I
James K. Polk presided over the acquisition of more territory than any other president in American history. During his one-term administration the country expanded by two-thirds with the annexation of Texas, the settlement of the Oregon boundary, and the seizure of all Mexican provinces north of 31°. Having been elected in 1844 on a platform demanding Oregon to a northern boundary of 54° 40′ and Texas to a southern boundary of the Rio Grande River, Polk compromised with Britain on 49° but went to war against Mexico for Texas—with California and New Mexico thrown in for good measure. And thereby hung a tale of sectional conflict that erupted into civil war a decade and a half later.1
"Mr. Polk's War" evoked opposition from Whigs in Congress, who voted against the resolution affirming a state of war with Mexico in May 1846. After the Democratic majority passed this resolution, however, most Whigs supported appropriations for the armies confronting enemy forces. Having witnessed the disappearance of the Federalist party after it opposed the War of 1812, a Whig congressman said sardonically that he now favored "war, pestilence, and famine." Nevertheless, Whigs continued to accuse Polk of having provoked the conflict by sending
1. Polk's motives and actions are laid out in detail by Charles G. Sellers, James K. Polk, Continentalist 1843–1846 (Princeton, 1966).
American troops into territory claimed by Mexico. They sniped at the administration's conduct of the war and opposed territorial acquisition as a result of it. Encouraged by the elections of 1846 and 1847, in which they picked up 38 seats and gained control of the House, Whigs intensified their attacks on Polk. One of these new Whig congressmen, a lanky, craggy Illinoisian with gray eyes, disheveled black hair, and illfitting clothes introduced resolutions calling for information about the exact spot where Mexicans had shed American blood to start the war. Though the House tabled Abraham Lincoln's resolutions, it did pass one sponsored by another Whig declaring that the war had been "unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President."2
Like the war, Manifest Destiny was mainly a Democratic doctrine. Since the day when Thomas Jefferson overcame Federalist opposition to the purchase of Louisiana, Democrats had pressed for the expansion of American institutions across the whole of North America whether the residents—Indians, Spaniards, Mexicans, Canadians—wanted them or not. When God crowned American arms with success in the Revolution, vouchsafed a Democratic congressman in 1845, He had not "designed that the original States should be the only abode of liberty on earth. On the contrary, He only designed them as the great center from which civilization, religion, and liberty should radiate and radiate until the whole continent shall bask in their blessing." "Yes, more, more, more!" echoed John L. O'Sullivan, inventor of the phrase Manifest Destiny. "More . . . till our national destiny is fulfilled and . . . the whole boundless continent is ours."3
Whigs were not averse to extending the blessings of American liberty, even to Mexicans and Indians. But they looked askance at doing so by force. Befitting the evangelical origins of much Whig ideology, they placed their faith in mission more than in annexation. " 'As a city set upon a hill,' " the United States should inculcate the ideas of "true republicanism" by example rather than conquest, insisted many Whigs.
2. CG, 30 Cong., 1 Sess., 64, 95, and Appendix, 93–95. The best study of opposition to the war is John H. Schroeder, Mr. Polk's War: American Opposition and Dissent, 1846–1848 (Madison, 1973). But see also Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The War with Mexico in the American Imagination (New York, 1985), which shows how popular the war was with the public outside of New England and a few other areas along the Atlantic seaboard.
3. John Wentworth of Illinois and O'Sullivan quoted in Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation (New York, 1963), 28, 52.
Although it would "be a gain to mankind if we could spread over Mexico the Idea of America—that all men are born free and equal in rights," said antislavery clergyman Theodore Parker in 1846, "we must first make real those ideas at home." While the Democratic notion of progress envisioned the spread of existing institutions over space, the Whig idea envisaged the improvement of those institutions over time. "Opposed to the instinct of boundless acquisition stands that of Internal Improvement," said Horace Greeley. "A nation cannot simultaneously devote its energies to the absorption of others' territories and the improvement of its own."4
Acquisition of Mexican territory was Polk's principal war aim. The desire of American settlers in Oregon and California for annexation to the United States had precipitated the dual crises with Britain and Mexico in 1846. Praising these emigrants as "already engaged in establishing the blessings of self-government in the valleys of which the rivers flow to the Pacific," Polk had pledged to extend American law to "the distant regions which they have selected for their homes."5 A treaty with Britain secured Oregon north to the 49th parallel. But efforts to persuade Mexico to sell California and New Mexico had failed. So Polk decided to use force. Soon after becoming president he ordered the Pacific fleet to stand ready to seize California's ports in the event of war with Mexico. In the fall of 1845 Polk instructed the U.S. consul at Monterey to encourage annexation sentiment among American settlers and disaffected Mexicans.
Americans in California needed little encouragement, especially when they had among them a glory-hunting captain of the army topographical corps, John C. Frémont. Famous for his explorations of the West, Frémont was also the son-in-law of Missouri's powerful Senator Thomas Hart Benton. When rumors of war with Mexico reached the Sacramento valley, Frémont took it upon himself to assist settlers in an uprising that proclaimed an independent California. This "bear flag republic" (its flag bore the image of a grizzly bear) enjoyed a brief existence before its citizens celebrated official news of the war that ensured their annexation by the United States.
4. Schroeder, Mr. Polk's War, 75–76; Parker, "A Sermon of War," in Robert E. Collins, ed., Theodore Parker: American Transcendentalist (Metuchen, N.J., 1973), 252; Greeley quoted in Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago, 1979), 21.
5. Sellers, Polk, 210.
While these proceedings unfolded, Missouri volunteers and a regiment of regulars were marching over the Santa Fe trail to seize the capital of New Mexico. Commanded by Stephen Watts Kearny, these tough dragoons occupied Santa Fe on August 18, 1846, without firing a shot. After raising the American flag, Kearny left behind a garrison and pushed across the desert to California with a hundred men who joined a few hundred sailors, marines, and volunteers to subdue Mexican resistance there by January 1847. During the next several months a string of stunning American victories south of the Rio Grande culminating in the capture of Mexico City ensured the permanence of these American conquests. The only remaining question was how much territory to take.
Polk's appetite was originally sated by New Mexico and California. In April 1847 he sent Nicholas Trist to Mexico as a commissioner to negotiate a treaty for these provinces. But the ease of American conquest made Polk suddenly hungry for more territory. By the fall of 1847 a Democratic movement to annex "all Mexico"—or at least several additional provinces—was in full cry. The whipsaw cuts and rasps of all-Mexico Democrats and no-territory Whigs left Trist on a precarious limb three thousand miles away in Mexico City where the proud Santa Anna proved reluctant to yield up half his country. Polk sided with the hard-liners in Washington and recalled Trist in October 1847. But a breakthrough in negotiations appeared possible just as Trist received the recall dispatch, so he disobeyed orders and signed a treaty that fulfilled Polk's original instructions. In return for a payment by the United States of $15 million plus the assumption of Mexican debts to American citizens, Mexico recognized the Rio Grande boundary of Texas and ceded New Mexico and upper California to the United States.6 When this Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo reached Washington in February 1848, Polk initially spurned it. On second thought, however, he submitted it to the Senate, where the Whigs would have enough votes to defeat any treaty that sliced off more Mexican territory but might approve one that avoided the appearance of conquest by paying Mexico for California and New Mexico. The strategy worked; the Senate ratified the treaty by a vote of 38–14, with five of the opposition votes coming from Democrats
6. This cession included the present states of California, Nevada, and Utah, most of New Mexico and Arizona, and parts of Oklahoma, Colorado, and Wyoming as well as one-third of Texas.
who wanted more territory and seven from Whigs who wanted none.7
This triumph of Manifest Destiny may have reminded some Americans of Ralph Waldo Emerson's prophecy that "the United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us."8 He was right. The poison was slavery. Jefferson's Empire for Liberty had become mostly an empire for slavery. Territorial acquisitions since the Revolution had added the slave states of Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas to the republic, while only Iowa, just admitted in 1846, had increased the ranks of free states. Many northerners feared a similar future for this new southwestern empire. They condemned the war as part of a "slave power conspiracy" to expand the peculiar institution. Was not President Polk a slaveholder? Had he not been elected on a platform of enlarging slave territory by annexing Texas? Were not pro-slavery southerners among the most aggressive proponents of Manifest Destiny? Did not most of the territory (including Texas) wrested from Mexico lie south of the old Missouri Compromise line of 36° 30′—a traditional demarcation between freedom and slavery? The Massachusetts legislature indicted this "unconstitutional" war with its "triple object of extending slavery, of strengthening the slave power, and of obtaining control of the free states." James Russell Lowell's rustic Yankee philosopher Hosea Biglow fretted that
They just want this Californy
So's to lug new slave-states in
To abuse ye, an' to scorn ye,
An' to plunder ye like sin.9
Polk could not understand what the fuss was about. "In connection with the Mexican War," he wrote in his diary, slavery was "an abstract question. There is no probability that any territory will ever be acquired from Mexico in which slavery would ever exist." Agitation was thus "not only mischievous but wicked." But a good many congressmen—
7. Senate Executive Docs., 30 Cong., 1 Sess., no. 52, p. 36. The other two opposition votes came from Democrats who disliked the treaty for other reasons.
8. Edward W. Emerson and Waldo E. Forbes, eds., Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols. (Boston, 1909–14), VII, 206.
9. H. V. Ames, ed., State Documents on Federal Relations (Philadelphia, 1906), 241–42; The Works of James Russell Lowell, Standard Library ed., 11 vols. (Boston, 1890), VIII, 46–47.
even some in Polk's own party—did not share the president's conviction. They believed agitation of the question necessary. This issue overshadowed all others from 1846 to 1850. Hundreds of congressmen felt moved to speak on the matter. Some of them agreed with Polk that it was an "abstract" issue because "natural conditions" would exclude slavery from these lands. "The right to carry slaves to New Mexico or California is no very great matter," said John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, because "no sensible man would carry his slaves there if he could."10 But numerous southerners disagreed. They noted that cotton was already grown in river valleys of New Mexico. Slaves had labored in mines for centuries and would prove ideal mineworkers in these territories. "California is peculiarly adapted for slave labor," resolved a southern convention. "The right to have [slave] property protected in the territory is not a mere abstraction." A Georgia newspaper heightened abolitionist suspicions of a slave-power conspiracy by professing a broader purpose in opening these territories to slavery: it would "secure to the South the balance of power in the Confederacy, and, for all coming time . . . give to her the control in the operations of the Government."11
Of the congressmen who spoke on this matter, more than half expressed confidence (if southern) or fear (if northern) that slavery would go into the new territories if allowed to do so.12 Many of them conceded that the institution was unlikely to put down deep roots in a region presumed to be covered with deserts and mountains. But to make sure, northern congressmen voted for a resolution to exclude slavery therefrom. This was the fateful Wilmot Proviso. As Congress neared adjournment on the sultry Saturday night of August 8, 1846, Pennsylvania's first-term Representative David Wilmot rose during the debate on an appropriations bill for the Mexican War and moved an amendment: "that, as an express and fundamental condition of the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico . . . neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory."13
10. Milo Milton Quaife, ed., The Diary of James K. Polk during His Presidency, 1845 to 1849, 4 vols. (Chicago, 1910), II, 308; Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York, 1978), 77.
11. Robert S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New York, 1970), 18–20; Milledgeville Federal Union, Nov. 10, 1846, quoted in Schroeder, Mr. Polk's War, 55.
12. Desmond D. Hart, "The Natural Limits of Slavery Expansion: The Mexican Territories as a Test Case," Mid-America, 52 (1970), 119–31.
13. CG, 29 Cong., 1 Sess., 1217.
More lay behind this maneuver than met the eye. Antislavery conviction motivated Wilmot and his allies, but so did a desire to settle old political scores. Wilmot acted for a group of northern Democrats who were vexed with Polk and fed up with southern domination of the party. Their grievances went back to 1844 when southerners had denied Martin Van Buren the presidential nomination because he refused to endorse the annexation of Texas. The Polk administration had given the patronage in New York to anti-Van Buren "Hunkers." Rate reductions in the Walker Tariff of 1846 embittered Pennsylvania Democrats who thought they had secured a pledge for higher duties on certain items. Polk's veto of a rivers and harbors bill angered Democrats from Great Lakes and western river districts. The administration's compromise on the 49th parallel for the Oregon boundary incensed the many Democrats who had chanted the slogan "Fifty-four forty or fight!" Having voted for the annexation of Texas with its disputed Rio Grande border at risk of war with Mexico, they felt betrayed by Polk's refusal to risk war with Britain for all of Oregon. "Our rights to Oregon have been shamefully compromised," declared an Ohio Democrat. "The administration is Southern, Southern, Southern! . . . Since the South have fixed boundaries for free territory, let the North fix boundaries for slave territories." "The time has come," agreed Connecticut Congressman Gideon Welles, "when the Northern democracy should make a stand. Every thing has taken a Southern shape and been controlled by Southern caprice for years." We must, Welles concluded "satisfy the northern people . . . that we are not to extend the institution of slavery as a result of this war."14
When Wilmot introduced his proviso, therefore, he released the pent-up ire of northern Democrats, many of whom cared less about slavery in new territories than about their power within the party. Northern Whigs, who had a more consistent antislavery record, were delighted to support the proviso. This bipartisan northern coalition in the House passed it over the united opposition of southern Democrats and Whigs. This was a dire omen. The normal pattern of division in Congress had
14. Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 22, Aug. 5, 1846, quoted in Stephen E. Maizlish, The Triumph of Sectionalism: The Transformation of Ohio Politics 1844–1856 (Kent, 1983), 56, 60–61; Welles to Martin Van Buren, July 28, 1846, June 30, 1848, quoted in Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States 1837–1860 (New York, 1976), 143; speech by Welles in the House, Jan. 7, 1847, in CG, 29 Cong., 2 Sess., 136. See also Eric Foner, "The Wilmot Proviso Revisited," JAH, 56 (1969), 262–79.
occurred along party lines on issues such as the tariff, the Bank, federal aid to internal improvements, and the like. The Wilmot Proviso wrenched this division by parties into a conflict of sections. The political landscape would never again be the same. "As if by magic," commented theBoston Whig, "it brought to a head the great question that is about to divide the American people."15
The full impact of the proviso did not become apparent immediately, for Congress adjourned in 1846 before the Senate could vote on it. But northern Democrats reintroduced it at the next session, prompting an anguished lament from the president, who began to comprehend the whirlwind he was reaping as the result of his war. "The slavery question is assuming a fearful . . . aspect," wrote Polk in his diary. It "cannot fail to destroy the Democratic party, if it does not ultimately threaten the Union itself."16 The House again passed Wilmot's amendment by a sectional vote. But the South's greater power in the Senate (15 slave states and 14 free states composed the Union in 1847) enabled it to block the proviso there. Arm-twisting by the administration eventually compelled enough northern Democrats in the House to change their votes to pass the appropriations bill without the proviso. But the crisis had not been resolved—only postponed.
Free-soil sentiment in 1847 can be visualized in three concentric circles. At the center was a core of abolitionists who considered slavery a sinful violation of human rights that should be immediately expiated. Surrounding and drawing ideological nourishment from them was a larger circle of antislavery people who looked upon bondage as an evil—by which they meant that it was socially repressive, economically backward, and politically harmful to the interests of free states.17 This circle comprised mainly Whigs (and some Democrats) from the Yankee belt of states and regions north of the 41st parallel who regarded this issue
15. Aug. 15, 1846, quoted in Potter, Impending Crisis, 23.
16. Quaife, ed., Diary of Polk, II, 305.
17. Three-fifths of the slaves were counted as part of the population on which representation in the House was based. This gave southern voters relatively greater influence in national politics than northern voters. Because the average population of the slave states was less than that of free states, the equal representation of each state by two senators gave the South disproportionate power in the Senate as well. And since each state's electoral vote equaled its combined number of senators and representatives, the South also enjoyed disparate power in presidential elections. With 30 percent of the voting population in 1848, the slave states cast 42 percent of the electoral votes.
as more important than any other in American politics. The outer circle contained all those who had voted for the Wilmot Proviso but did not necessarily consider it the most crucial matter facing the country and were open to compromise. This outer circle included such Whigs as Abraham Lincoln, who believed slavery "an unqualified evil to the negro, the white man, and the State" which "deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites," but who also believed that "the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils" by uniting the South in defense of the institution.18 The outer circle also included Democrats, like Martin Van Buren, who cared little about the consequences of slavery for the slaves and had been allied with the "slave power" until it had blocked Van Buren's nomination in 1844.
All free soilers—except perhaps some of the Van Burenites—concurred with the following set of propositions: free labor was more efficient than slave labor because it was motivated by the inducement of wages and the ambition for upward mobility rather than by the coercion of the lash; slavery undermined the dignity of manual work by associating it with servility and thereby degraded white labor wherever bondage existed; slavery inhibited education and social improvements and kept poor whites as well as slaves in ignorance; the institution therefore mired all southerners except the slaveowning gentry in poverty and repressed the development of a diversified economy; slavery must be kept out of all new territories so that free labor could flourish there.
For some members of the two outer circles these propositions did not spring from a "squeamish sensitiveness . . . nor morbid sympathy for the slave," as David Wilmot put it. "The negro race already occupy enough of this fair continent. . . . I would preserve for free white labor a fair country . . . where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor." If slavery goes into the new territories, wrote free-soil editor and poet William Cullen Bryant, "the free labor of all the states will not." But if slavery is kept out, "the free labor of the states [will go] there . . . and in a few years the country will teem with an active and energetic population."19
18. CWL, I, 74–75; II, 255; III, 92.
19. CG, 29 Cong., 2 Sess., Appendix, 314–17; New York Evening Post, Nov. 10, 1847.
Southerners bristled at these attacks on their social system. At one time a good many of them had shared the conviction that slavery was an evil—albeit a '"necessary" one for the time being because of the explosive racial consequences of emancipation. But the sense of evil had faded by 1830 as the growing world demand for cotton fastened the tentacles of a booming plantation economy on the South. Abolitionist attacks on slavery placed southerners on the defensive and goaded them into angry counterattacks. By 1840 slavery was no longer a necessary evil; it was "a great moral, social, and political blessing—a blessing to the slave, and a blessing to the master." It had civilized African savages and provided them with cradle-to-grave security that contrasted favorably with the miserable poverty of "free" labor in Britain and the North. By releasing whites from menial tasks it elevated white labor and protected it from degrading competition with free Negroes. Slavery eliminated the specter of class conflict that would eventually destroy free-labor societies, for it "promotes equality among the free by dispensing with grades and castes among them, and thereby preserves republican institutions."20 It also established the foundation for an upper class of gentlemen to cultivate the arts, literature, hospitality, and public service. It created a far superior society to that of the "vulgar, contemptible, counter-jumping" Yankees. Indeed, said Senator Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia, "there is not a respectable system of civilization known to history whose foundations were not laid in the institution of domestic slavery." "Instead of an evil," said John C. Calhoun in summing up the southern position, slavery was "a positive good . . . the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world."21
Proponents of slavery naturally wished to offer the blessings of this institution to the new territories. Even those who did not expect bondage to flourish there resented the northern effort to exclude it as an insult to southern honor. The Wilmot Proviso pronounced "a degrading inequality" on the South, declared a Virginian. It "says in effect to the Southern man, Avaunt! you are not my equal, and hence are to be
20. Senator Albert Gallatin Brown of Mississippi quoted in David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1960), 348; resolution of a Southern Rights convention in Montgomery, March 1852, quoted in J. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge, 1978), 206–7.
21. Hunter quoted in Donald, Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 349; Calhoun in CG, 25 Cong., 2 Sess., Appendix, 61–62.
excluded as carrying a moral taint." Having furnished most of the soldiers who conquered Mexican territory, the South was particularly outraged by the proposal to shut them out of its benefits. "When the warworn soldier returns to his home," asked an Alabamian, "is he to be told that he cannot carry his property to the country won by his blood?"22 "No true Southron," said scores of them, would submit to such "social and sectional degradation. . . . Death is preferable to acknowledged inferiority."23
In addition to their sacred honor, slaveholders had "the lives and fortunes of ourselves and families" at stake. Enactment of the Wilmot Proviso would yield ten new free states, warned James Hammond of South Carolina. The North would then "ride over us rough shod" in Congress, "proclaim freedom or something equivalent to it to our slaves and reduce us to the condition of Hayti. . . . Our only safety is in equality of POWER. If we do not act now, we deliberately consign our children, not our posterity, but our children to the flames."24
Southerners challenged the constitutionality of the Wilmot Proviso. Admittedly, precedent seemed to sanction congressional exclusion of slavery from territories. The first Congress under the Constitution had reaffirmed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banning the institution from the Northwest Territory. Subsequent Congresses re-enacted the ordinance for each territory carved out of the region. The Compromise of 1820 prohibited slavery north of 36° 30′ in the Louisiana Purchase. Southern congressmen had voted for these laws. But in February 1847 Senator John C. Calhoun introduced resolutions denying the right of Congress to exclude slave property from the territories. "Tall, careworn, with fevered brow, haggard cheek and eye, intensely gazing," as Henry Clay described him, Calhoun insisted that territories were the "common property" of sovereign states. Acting as the "joint agents" of these states, Congress could no more prevent a slaveowner from taking his human property to the territories than it could prevent him from taking his horses or hogs there. If the North insisted on ramming through the
22. Both quotations from Chaplain W. Morrison, Democratic Politics and Sectionalism: The Wilmot Proviso Controversy (Chapel Hill, 1967), 65.
23. Ibid.; Don E. Fehrenbacher, The South and Three Sectional Crises (Baton Rouge, 1980), 26; William J. Cooper, Jr., The South and the Politics of Slavery 1828–1856 (Baton Rouge, 1978), 239.
24. William L. Barney, The Road to Secession: A New Perspective on the Old South (New York, 1972), 105–6.
Wilmot Proviso, warned Calhoun in sepulchral tones, the result would be "political revolution, anarchy, civil war."25
The Senate did not pass the Calhoun resolutions. As the presidential election of 1848 neared, both major parties sought to heal the sectional rifts within their ranks. One possible solution, hallowed by tradition, was to extend the Missouri Compromise line through the middle of the new territories to the Pacific. Polk and his cabinet endorsed this policy. Ailing and prematurely aged, the president did not seek renomination. Secretary of State James Buchanan made 36° 30′ the centerpiece of his drive for the nomination. Several times in 1847–48 the Senate passed a version of this proposal, with the backing of most southern senators, who yielded the principle of slavery in all the territories for the sake of securing its legality in some. But the northern majority in the House voted it down.
Another idea emerged from the maelstrom of presidential politics. This one came to be known as popular sovereignty It was identified in 1848 mainly with Michigan's Senator Lewis Cass, Buchanan's main rival for the Democratic presidential nomination. Maintaining that settlers in territories were as capable of self-government as citizens of states, Cass proposed that they should decide for themselves whether to have slavery. This idea had the political charm of ambiguity, for Cass did not specify when voters might choose for or against slavery—during the territorial stage or only when adopting a state constitution. Most contemporaries presumed the former—including Calhoun, who therefore opposed popular sovereignty because it could violate the property rights of southern settlers. But enough southerners saw merit in the approach to enable Cass to win the nomination—though significantly the platform did not endorse popular sovereignty. It did reject the Wilmot Proviso and the Calhoun resolutions, however. The Democratic party continued the tradition of trying to preserve intersectional unity by avoiding a firm position on slavery.
So did the Whigs. Indeed they adopted no platform at all, and nominated the hero of a war that most of them had opposed. Nothing illustrated better the strange-bedfellow nature of American politics than Zachary Taylor's candidacy. A thick-set man with stubby legs and heavy brows contracted into a perpetual frown, careless in dress, a career army officer (but not a West Pointer) with no discernible political opinions,
25. CG, 29 Cong., 2 Sess., 453–55. Clay's description of Calhoun is quoted in Nevins, Ordeal, I, 24.
Taylor seemed unlikely presidential timber. The handsome, imposing General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, a dedicated professional with a fondness for dress uniforms, and an articulate Whig, looked like a better choice if the anti-war party felt compelled to mend its image by nominating a military candidate. But Scott had the defects of his virtues. His critics considered him pompous. He had a penchant for writing foot-in-mouth public letters which made him vulnerable to ridicule. His nickname—Old Fuss and Feathers—conveys the nature of his political liabilities. And Taylor had the virtues of his defects, as the image conveyed by his sobriquet of Rough and Ready illustrates. Many voters in this new age of (white) manhood suffrage seemed to prefer their candidates rough-hewn. As a war hero Taylor claimed first priority on public affection. Although Scott had planned and led the campaign of 1847 that captured Mexico City, Taylor's victories of 1846 along the Rio Grande and his extraordinary triumph against odds of three to one at Buena Vista in February 1847 had made his reputation before Scott got started.
Buena Vista launched a Taylor bandwagon that proved unstoppable. Rough and Ready's main rival for the nomination (besides Scott) was Henry Clay. Urbane, witty, popular, the seventy-year-old Clay was Mr. Whig—a founder of the party and architect of its "American System" to promote economic growth by a protective tariff, a national bank, and federal aid to internal improvements. As a three-time loser in presidential contests, however, Clay carried the liabilities as well as assets of a long political career. Like a majority of his party he had opposed the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War.26 But the Whigs could not hope to win the election without carrying some states where annexation and the war had been popular. Taylor seemed to be the answer.
The general was also a godsend to southern Whigs, who faced an erosion of strength at home because of the persistent support of northern Whigs for the Wilmot Proviso. (Most northern Democrats had abandoned Wilmot's Proviso for Cass's formula of popular sovereignty.) Southern Whig leaders, especially Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky and Congressman Alexander Stephens of Georgia, maneuvered the Taylor boom into a southern movement. Taylor's ownership of Louisiana and Mississippi plantations with more than a hundred slaves seemed to assure his safety on the issue of most importance to southerners.
26. In a sad irony, one of Clay's sons was killed at Buena Vista. Another prominent Whig and opponent of the Mexican adventure, Daniel Webster, also lost a son in the war.
"The truth is," declared Robert Toombs of Georgia, Clay "has sold himself body and soul to the Northern Anti-Slavery Whigs." Taylor, on the other hand, was a "Southern man, a slaveholder, a cotton planter" identified "from birth, association, and conviction . . . with the South."27Southern delegates to the Whig convention provided the votes to deny Clay the nomination on the first ballot and then to award it to Taylor on the fourth.
Taylor's candidacy brought to a head a long-festering schism in northern Whiggery. "Of course, we cannot & will not under any circumstances support General Taylor," wrote Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. "We cannot support any body who is not known to be against the extension of Slavery." Sumner spoke for a faction of the party known as "Conscience Whigs." They challenged a more conservative group labeled "Cotton Whigs" because of the prominence of textile magnates in their ranks. The Cotton faction had opposed the Mexican War and favored the Wilmot Proviso. But their position on these issues seemed lukewarm, and in 1848 they wished to join hands with southern Whigs in behalf of Taylor and victory. Unable to sanction this alliance of "lords of the loom" with "lords of the lash," Conscience Whigs bolted the party. Their purpose, in Sumner's words, was no less than "a new crystallization of parties, in which there shall be one grand Northern party of Freedom."28
The time appeared ripe for such a movement. In New York the Van Buren faction of Democrats was ready for revolt. Dubbed "Barnburners" (after the legendary Dutch farmer who burned his barn to rid it of rats), this faction sent a separate delegation to the national Democratic convention. When the convention voted to seat both New York delegations, the Barnburners stomped out and held their own conclave to nominate Van Buren on a Wilmot Proviso platform. Antislavery Democrats and Whigs from other northern states cheered. The Barnburner
27. Toombs to James Thomas, April 16, 1848, in Ulrich B. Phillips, ed., The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb, Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1911, vol. 2 (Washington, 1913), 103–4; New Orleans Bee and Charleston Mercury quoted in Joseph G. Rayback, Free Soil: The Election of 1848 (Lexington, Ky., 1970), 42, 43.
28. Sumner to Salmon P. Chase, Feb. 7, 1848, Dec. 12, 1846, Chase Papers, Library of Congress. For the development of this split within the Whig party of Massachusetts, see Kinley J. Brauer, Cotton versus Conscience: Massachusetts Whig Politics and Southwestern Expansion, 1843–1848 (Lexington, Ky., 1967).
convention provided the spark for an antislavery political blaze; the Liberty party offered itself as kindling.
Founded in 1839 by simon-pure abolitionists, the Liberty party had thus far managed to win only 3 percent of the northern votes for its presidential candidate, in 1844. Since that election, party leaders had been debating future strategy. A radical faction wanted to proclaim a new doctrine that the Constitution empowered the government to abolish slavery in the states. But a more pragmatic majority under the leadership of Salmon P. Chase wanted to move in the other direction—toward a coalition with antislavery Whigs and Democrats. An astute lawyer who had defended fugitive slaves, Chase combined religious conviction and humorlessness with unquenchable ambition and shrewd political insight. Although Liberty men must continue to proclaim the goal of ending slavery everywhere, said Chase, they could best take the first step toward that goal by joining with those who believed in keeping it out of the territories—whatever else they believed. If such a coalition gained enough leverage in Ohio to elect Chase to the U. S. Senate, so much the better. Chase planted feelers with Conscience Whigs and Barnburner Democrats in the spring of 1848. These ripened into a Free Soil convention in August, after the major-party nominations of Cass and Taylor had propelled antislavery men out of their old allegiances.
The Free Soil convention at Buffalo resembled nothing so much as a camp meeting. Fifteen thousand fervent "delegates" thronged into the sweltering city. Gathered under a huge canopy erected in the park, they cheered endless oratory damning the slave power while an executive committee of 465 met in the church to do the real work. This committee accomplished something of a miracle by fusing factions from three parties that held clashing opinions on banking, tariffs, and other economic issues. These questions, the staples of American politics for two decades, must give way to a more important one, said veteran Whig Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio: "Our political conflicts must be in future between slavery and freedom."29 The committee created its new fusion party by nominating a Barnburner for president and a Conscience Whig for vice president on a Liberty platform drafted mainly by Chase. The "mass convention" in the park roared its approval of the committee's work.
Acceptance of Martin Van Buren as presidential nominee was not
29. Maizlish, Triumph of Sectionalism, 89.
easy for Liberty men and Conscience Whigs. As a proslavery Jacksonian, the Little Magician had earned the apparent undying enmity of abolitionists and Whigs in the 1830s. But a new age dawned in 1848. Van Buren now endorsed exclusion of slavery from the territories and abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. His Barnburner backers proclaimed bondage "a great moral, social, and political evil—a relic of barbarism which must necessarily be swept away in the progress of Christian civilization." Speaking to fellow Whigs, Sumner said that "it is not for the Van Buren of 1838 that we are to vote, but the Van Buren of to-day."30 With Charles Francis Adams as vice-presidential nominee, the ticket strengthened its Conscience image. Charles Francis inherited the antislavery mantle from his father John Quincy, who had died earlier in the year. Joshua Leavitt, a founder of the Liberty party and a co-worker with John Quincy Adams against the congressional gag rule on antislavery petitions, brought tears to many eyes at the Buffalo convention with an emotional speech recounting the courage of pioneer abolitionists. Leavitt then offered his blessing to the new Free Soil coalition. "The Liberty Party is not dead," he declaimed, "but translated." Vowing to "fight on, and fight ever" for "Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men," the delegates returned home to battle for the Lord.31
Free Soilers made slavery the campaign's central issue. Both major parties had to abandon their strategy of ignoring the question. Instead, they tried to win support in each section by obfuscating it. Democrats circulated different campaign biographies of Cass in North and South. In the North they emphasized popular sovereignty as the best way to keep slavery out of the territories. In the South Democrats cited Cass's pledge to veto the Wilmot Proviso and pointed with pride to the party's success (over Whig opposition) in acquiring territory into which slavery might expand.
Having no platform to explain and a candidate with no political record to defend, Whigs had an easier time appearing to be all things to
30. Both quotations from Rayback, Free Soil, 211, 247.
31. This account of the Free Soil convention is drawn from Rayback, 201–30; Morrison, Democratic Politics and Sectionalism, 145–55; Frederick J. Blue, The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics 1848–1854 (Urbana, 1973); Brauer, Cotton vs. Conscience, 229–45; Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 142–58; and John Mayfield, Rehearsal for Republicanism: Free Soil and the Politics of Antislavery(Port Washington, N.Y., 1980), 111–19.
all men. In the North they pointed to Taylor's pledge not to veto whatever Congress decided to do about slavery in the territories. Those antislavery Whigs who supported Taylor in the belief that he would take their side—William H. Seward and Abraham Lincoln, for example—turned out to be right. Southerners should have paid more attention to a speech by Seward at Cleveland. Affable, artful, sagacious, an instinctive politician but also a principled opponent of slavery, Seward would soon emerge as one of Taylor's main advisers. "Freedom and slavery are two antagonistic elements of society," he told a Cleveland audience. "Slavery can be limited to its present bounds"; eventually "it can and must be abolished."32 But in the South, Taylor's repute as the hero of Buena Vista and his status as a large slaveholder dazzled many eyes. "We prefer Old Zack with his sugar and cotton plantations and four hundred negroes," proclaimed the Richmond Whig. "Will the people of [the South] vote for a Southern President or a Northern one?" asked a Georgia newspaper.33
Most of them voted for a southern one. Taylor carried eight of the fifteen slave states with a majority of 52 percent. He also carried seven of fifteen free states, though the Whig popular vote in the North dropped to 46 percent because of Free-Soil inroads. But while they won 14 percent of the northern vote and supplanted Democrats as the second party in Vermont, Massachusetts, and New York, the Free Soilers did not carry a single state. Nor did they affect the election's outcome: though Van Buren carried enough Democratic votes in New York to give the state to Taylor, Free Soilers neutralized this effect by attracting enough Whig voters in Ohio to put that state in Cass's column. Despite stresses produced by the slavery issue, the centripetal forces of party overcame the centrifugal forces of section.34
Nevertheless, those stresses had wrenched the system almost to the breaking point. Free Soilers hoping to realign American politics into a struggle between freedom and slavery professed satisfaction with the election. "The public mind has been stirred on the subject of slavery to depths never reached before," wrote Sumner. "The late election," agreed one of his confreres, "is only the Bunker Hill of the moral & political
32. Nevins, Ordeal, I, 212; James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 . . . 7 vols. (New York, 1893–1906), I, 162.
33. Quoted in Cooper, The South and the Politics of Slavery, 265, 262.
34. For detailed election data and an analysis, see Rayback, Free Soil, 279–302.
revolution which can terminate only in success to the side of freedom."35