The Creole Affair

by Arthur T. Downey

  Slavery: On December 13, 1865, Secretary of State William H. Seward announced that the Thirteenth Amendment had been ratified, and thus slavery ended in the United States. The last major nation to abolish slavery was Brazil, on May 13, 1888. On December 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Of the thirty articles in the declaration, the first and the fourth provide: “Article 1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. . . . Article 4. No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.” The 1958 Convention on the High Seas provides in Article 13: “Every State shall adopt effective measures to prevent and punish the transport of slaves in ships authorized to fly its flag, and to prevent the unlawful use of its flag for that purpose. Any slave taking refuge on board any ship, whatever its flag, shall ipso facto be free.”[25] The United States ratified the convention on April 12, 1961.

  Slidells: Judah Benjamin’s coauthor and law partner, Thomas Slidell, was appointed an associate justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court in 1846, and in 1852 was elected to a ten-year term as chief justice. He resigned in 1855 for health reasons. Thomas died in 1864. His older brother, John Slidell, who was Judah Benjamin’s political mentor, was elected to the US House of Representatives for the 1843–1845 term and then served as US minister to Mexico. John Slidell was elected to the US Senate in 1853 but resigned in February 1861 to join the Confederacy. He was appointed CSA minister to France in 1861 and was part of the “Trent Affair,” which involved the United States capturing him and James Mason (CSA envoy to London) on the high seas. John Slidell died in the United Kingdom in 1871 and was buried there. The city of Slidell, Louisiana, is named in honor of both John and Thomas.

  Lord Stanley, the British secretary of state for war and the colonies during the Creole affair, later became the 14th Earl of Derby and prime minister three times during the period 1852–1868. His second son, Frederick, became Canada’s governor general (1888–1893), after whom the famous hockey trophy, the Stanley Cup, is named.

  John Tyler continued to have difficulties with Congress, especially with the Whig-controlled Senate. The Senate turned down four of Tyler’s cabinet nominees and four of his Supreme Court nominees. In early March 1843, Tyler sent Congressman Caleb Cushing’s name to the Senate for secretary of the treasury, but the Senate rejected Cushing three times on the same day, each time by larger margins. This three-time rejection remains the worst one-day loss of cabinet nominations by any president, before or since. Later that year, Tyler was successful in securing the confirmation of Cushing as US ambassador to China; Cushing then negotiated the first China-US treaty, one of the few successes of the Tyler term. The secretary of the US legation in China, under Cushing, was Daniel Webster’s elder son, Fletcher.

  His new Democratic-Republican Party renominated Tyler for the presidency on May 27, 1844. The Democrats nominated (on the ninth ballot) James K. Polk, a slave owner from Tennessee, and a former Speaker of the House of Representatives. Fearing that, if he stayed in the race, he would split votes with Polk, and, therefore, his archenemy, Henry Clay, might win, Tyler withdrew his nomination. A month later, Tyler became the first president to marry while in office (Julia Gardner, younger than his daughter, in June 1844.) Among his last acts as president was to push Congress to annex Texas through Joint Resolution, which he signed just before leaving office in 1845. After leaving the White House on March 3, 1845, he practiced law in Virginia and served on the board of visitors for the College of William and Mary.

  In early 1861, as the Civil War loomed, Tyler met with President Buchanan, and urged that he abandon Fort Sumter. Tyler was unanimously elected president of the Washington Peace Convention, composed of twenty-seven states (seven of which were from the South) on February 5, 1861, in a last effort to resolve the crisis.

  The conference did not proceed well, and by February 9, six more Deep South states seceded. Concerned that the draft constitutional amendment being proposed by the conference would not permit slavery to grow in Latin America and the West Indies, Tyler joined the seceding radicals, and tried to persuade the border states to join the Confederacy in the hope that the Confederacy would be strong enough to deter the incoming Lincoln administration from choosing war. During a heated meeting on February 26 with Lincoln, Tyler was persuaded that Lincoln did in fact want war. Two days later, Tyler was back in Richmond, urging Virginia to secede. On April 27, Tyler joined eighty-seven other delegates to the Virginia State Convention in approving the Ordinance of Secession. Thus, he became the only president to take action to dismember the United States and thus to betray his country.

  Later that same year, after the formation of the Confederacy, Tyler was elected to the Confederate House. But he died on January 18, 1862, before he could take his seat. President Lincoln did not issue a proclamation marking the death of the former president; the passing of the disgraced ex-president was greeted with official US government silence. However, Tyler’s coffin, draped in a Confederate flag, lay in state in Richmond’s Hall of Congress while thousands passed by in mourning. Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet attended the church memorial service.[26]

  Daniel Webster remained secretary of state for almost a year following the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. He resigned from the Tyler cabinet on May 8, 1843. In 1844, he was elected senator from Massachusetts for the second time.

  After the initial conclusion of the 1842 “Dorr’s Rebellion” in Rhode Island, one of Dorr’s supporters, Martin Luther, sued a Rhode Island militiaman, Luther Borden, who had entered Luther’s house wrongfully under the state’s martial law. The case ended up in the US Supreme Court, where arguments were held over several days in late January 1848. Daniel Webster argued the case on behalf of Borden and the charter government. The ultimate legal issue was the constitutional provision (in Art. IV, Sec. 4) in which the federal government guarantees to each state a “Republican Form of Government.” In political terms, the case was seen as a contest between the Whigs (Borden and the established charter government) and the Democrats (Luther and the Dorr faction). Webster argued “brilliantly.”[27] Since 1848 was an election year, the court delayed its decision until January 1849, where in Luther v. Borden[28] the court held 8 to 1 that this was a “political question” and declined to intervene. This doctrine, pronounced by Chief Justice Taney, remains a cornerstone of constitutional law.[29] Daniel Webster won.

  Later in 1848, Webster sought the Whig nomination for president but lost to Zachary Taylor. Webster, once again, was offered the vice presidential nomination but declined. (President Zachary Taylor died after sixteen months in office, and so, had Webster accepted the vice presidential nomination, Webster would have become president.) He played a pivotal role in achieving the great Compromise of 1850, an effort led by Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas to avoid civil war. In March 1850, Webster gave a famous speech in support of the Compromise, which included the Fugitive Slave law. In that act of support, he destroyed his political base in New England, and he resigned from the Senate in July 1850.

  He became secretary of state once again, under President Millard Fillmore (1850–1852). Webster had been somewhat reluctant to serve again, largely because he felt he could not afford to take a great reduction in his income. To accept Fillmore’s offer would also mean giving up twenty important cases he had pending at the Supreme Court.[30] In 1851, there were political charges that he had accepted “voluntary contributions” from major American bankers—specifically including Baring Brothers’ agent—as an inducement to take the secretary of state position, for which they were rewarded by Webster with contracts relating to the installment payments to Mexico due by the United States under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the US-Mexican War. A House Resolution to formally investigate the charges was rejected 119 to 35, over the passionate objections of Congressman Joshua Giddings.

  Senator John F. Kennedy, in his Profiles in
Courage (1955), called Webster’s defense of the Compromise of 1850, despite the certainty that it would create denunciations from the North, one of the greatest acts of courageous principle in the Senate’s history. Webster died on October 24, 1852.

  Daniel Webster’s grandson, the son of Fletcher, was born in Boston in 1847, five years after the signing of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. His name: Ashburton Webster.

  Henry A. Wise continued to duel verbally with John Quincy Adams over the Gag Rule. Wise was reelected to the House as a Tyler Democrat in 1843, and then he served as US minister in Brazil, 1844–1847. In 1855, he was elected governor of Virginia (1856–1860). He rushed to Harpers Ferry in the fall of 1859 to interview John Brown, and later signed Brown’s death warrant as one of his final acts in office. Wise was a member of the Virginia secession convention in 1861, where he opposed immediate secession. After Virginia’s secession, he became a general in the Confederate army and was with Lee at Appomattox Courthouse, where he advised Lee to surrender to Grant. After the war, Wise was a successful lawyer. He died in 1876.

  Madison Washington stepped out of jail in Nassau in April 1842 and vanished from history.

  1. Gary May, John Tyler (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2008), 104.

  2. Quoted by Thomas Fleming, review of Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill in Wall Street Journal, April 27–28, 2013, C-7.

  3. Lynn Hudson Parsons, John Quincy Adams (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 267.

  4. One of Adams’s biographers adds the death of Benjamin Franklin, after Washington. Harlow Giles Unger, John Quincy Adams (Boston: Da Capo, 2012), 310. Unger concludes that Adams “was an aristocrat of an earlier generation, raised in an age of deference, who spoke the rich language that ordinary people could seldom fathom, but in the end, they sensed that he spoke for their greater good and to protect their rights and freedoms.”

  5. David Brion Davis, “How They Stopped Slavery: A New Perspective,” review of James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 in New York Review of Books, June 6, 2012, 59–60.

  6. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “From Benjamin to Breyer: Is There a Jewish Seat?” Supreme Court Historical Society Quarterly 24, no. 3 (2003): 1.

  7. Wade was president pro tem of the Senate during the impeachment trial of President Johnson. Had the attack on Johnson not failed by one vote, Wade would have become president, since Johnson had no vice president.

  8. Eli N. Evans, Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate (New York: The Free Press, 1988), 97.

  9. Sandy Prindle, “Judah Benjamin: A Person of Interest,” Surratt Courier 38 (April 2013): 9. Prindle offers no proof, and makes clear that this is only speculation.

  10. Judah Best, “Judah P. Benjamin: Part II: The Queen’s Counsel,” Supreme Court Historical Society Quarterly 33, no. 3 (2011): 9.

  11. David Lynch, “Judah Benjamin’s Career on the Northern Circuit and at the Bar of England & Wales,” Supreme Court Historical Society Quarterly 33, no. 4 (2011): 10.

  12. Ginsburg, “From Benjamin to Breyer,” 4.

  13. Jill Lepore, “Dickens in Eden,” The New Yorker, August 29, 2011, 61.

  14. Michael Slater, The Great Charles Dickens Scandal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

  15. David Grylls, “What Larks,” Financial Times, October 17–18, 2009, 16.

  16. Ben Pershing, “Douglass Statue Arrives at Capital, His Cause in Tow,” Washington Post, June 20, 2013, A3.

  17. Bob Greene, “The Forgotten Gettysburg Addresser,” Wall Street Journal, June 22, 2013, A-15.

  18. In April 1848, revolution erupted in Germany, Austria, and Italy. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had just completed a pamphlet titled The Communist Manifesto. An excellent source for this period in Europe is Mike Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2008).

  19. See generally, Patrice M. Williams, “‘Freedom Day’: The Emancipation Celebrations in the Bahamas in the 19th Century,” Journal of the Bahamas Historical Society 17 (1995): 23.

  20. Peter T. Dalleo, “Montell & Co., The James Power and the Baltimore-Bahamas Packet Trade 1838–1845,” Journal of the Bahamas Historical Society 30 (2008): 8.

  21. Thomas P. Lowry, “The Big Business of Bahamian Blockade Running,” Civil War Times (May 2007): 59. See also D. Gail Sanders, “The Blockade Running in the Bahamas: Blessing or Curse?” Journal of the Bahamas Historical Society 10 (1988): 14.

  22. Economist, October 5, 2013, 42.

  23. For a positive description of the Anaconda Plan, see Tim Rowland, “The Big Squeeze,” America’s Civil War (March 2013): 37–43.

  24. Robert D. Shuster and William G. Shuster, “Winfield Scott’s Last Mission,” Civil War Times (June 2013): 58.

  25. Marjorie M. Whiteman, Digest of International Law, vol. 4 (Washington, DC: Department of State, 1965), vol. 4, 645.

  26. May, John Tyler, 145.

  27. Robert V. Remini, Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time (New York: Norton, 1997), 640. See also Erik J. Chaput, The People’s Martyr: Thomas Wilson Dorr and His 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013), 198–99.

  28. 48 U.S. (7 How.) 1 (1849).

  29. “Political Questions are controversies that the US Supreme Court has historically regarded as nonjustifiable and inappropriate for judicial resolution. . . . Although the Court may have jurisdiction over cases involving such questions, it has often chosen not to decide them, preferring instead to allow them to be resolved by the ‘political’ branches of government.” Kermit L. Hall, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 651.

  30. Remini, Daniel Webster, 685.

  Appendix I

  Chronology

  1772

  June 22: Lord Mansfield delivered his famous opinion in Somerset v. Stewart, which concluded that a slave brought into England could be set free, since there was no law in England establishing slavery.

  1775

  The Royal Governor of Virginia promised freedom to slaves owned by rebels if those slaves would join His Majesty’s troops.

  1779

  Royal Governor Clinton in New York declared that slaves serving the rebels would be sold, but those who deserted the rebels would be offered full security.

  1807

  February 23: The British Parliament voted, 283 to 16, to end British participation in the international slave trade; the act passed on March 25, effective May 1.

  March 7: President Jefferson signed into law the elimination of US participation in the international slave trade, effective in 1808.

  1814

  August 24: Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn reportedly stood on the chair of the Speaker of the House and asked: “Shall this harbor of Yankee democracy be burned?” Then he ordered British troops to “destroy and lay waste” to the public buildings in Washington, DC. Slaves obtained freedom by serving the British forces.

  December 24: The Treaty of Ghent was signed, ending the War of 1812. Among the US signers was John Quincy Adams.

  1816

  The American Colonization Society was formed.

  1817

  The Anglo-Spanish Treaty banned the importation of African slaves into Cuba.

  1819

  Congress authorized the president to create the Africa Squadron of US armed vessels to interdict slavers off the African coast.

  1820

  March 6: The Missouri Compromise was signed by President Monroe, under which Missouri was admitted as a slave state and Maine as a free state, preserving the North-South equality in the Senate.

  Congress enacted a law to make those involved in the international slave trade punishable as pirates.

  1822

  May: Charleston, South Carolina, was rocked by an ambitious, but thwarted, slave rebellion organized by the freed slave Denmark Vesey, designed to seize Charleston and to drive out the whites.

  1824

  The United Kingd
om and United States signed a treaty in London mutually agreeing that participants in the slave trade would be treated as pirates. The treaty failed Senate ratification.