How the States Got Their Shapes Too

by Mark Stein

  Within two years of his arrival, Douglas was elected to the state legislature, where he served with another newly elected young legislator. (Need I say who?) Douglas looked back at those days (through politically tinted glasses) during the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates:

  Lincoln is one of those peculiar men who perform with admirable skill everything which they undertake.… He was just as good at telling an anecdote as now. He could beat any of the boys wrestling, or running a foot-race, in pitching quoits or tossing a copper; could ruin more liquor than all the boys of the town together; and the dignity and impartiality with which he presided at a horse-race or fist-fight excited the admiration and won the praise of everybody that was present and participated.

  The Lincoln-Douglas debates, stripped of their backhanded compliments and oratorical ornaments, were about slavery. More precisely, they were about Douglas’s record in the U.S. Senate regarding slavery: his coauthorship of the Compromise of 1850 and sole authorship of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. Today these laws are mainly names memorized for tests. Back then they tested the nation’s ability to survive. The Compromise of 1850 created a crack in America’s largest political dam; the Kansas-Nebraska Act caused the dam to collapse.

  That dam was the Missouri Compromise, enacted in 1820 to settle the slavery disputes that had flared anew after the Louisiana Purchase. It stipulated that no new state or territory north of 36°30’ could have slavery, with the exception of Missouri. It blocked the conflict well enough for the Louisiana Purchase, and even when Texas later joined the nation. But after the vast acquisition of lands in the Mexican War, the South could see that continuing the dividing line at 36°30 would no longer maintain parity between free states and slave states. Added to the South’s concerns were California (filled with gold) and New Mexico (filled with Mexicans). These three issues created an explosive political mix.

  Slave and free states, 1848

  California had organized its own boundaries without waiting for congressional authorization—boundaries so large that they crossed the Missouri Compromise line. But Congress had yet to vote on whether or not to accept those boundaries.

  The region now known as New Mexico was populated by people who had not sought to join the United States. Minimizing their potential animosity was crucial, since their population was centered in Santa Fe, easily accessible to Mexico. The Polk administration assured the region’s residents that, unless their local laws violated the Constitution, their laws would remain in force. Their laws prohibited slavery.

  Both the events in California and the emerging territory of New Mexico raised hopes in the North and caused alarms in the South. A new level of intensity infused editorials in Southern newspapers. “It was to be hoped that the rapacity of the … North would have been satisfied with having monopolized the whole of California,” Georgia’s Savannah Morning News commented, “and that for the sake of appearances at least, they would for a time have abstained from any interference with the territory lying contiguous to, and belonging to, the slave states.”

  Stephen Douglas was now the chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, which had responsibilities for proposing where territorial boundaries would be located and for structuring territorial governments. If his committee chose to deviate from the Missouri Compromise, it could send such legislation to the Senate floor. Because the Missouri Compromise was the lynchpin in the dispute over slavery in new territories, Chairman Douglas was sitting in a highly precarious chair. It was the chair in which he most wanted to sit; if he could sufficiently satisfy both North and South, his chances of winning the presidency would be greatly enhanced.

  He sought to achieve that goal through the Compromise of 1850, a package of bills dealing with California statehood, the creation of the New Mexico Territory, the Texas-New Mexico boundary, slave trade in the District of Columbia, and fugitive slaves. Taken together, they were designed to counterbalance each other in terms of the slavery dispute.

  Douglas himself wrote the bills involving New Mexico. In his Texas-New Mexico boundary bill, the United States purchased land from Texas (still greatly in debt from its years as a republic) and annexed that land to New Mexico. In his bill creating the New Mexico Territory, its citizens were allowed to decide for themselves whether or not to permit slavery. The same choice was also given to California. The Missouri Compromise was set aside.

  Douglas believed the Missouri Compromise was more than set aside; he believed it was eliminated. Most important, he believed the nation’s inability to reach agreement on slavery had now been resolved by a larger issue on which the nation did agree: democracy, whereby the people decide. “It was one of the great merits of the compromise measures of 1850,” Douglas told his fellow senators, “that they furnished a principle … to prevent any strife, any controversy, any sectional agitation in the future.… A geographical line had been abandoned and repudiated by the Congress of the United States and, in lieu of it, the plan of leaving each territory free to decide the question for itself was adopted.”

  Indeed, Douglas’s approach to ending the nation’s division over slavery succeeded in 1850, though it did so by dividing the divisions. Some on both sides accepted it; others on both sides did not. The editors of Georgia’s Macon Weekly Telegraph were shocked and offended that the legislation had given New Mexicans the right to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery, declaring in September:

  Is there any outrage, is there any farce, too gross to be perpetrated on any Southern right, or to be approved under … [the] new-found discovery of the inherent right of a people of a territory to sovereignty? … The submission of the South will soon find that, although their sense of honor and their regard for right is extinct, yet the position they have assumed of being kicked by the North indefinitely is quite as uncomfortable even to timid servility.

  In October, up in Vermont, the editors of Brattleboro’s Weekly Eagle were equally outraged:

  There is joy in Washington … over the “Settlement of our Slavery Difficulties.” … The consent of certain citizens to forego their purpose of dissolving this Union … is deemed an occasion suited to these demonstrations of joy and thankfulness. We infer from the nature and magnitude of the concession made to slavery, that free men have been greatly in the wrong. We have been guilty of some grave offence for which severe atonement was demanded.

  Amid the clamor, the public failed to notice that the new Texas-New Mexico boundary, for which Douglas was responsible, set the stage for future states in a way that transcended the issue of slavery. Time would show that Douglas had located the boundary precisely for the future division of the New Mexico Territory into two states, virtually equal in size, thus providing a maximum buffer for New Mexico’s Hispanic citizens, who greatly feared Texans (see “Francisco Perea and John Watts” in this book). It is one of the three most brilliant straight lines on the American map.

  The other two equally brilliant straight lines were drawn by the same man. They resulted from the fact that the Compromise of 1850 did not, as Douglas had hoped, end the debate over slavery. It flared up yet again in December 1853, when Douglas sent to the Senate floor his committee’s bill for the creation of Nebraska. Ironically, what reignited the debate was that aspect of Douglas’s bill that he thought had settled the argument: popular sovereignty. In this instance, however, popular sovereignty had the opposite effect than it had had in the Compromise of 1850. It now raised hopes in the South and alarms in the North. A Mississippi newspaper claimed that Douglas’s Nebraska bill “will put to the test professions which have been made by the Northern men,” while an Ohio paper described the bill as “a crazy, dangerous, and dishonorable effort to break down the Missouri Compromise.”1

  Douglas was not discouraged. He believed he had the key; the problem had to do with the door. The nation needed two doors: one opening on Nebraska, the other on a territory called Kansas, carved from the southern end of his original Nebraska proposal. Creating the two territories simu
ltaneously made it possible that one would choose slavery and the other would not.

  Douglas’s 1850 boundary line anticipating future New Mexico and Arizona

  Douglas introduced the revised bill in January 1854, and indeed it did make a difference. Although Northerners continued shaking their fists, they now added insults aimed at Douglas. “Year after year we have warned those who have been disposed to yield much to the South for sake of harmony,” an editorial in New Jersey’s Trenton State Gazette declared, disparaging the Little Giant of the Senate by adding, “Now we find the Missouri Compromise, always regarded with religious faith by its great originator, Henry Clay, attacked by a pygmy statesman.”

  Douglas’s addition of Kansas also made a difference in the South. They now resumed shaking their fists. But, unlike the North, they did not shake them at Douglas. They shook them at the North for continuing to shake their fists, even after Douglas’s two-state response to northern fist shaking. The conflicts were becoming increasingly complex. Each camp, however, believed the matter was becoming increasingly clear. “We have never read speeches which more completely and irrefragably established what [the Kansas-Nebraska Act] proposed to do, than have the efforts of the friends of Mr. Douglas’ Bill,” the Macon Weekly Telegraph asserted. “The enemies of the measure have in every instance been … forced to take some poor pitiful shift of abolition, maudlin cant, or irrelevant discussion.”

  As with the Compromise of 1850, the furor over slavery in the Kansas-Nebraska Act diverted attention from the significance of Douglas’s boundary lines. Though he originally proposed that Kansas’s southern border be located, quite logically, adjacent to Texas at 36°30’, shortly after the bill was introduced he shifted the border to 37°. This shift left a gap of one-half of one degree. Today that gap is the Oklahoma Panhandle. Why did Douglas do this? “The southern boundary of the proposed territory … is on the line of 36°30’,” Douglas noted when introducing the amendment to shift the boundary, explaining, “[My] attention has been called, by the chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, to the fact that that boundary would divide the Cherokee country; whereas, by taking the parallel of 37° north latitude as the southern boundary, the line would run between the Cherokees and the Osages.”

  That sounded plausible … except for the fact that American Indian boundaries were unaffected by state lines. Two weeks later, Senator William Sebastian, the committee chairman to whom Douglas referred, revealed the truer reason when he stated on the floor of the Senate, “[My] committee is maturing a policy which … directly affects the terms and conditions upon which the title of the Indians to the lands guaranteed to them by treaty, within the proposed limits of these territories, is to be extinguished.” Shifting the line simplified the task of extinguishing various Indian treaties.

  In addition, the shift enhanced the geometry for future states—though it left that pesky gap. With a boundary at 37° as a baseline, two tiers of equally spaced future states emerged. One was a tier of prairie states: Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota, each having three degrees of height. Just to their west was a tier of mountainous states: Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, each with four degrees of height.

  Did Douglas envision this? His Kansas-Nebraska Act stipulated Kansas’s northern border at precisely the height that, if replicated, would yield the tier of states that resulted. Yet he never expressed this geometric logic in the Senate debate. Likewise, if he foresaw the future Arizona and New Mexico by virtue of where he located the Texas-New Mexico boundary, he never expressed that either. Perhaps for good reason. Both debates were filled with suspicion regarding future slave and free states. For Douglas to add projected states to the debate would have added fuel to the fire he was seeking to tamp down. Though his intentions for future boundaries cannot be ascertained from what he didn’t say, a pattern emerges from the added facts that he also made no mention of his colleague’s plan to extinguish Indian treaties, and that his prized policy of “popular sovereignty” was never expressed as such in the 1850 legislation that initiated it.

  Kansas: southern boundary shift

  While Douglas was successful in winning popular sovereignty in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, popular sovereignty proved less than successful in Kansas. Proslavery settlers drafted a Kansas constitution at Lecompton; antislavery settlers drafted an opposing Kansas constitution at Topeka. Both constitutions were sent to Washington for approval. Congress approved neither, but Senator Douglas favored the antislavery Topeka constitution over its proslavery rival from Lecompton:

  Is there a man within the hearing of my voice who believes the Lecompton constitution does embody the will of a majority of the bona fide inhabitants of Kansas? … We are told that it … has been submitted to the people for ratification or rejection. How submitted? In a manner that allowed every man to vote for it, but precluded the possibility of any man voting against it. We are told that there is a majority of about five thousand five hundred votes recorded in its favor under these circumstances.… On the other hand, we have a vote of the people, in pursuance of law, on the 4th of January last, when this constitution was submitted by the Legislature to the people for acceptance or rejection, showing a majority of more than ten thousand against it.

  Though he could not know it at the time, Douglas had just ended his chances to become president. As the 1860 campaign neared, the cost of Douglas’s choice surfaced. Southerners denounced Douglas along the lines stated by former congressman and diplomat William Stiles of Georgia:

  In 1854, Mr. Douglas, to curry favor with the South … brought forward his measure for the repeal of the Missouri [Compromise] restriction. The South was enchanted and shouted paeans to the “Little Giant.” … But would they have shouted those paeans … had they supposed it covered, as Mr. Douglas now claims, his odious squatters sovereignty doctrine? Never! Never!! Has not Stephen A. Douglas, then, cruelly deceived and wantonly betrayed the South? Did he not bring forward a measure which he induced us to believe was for our benefit, and does he not show us now and boast that it was for our ruin!2

  The Democrats split into two parties during their 1860 convention, both claiming to be the true Democratic Party. The Northern party nominated Douglas; the Southern party chose John C. Breckenridge. By dividing its supporters, the Democrats enabled Republican Abraham Lincoln to win the White House with less than 40 percent of the popular vote.

  One month after Lincoln’s election, Southern states began seceding from the Union. Douglas made a final plea to avert the hemorrhage. “Are we prepared for war?” he beseeched his colleagues. “I do not mean that kind of preparation which consists of armies and navies, and supplies, and munitions of war; but are we prepared in our hearts for war with our own brethren and kindred? I confess, I am not.”

  The long fuse leading to the Civil War detonated at Fort Sumter in April 1861. Whichever side won, Douglas had lost. On the Sunday following the firing on Fort Sumter, he (after some coaxing from his wife) went to the White House to speak with President Lincoln. The two longtime rivals exchanged pleasantries, then Lincoln read to Douglas his draft of a speech summoning the nation to war. Douglas offered only one criticism, recorded by a mutual friend who was present. “Instead of the call for 75,000 men,” Douglas advised, “I would make it 200,000. You do not know the dishonest purposes of those men as well as I do.”3 He then asked to see a map. Standing next to the president, the man who knew the American map as well as anyone—and who had sought to avoid war as much as anyone—pointed out the geographic weak points in the South.

  Six weeks later, he was dead, having fallen ill with typhoid fever. A large monument marks his grave in Chicago. But perhaps the most meaningful monument to Stephen A. Douglas is on the map itself: the equally spaced lines in the middle of the nation. They, and the gap that became Oklahoma’s Panhandle, are enduring monuments to a visionary who dreamed of equality but accepted imperfection.

  · · · THE ALMOST STATES OF AMERICA · · ·

  JOHN A. Q
UITMAN

  Annexing Cuba: Liberty, Security, Slavery

  I believe that the institution of slavery is not only right and proper, but the natural and normal condition of the superior and inferior races, when in contact.… That the preservation of the institution of slavery in Cuba … is essential to the safety of our own system.… That it is consistent with the designs of Providence, and our right and duty, not to restrain but to encourage the white Caucasian race to carry humanity, civilization and progress to the rich and fertile countries south of us, which, now in the occupation of inferior and mixed races, be undeveloped and useless.

  —JOHN A. QUITMAN1

  During the early 1850s Mississippi Governor John A. Quitman raised a private army for the purpose of invading Cuba and offering it to the United States. His primary reason was to preserve slavery on the island (ruled, at the time, by Spain) and thereby add an additional slave state to the Union.2

  Quitman’s involvement commenced in 1850, when he was introduced to Narciso López, leader of a group of Cuban revolutionaries. López and his followers were wealthy landowners and merchants who turned against Spain when a key element of their wealth—slavery—was threatened by changes in colonial policy.

  John A. Quitman (1798-1858) (photo credit 30.1)

  Spain, greatly weakened by the loss of nearly its entire empire, was seeking to ally itself with the nation whose empire was most rapidly growing: England. England, for its part, was seeking to undermine the nation whose borders were most rapidly growing: the United States. By allying with Spain, England could establish a naval presence in Cuba, thereby dominating the intersection of commerce between the Gulf of Mexico and the sea.