and permitting the “QC” to wear a silk gown and full-bottomed wigs. Benjamin is reputed to have earned more than any member of the bar of his time, some GBP 480,000 during his sixteen years of practice in the UK—the equivalent to almost $17 million today. He retired in 1883 and moved to Paris, where his wife and da
ughter lived. He died there the following year.

  US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted that Benjamin “rose to the top of the legal profession twice in one lifetime, on two continents, beginning his first ascent as a raw youth and his second as a fugitive minister of a vanquished power.”[12]

  Sir Francis Cockburn was promoted to major general in 1846, lieutenant general in 1854, and general in 1860. He died in 1868 in Dover, England, at age eighty-eight. His brother, Sir James Cockburn, the 9th Baronet, was governor of Bermuda; another brother, Sir George, the 10th Baronet, served as Admiral of the Fleet and First Sea Lord; his nephew, Sir Alexander, the 12th Baronet, was the Lord Chief Justice of England. Cockburn Town, on San Salvador Island in the Bahamas, is named in honor of Sir Francis.

  Charles Dickens published American Notes in October 1842. It was, in the words of one scholar, “an unforgiving portrait of a troubled republic: ambitious, cruel, ungenerous, brutal, and divided. . . . Dickens’s humor about America was black.”[13] He retained his status as the super-celebrity of the English-speaking popular literary world, although he did suffer a public scandal in 1858 when he decided to separate from his wife, Catherine—in sort of a midlife crisis. They had been married for more than two decades, and she had borne him seven sons and three daughters over sixteen years. Ellen Ternan, a nineteen-year-old actress (Dickens was forty-six), became his protégé and probably his lover.[14]

  Dickens returned to America in November 1867, the most successful author in the English-speaking world: he virtually invented the Victorian Christmas, and was also a journalist, philanthropist, actor, orator, and public conscience.[15] Unlike his 1842 “tour from hell,” this time his American tour was managed like a modern, professional, speaking tour, and it was a lucrative venture. Tickets for his readings sold for three times the price of a play. He gave seventy-six readings and earned a total of $228,000—the rough equivalent today of $50,000 per night. More than 40,000 people heard Dickens read in New York City alone; 5,000 people waited for tickets in the cold in a line a half mile long.

  During his Washington visit in February 1868, where he celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday, he again met with an unelected American president, who also was unpopular with Congress, Andrew Johnson. Johnson was preoccupied with the congressional situation: on February 24, the House voted (126–47) to impeach him. (Dickens’s readings had to be canceled in March due to the president’s trial in the Senate.) Dickens, this time, left all politics aside and did not speak about international copyright or the plight of the Negro freedman. Unlike 1842, this second, and final, visit to America was a commercial and artistic success. Dickens, this time, was sick, hobbled on a stick, and dosed himself with laudanum in order to sleep.

  Back in England, on June 9, 1870, while trying to finish Edwin Drood, Charles Dickens died. In England, his death was as momentous as those of Prince Albert and the Duke of Wellington.

  Frederick Douglass: In 1855, he published a second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom. The fiery abolitionist John Brown stayed at Douglass’s home in Rochester in 1858, while Brown was developing his plan to cause a slave revolt in the South. Just prior to Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859, Douglass met with Brown in nearby Maryland, but Douglass declined to participate in Brown’s raid. After the bloodshed at Harpers Ferry, Douglass’s name was found among Brown’s papers, and an arrest warrant was issued for Douglass. Douglass fled to Canada, and then to Europe, to avoid capture. He returned to the United States the following year, after his daughter Annie died. During the Civil War, Douglass was active in improving the position of Negro soldiers, and in pushing Lincoln to end slavery.

  After the war, in 1871, Douglass moved to Washington, DC, and was appointed US marshall of the District (1877), and then recorder of deeds (1881). Also in 1881, he published his third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Three years later, Douglass married his secretary, Helen Pitts, a cousin to John Quincy Adams. In 1888, President Benjamin Harrison—the grandson of President William Henry Harrison, whose untimely death in 1841 caused Vice President Tyler to become president—appointed Douglass US consul general in Haiti, and the following year US minister to Haiti.

  At seventy-seven, Douglass died of a massive heart attack at his home (Cedar Hill) in Anacostia, in the District of Columbia, February 20, 1895.

  On June 19, 2013, a statue of Frederick Douglass was installed at the Capitol building in the National Statutory Hall. It joined fifty statues, each representing a state; Douglass’s bronze statue—seven feet tall and weighing 1,700 pounds—was the first to represent the District of Columbia.[16] (A statue of Daniel Webster represents New Hampshire.) The hall, famous for its ability to carry echoes of conversations, was the meeting place of the House of Representatives from 1807 until 1857.

  Edward Everett, after serving as Tyler’s envoy to Great Britain, 1841–1845, returned home to Massachusetts and became president of Harvard University. In 1852, he succeeded Daniel Webster as secretary of state, and then was a US senator, 1853–1854. In the election of 1860, he was the vice presidential candidate for the Constitutional Union Party. Everett is most renowned as the featured speaker at the November 19, 1863, dedication ceremony in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where his formal two-hour oration (13,508 words) preceded the two-minute (280 words) address of President Lincoln. The next day, Everett wrote to Lincoln, “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”[17]

  Everett died in January 1865. The town of Everett, Massachusetts, is named in his honor.

  Henry S. Fox, the unpopular British minister in Washington from 1837—over whose head Lord Ashburton negotiated with Secretary of State Webster—was finally asked to retire in 1843 by Lord Aberdeen, in part to ease negotiations with the United States over the divided Oregon territory. Fox stayed in Washington and died three years later from a morphine overdose. Fox is buried in the Congressional Cemetery, located less than two miles from the Congress. The bodies of President Harrison and John Quincy Adams lay temporarily at the Public Vault at the same cemetery.

  Joshua Reed Giddings spent seventeen more years in the House of Representatives, where he led congressional opposition to the expansion of slavery. In April 1848, following the unsuccessful escape of seventy-seven slaves on a schooner, the Pearl, down the Potomac River, and the consequent three-day riot in downtown Washington, Giddings introduced a resolution asking why, in light of the popular struggles for freedom in Europe,[18] the Pearl fugitives were being jailed for attempting to enjoy the freedom for which America’s forefathers had died.

  Giddings condemned the annexation of Texas (1846), the Mexican War (1845–1848), the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854). He left the Whig Party and became one of the founders of the Republican Party. From his law office in Ashtabula, Ohio, Giddings wrote the Republican Party’s first national platform, adopted at Philadelphia on June 17, 1856. He retired from the House on March 3, 1859. At the outset of the Lincoln administration in March 1861, Giddings was appointed by Lincoln to be the US consul general in Canada [the British North American Provinces]. He died in Montreal in May 1864.

  In 1889, the first all-black public school was built on Capitol Hill (315 G Street SE), and was named the J. R. Giddings School. In the late 1990s, the DC government sold it as surplus; the historic building is now a gym.

  Nassau, the Bahamas: Emancipation Day, celebrated on the first Monday of August, is a public holiday in the Bahamas.[19] On Emancipation Day in 1850, marching Bahamian celebrants offered three cheers for the Queen of England, the governor of the Bahamas, and freedom. But when they came to the US consulate, they instead gave out three groans against American slavery.[20]

  During the American Civil War, the Bahamas was a primary transshipment point for blockade runners. Large, slow ships brought goods to the Bahamas, and smaller, swifter vessels carried the cargo from the Bahamas to the Confederate ports,
and vice versa.[21] During the American Prohibition era, “rum-running” also found that Nassau was a convenient location for smuggling activity.

  In 1936, King Edward VIII abdicated the British throne and became HRH, Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor. The following year, he married Wallis Simpson, who became the Duchess of Windsor. Great Britain was soon in the midst of World War II, and so the British government arranged for the duke and duchess to be transported to Nassau, where they would be safe. The duke served as governor of the Bahamas from August 1940 to March 1945.

  In 1973, the Bahamas became an independent nation, and Nassau is its capital. The United States formally recognized the Bahamas on July 11, 1973, when the US embassy in Nassau was established. Today, the Bahamas is a fairly successful middle-income country with a GDP per head close to that of Spain or Italy.[22]

  Winfield Scott, the general who helped to defuse the tense Canadian border areas with New York and with Maine, led the US invasion of Mexico in 1847, and five years later became the last Whig candidate for president. In 1856, Scott was promoted to lieutenant general, the first officer to hold that rank since George Washington. In 1861, after Fort Sumter, Scott established the largest army in US history (to that point), and devised the famous Anaconda Plan to strangle the Confederacy by blockade.[23] After the first battle of Bull Run, President Lincoln decided that the seventy-four-year-old general was not up to the task and replaced him with thirty-five-year-old General George McClellan, as head of the Army of the Potomac. On October 13, 1861, Scott submitted his resignation as general-in-chief of the Union Army. There is some speculation that later that year, while visiting Europe, Scott played a role in defusing the tense situation with Great Britain over the Trent affair.[24] Scott died in May 1866 and is buried at West Point.