CHAPTER THREE
I speak today out of a solicitous and anxious heart, for the restoration to the country of that quiet and that harmony, which makes the blessings of this Union so rich and so dear to us all.
DANIEL WEBSTER
The pace of American development in the decade 1840–50 was so accelerated that it inevitably generated debate over the future direction of this experiment in nation-forming. The United States witnessed immense expansion and striking victory in war. It saw the extension and rationalization of the second two-party system. But the greater the extension and development of the United States system across the North American continent, the more fervent became the debate over its fundamental character, and the more likely became a fracturing of that system. By 1840 there were two contrasting views of the nature of ‘liberty’. Although the American political system endured other tensions and focused on different concerns – anxieties over foreign immigration, for example, began to fester during these years – the prime issue underlying sectional disruption was slavery, because only this issue could frame a regional divergence that would result in a resort to force of arms. Before 1850 such tensions could be resolved, not by force (although this remained a possibility) but by an acceptance of slavery as a legitimate facet of American constitutional and judicial life in the Union ‘as it was’. Disquiet would increase when it became clear that southerners expected this to expand commensurate with the expansion of the Union after 1850 and extend its tentacles into northern political life. How this modus vivendi was reached is the subject of this chapter. As Daniel Webster declared, T profess to love liberty as much as any man living, but I profess to love American liberty, that liberty which is secured to the country by the government under which we live; and I have no great opinion of that other and higher liberty which disregards the restraints of law and the Constitution’.1 The result of attempting to secure this constitutional protection for slavery was one of the most celebrated feats in American history, but one of the least enduring.
The rise of anti-slavery politics
One of the most potent catalysts for conflict and instability within the American body politic, which two generations of American politicians struggled to resolve, was provided by the growing influence of anti-slavery politics in the North. The ‘threat’ posed by these movements provided southerners with an ‘enemy’ against which their own sense of reciprocal identity was fashioned. The main achievement of these diverse ‘abolitionist’ groups, all of whom were motivated by a commitment to the unqualified abolition of slavery (as opposed to the gradualist anti-slavery movement of the preceding era), was keeping the slavery issue at the forefront of those political matters set before the electorate of the United States – even though their nostrums were unreservedly rejected by the voters. This achievement was all the more impressive in the face of pressure to suppress discussion of slavery; and there can be no doubt that there were many other issues that bore upon the attention, and tolerance, of the voters.
The abolitionists and their allies were an outgrowth of liberal, reforming movements which grew up in other western societies during this period. American abolitionists received inspiration and support from like-minded men and women in Great Britain. The passage of the bill to abolish slavery in the British Empire through the House of Commons in 1833 had shown how effective lobbying, and winning the moral and intellectual case, could bring about a major legislative victory.2 The various abolitionist factions were concerned with ameliorating other social evils as well as slavery. They had strong views on improving education, on women’s rights, temperance, on the evils of urbanization, on the reform of factories, and the need for a religious revival. Although they themselves were not particularly sympathetic to the spread of industrial, urban civilization, especially in New England, they took full advantage of the spread among the well-educated, urban middle class of sensibility, anxiety and idealism. These developments were related to the Second Great Awakening of Protestant, evangelical zeal that stemmed from the late 1820s, the spread of Sunday schools, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), and the increasing influence of itinerant, evangelical preachers. Much of this revivalism was focused on doctors, lawyers and business people. The importation of Methodism from Britain added to this effervescent cocktail. Although revivalism and abolitionism were not synonymous, they were infused with similar impulses and characterized by the same apocalyptic and religious rhetoric. Certainly the notion that slavery abused and defiled Americans as God’s ‘chosen’ people was central to explaining the passion and missionary zeal of many abolitionists.3
Their leaders were men of unrestrained dogmatism and eloquence, William Lloyd Garrison, the formidable Theodore Weld and Angelina Grimké, Wendell Phillips and Benjamin and Lewis Tappan. They were dedicated to the notion that duty and the cherished belief that what was right should always triumph over expediency. Tactics were not their strong point. Garrison preached a doctrine ambiguously described as ‘immediatism’, that is to say, immediate abolition, which amounted to a declaration of an ultimate goal rather than a realization of what was immediately practicable. It is not surprising that many abolitionists felt a sense of release or fulfilment by launching their campaigns. Wendell Phillips once remarked that all abolitionists had ‘good cause to be grateful to the slave for the benefit we have received to ourselves, in working for him’. Their ranks included one former runaway slave, Frederick Douglass, a brilliant, self-taught man, tenacious and brave. He was a dazzling orator, accomplished mimic and fine writer. But he was sensitive to criticism and quick to take offence; his relations with his white colleagues were sometimes tense. Given such levels of (often naked) emotional commitment, it is not surprising to discover that abolitionists often spent more time warring among themselves than campaigning against slaveowners. They were imbued by a romantic quest to benefit American society at large. They thought that their movement, by mitigating racial prejudice, would benefit whites as much, if not more, than blacks. One may applaud their courage, though sometimes deplore their tactics and self-indulgence. They were inveterate campaigners and protesters whose forte was not executive leadership of institutions. In their own day they earned reputations for being insidious, fanatical, unbalanced extremists. It must be said that, on occasions, they did little to counteract this impression.4
But their initial forays in this campaign dedicated solely to the extirpation of slavery started modestly enough. The South was bombarded by anti-slavery pamphlets and Congress with petitions demanding the abolition of slavery. Some South Carolina post offices had their mail disinfected against such poisonous germs. A number of South Carolinians demanded that the North police itself against this fanaticism. A supporter of John C. Calhoun, Duff Green, called for all anti-slavery talk to be declared illegal. Another South Carolinian claimed that ‘if the Non-Slaveholding States … will come forward patriotically, generously, and fairly and unite with the South – then and only then will the South be saved’. In 1835–40 the view that slavery was a positive good had spread to states other than South Carolina. But in evaluating this view a conundrum is confronted. The various abolition societies peaked at about 200,000 members in 1840. A good number of these included disenfranchised women; in the presidential election of 1840 the Liberty Party, whose candidate for the presidency was James G. Birney, secured only 7,000 votes out of a total of 2.5 million. Contrary to the southern view, abolitionists encountered a comparable level of hostility in the North to that faced in the South: greeting abolitionist sympathizers with fusillades of rotten vegetables and abuse was a common (and very popular) sideshow at abolitionist meetings; although the lynching of Elijah P. Lovejoy in 1837 was a glaring, violent exception rather than a rule. If the North was so opposed to radical anti-slavery movements, and racial prejudice against Negroes seemed to increase in inverse proportion to a proximity to the peculiar institution, then why should the South feel so threatened? ‘If the North was never committed to abolitionism’, asks William Freehling, ‘why should the South have felt compelled to secede?’ This, Freehling affirms, is one of the enduring riddles of the secession crisis. Certainly, when looked at in this light the wild claims of fanaticism on both sides made by the ‘revisionist’ historians of the inter-war years, appear utterly misconceived.5
But this approach, viewing the secession crisis as some kind of enigma, is really turning into a mystery something that is essentially not mysterious. If southerners exaggerated the degree to which the South was a cohesive social and political unit, it is hardly surprising that they exaggerated the unity and outlook of a section of the country of which the great majority of southerners were wholly ignorant. Historians are apt to believe that those who take momentous decisions have a profound understanding of the forces that they seek to direct. But decision-makers are not men of the study and often display an astounding misapprehension of the realities of the situation which they really face. In short, great dilemmas or crises do not invariably inspire deep understanding. But to suggest this is not to assert that the politicians that led the United States were in some way a ‘blundering’ generation, or that they were somehow more prone to blundering than any other generation of political leaders in the west. If they had a weakness it was listening to those who talked wildly about the advantages conferred by war while lacking any experience of it themselves. James H. Hammond, for instance, felt in 1835 that ‘Fanatics’ could ‘be silenced in but one way Terror-death’. Incendiaries and other trouble-makers should be returned to the South to face trial or ‘we shall dissolve the Union, and seek by war the redress denied us’.6
Contrary to the impression given by this kind of alarmist talk, the early abolitionist essays in politics were fumbling and rather aimless. Their efforts were confined to the dispatch of anti-slavery publications, petitions to Congress and the publication in the newspapers of lists of those who were ‘pledged’ to support the unconditional and immediate abolition of slavery. These attitudes were marked by the conventional (though, in this case, passionate) rejection of party politics. Indeed many abolitionists were of the opinion that their efforts would ‘purify’ party politics. Garrison adamantly opposed any party involvement, and Lewis Tappan argued against the creation of a third party; many were content to wait upon the election of the Whig, William H. Harrison, in 1840. Garrison favoured spurning political activities of any kind, which rather overlooked the necessity for central organization and funding for any successful movement. Yet Hammond in 1836 reacted to these puny forays by introducing the ‘gag rule’ which sought to reduce congressional consideration of anti-slavery petitions; under the original rule such documents could be tabled, which allowed a measure of recognition; but in 1840 this outlet, too, was sealed off.7
Thus was laid down the fundamental approach of southern politicians towards Congress and slavery. It was marked by a staggering degree of hyperbole and exaggeration of the influence and representativeness of abolition spokesmen. John C. Calhoun had argued in his resolutions of 27 December 1837 that Congress was first the ‘common agent’ of all the sovereign states and thus should exercise the prime duty of ‘strengthening and upholding’ the domestic institutions of all the states represented in the Congress, which included slavery. This provided the thrust for the southern argument of the 1850s which enshrined a paradox: southern spokesmen argued that slavery was a local matter and not the business of Congress; yet simultaneously they demanded the full protection of congressional authority, including complete constitutional and legal sanction in the territories. Congressional ‘non- intervention’ demanded by southerners, in short, was a code word for ‘intervention’. Their overall approach failed to distinguish clearly between abolitionism and anti-slavery; the two were crucially different; after all, abolitionism was only the most militant form of anti-slavery; the anti-slavery groups advocated political action which favoured opposition to the further extension of slavery. This effort at extending control over congressional opinion and freedom of debate in favour of slavery, rebounded on its authors. At a time when American expansion once more became a heated issue, the activities of the ‘Slave Power’ began to agitate anti-slavery minds. It acted as a major force behind the creation of the Liberty Party and the discrediting of those who had argued (like Garrison) that the abolition of slavery was far too serious a business to be entrusted to party politicians. In the 1844 presidential election, the Liberty ticket polled 65,608 votes. Lewis Tappan, who had previously abhorred the idea of forming a new party, showed all the zeal of a late convert. Professor Fehrenbacher is surely correct in suggesting that the root of the intermittent sectional crisis, which erupted in the southern move to secede from the Union in 1860–61 that led to war, lay in their insecure reaction to the ferocity of northern anti-slavery denunciation. Often its ferocity was in inverse proportion to the degree of support it excited among northern voters. This was the source of anxiety, not fears about the restriction of slavery in the territories or the return of escaped slaves – which were but symptoms of the essential problem. The South seemed to want to munch its pastries and store them in the larder at the same time. It seemed to be risking all to lose all. To describe the gag rule, in William Freehling’s words, as the ‘Pearl Harbor of the slave controversy’ seems unduly melodramatic, and assumes a continuity of escalation in this crisis comparable to the escalation of violence leading up to the Second World War, which is inappropriate in this context. But the ‘gag rule’ is certainly a significant milestone in the road to the politicization of the anti-slavery movement.8
Such southern congressional manoeuvres contributed to a widespread fear that the South was dominating American politics; that ‘The northern states are treated as provinces to the South. We have given in too much to their extreme notions and abstractions’, in the words of Gideon Welles, an ally of former President Martin Van Buren, who was adopting an increasingly vociferous anti-slavery stance. Van Buren’s position reflected a bitter schism in 1847–48 within the New York Democratic Party between the Radical Democrats (popularly known as ‘Barnburners’), led by the former president, who sought to establish ‘permanent perpetual barriers against the extension of slavery’, and the conservatives (or ‘Hunkers’, led by Senator Daniel Dickinson, who opposed the restriction of slavery). The New York Democracy was the only state Democratic Party that erupted into civil war – the Democratic Party maintaining its national cohesion until 1860. There was very little concern expressed for slaves or free blacks in these bitter disputes, which focused rather on the nature of white supremacy. ‘The question is not, whether black men are to be made free, but whether we white men are to remain free’, one declared. Senator John A. Dix, later a member of the Buchanan Administration, exclaimed that Americans must realize their ‘sacred duty to consecrate these [Western] spaces to the multiplication of the white race’.9
Throughout the 1840s the second electoral system that had developed since President Andrew Jackson’s triumph over John Quincy Adams in the presidential election of 1828, began to break down. A conservative party, which eventually assumed the name Whig, competed with a more egalitarian party which summoned up the genius of the ‘common man’, the Democrats. The former advocated centralized government expenditure, a national bank and ‘internal improvements’, of the western territories and states, coordinated by these agencies. The latter tended to oppose all federally sponsored internal improvements as infringing the freedom of individual states and citizens. Paradoxically, although Democrats argued that the least form of government was the best, they preferred a ‘strong’, activist president, like the masterful and abrasive Jackson, or the grim, surly, diligent, suspicious and resentful James K. Polk, also from Tennessee. Polk was a ‘dark horse’ candidate, who surprisingly seized the Democratic Party nomination in 1844 and defeated the perennial Whig presidential hopeful, Henry Clay, in the election that year.
During these interminable and never-ending electoral contests, politics was influenced by two powerful forces. Because the Whigs themselves had been forced to adopt some popularist slogans to oust Jackson’s successor, Van Buren in 1840, all politicians of both parties had to pay obeisance to the ‘common man’, and attempt to demonstrate that political measures and electoral triumphs were ‘a response to grass-roots pressure for change’. This led a conservative party, like the Whigs, into a fundamental paradox that could be resolved only by fielding elderly, military candidates, who could run against discredited Democratic ‘politicians’. The art of government was so uncomplicated, the argument ran, that its simple, basic tasks could be discharged by many men who required no special training or knowledge.10 The second influence was revivalism, the emotional torrents of which stimulated propagandists on both sides to employ the devices of antithesis, polarization and anathematization that increased the political temperature. Richard Carwardine has also suggested that an increased stress on such techniques in the innumerable elections that occurred every year ‘encouraged them [Whig and Democratic propagandists] to present the election campaign as the agency of political renewal and community redemption’.11 This led to two features that were inherently unsettling for the American political system. The first is the widespread acceptance among politicians that the United States was born with a political system that embodied perfection; yet this should be subjected to constant change because of the American passion for ‘progress’. Hence the omnipresent unstable pluralism of American politics in the first half of the nineteenth century.12 Secondly, because it was born in a state of pristine perfection, the American Constitution, and the political system derived from it, was in constant need of redemption – of being saved from the unwelcome consequences of that very progress most Americans enthused about. This process was complicated by the failure to secure consensus on the nature of the ideals that underpinned this novel experiment in republican democracy. All Americans were convinced that this experiment represented an example for the edification of the rest of humankind, even a model for its imitation – but a model of what? Was it to be individual rights and free, mobile labour, or was it to be the liberty of property-holders to enslave their work-force as the basis for a prosperous civilization? These pressing issues, enwrapped by fears about the character of American destiny, were propounded ceaselessly in elections without placating the two amorphous groups – pro- and anti-slavery – that gradually took shape in the late 1840s. This occurred even while other important economic and cultural issues remained crucial in dividing parties. Popular slogans such as ‘Manifest Destiny’ concealed as much as they revealed about the forces underlying American expansionism. The result, which was hardly surprising given the legalistic and moralistic character of American democracy, was to seek refuge in constitutional formulae, which could not solve the underlying divergence; over time it would exacerbate it. Such forces underlay the political disputes that disrupted the second party system and saw the rise of a third force, the Free Soil Party, and the replacement of the Whig Party in the 1850s by the spiritual progeny of the Free Soil Party, the Republican Party.
Needless to say, any move that resulted in the expansion of the United States added much additional pressure to a political system already impacted under the weight of its own contradictions. Such an expansion, on a massive scale, occurred as a result of the Mexican War, 1846–48. This dashing, decisive and short war, fought far distant from American territory, became a model for Americans of the 1850s of how a war would (and should) be fought. On 14 September 1847, United States troops entered Mexico City signifying the utter rout of the Mexican forces and signalling that a punitive peace commensurate with that victory would be imposed on Mexico. By the most important of the twenty-three clauses of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 2 February 1848, Mexico ceded almost half her territory, including Upper California, New Mexico (not to be confused with the modern state of that name) and offered confirmation of the United States’ right to Texas (which had been annexed in the last days of the Tyler Administration in 1845). In return Mexico received from the United States $15 million, and a further sum of $3,250,000 to pay outstanding American citizens’ claims.13 Despite some outlandish expansionist demands for the annexation of all Mexico, the United States was more interested in Mexican territory than in the Mexican populace. This treaty was ratified by the Senate thirty-eight to fourteen on 10 March 1848, and American troops left Mexico City on 12 June. Largely bereft of inhabitants, a huge area was made available for settlement by whites and incorporation into the United States. These territories, minus Texas, comprised more than half a million square miles, and form what is now the modern states of California, Nevada, Utah, most of New Mexico and Arizona, as well as parts of Wyoming and Colorado. But which social form would be used to settle this vast acquisition?14
The Wilmot Proviso
It is no coincidence that a number of measures were laid down, as legalistic formulae, within a period of less than eighteen months after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Each bore upon the question of the extension of slavery into the western territories. Slavery had originally been prohibited north of the Ohio River by the North West Ordinance of 1787. This had effectively turned a blind eye to slavery in the South West, though Thomas Jefferson continued to give the impression that Congress in 1784–85 had come close to prohibiting it throughout the West. What really counted was the pattern, and bias, of local political power, for the Ordinance outlawed slavery in all areas that came under the sway of congressional authority. Hence the long-running dispute over the nature of congressional authority in the western territories, turning on the finer points of legal and congressional interpretation. Professor Fehrenbacher argues persuasively that the North West Ordinance offered a precedent for a congressional declaration akin to the Wilmot Proviso, for the 1787 document ‘did plainly amount to a strong assertion of Congressional control over the West’ before statehood and the sale of land. This abiding question, as to whether Congress enjoyed the power to prevent slavery spreading to the western territories, would underlie the whole dispute over the expansion of the so-called slave power.15
This issue had surfaced occasionally before 1840. For instance, during the debate over the admission of Missouri in 1819–20, the Tallmadge Amendment was added to the statehood bill. Its authors argued that it should be added automatically to all new statehood bills, thus abolishing slavery within their frontiers as they entered the Union (and all slave children born therein were to be emancipated once they had reached the age of 25). Nonetheless the Jackson-dominated coalition in the Democratic Party which prevailed until 1840 attempted successfully to suppress the slavery issue, mainly because its core lay in the South. Martin Van Buren’s conversion to the slavery restriction cause was as much a response to local as to national pressures. The Mexican War had effectively brought this agreement to disagree to an end.16
Senator Calhoun had, during the Mexican War, brought his resolutions of 1837 before Congress again on 19 February 1847. With his characteristic desire to enjoy the fruits of both sides of the argument, this move recapitulated the southern position that slavery was a local institution outside the jurisdiction of Congress, and yet simultaneously demanded the full protection of Congress in the territories.17 The Wilmot Proviso of August 1846 had no patience with such casuistry. It referred to the territory gained from Mexico, and declared that ‘neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory’: Congress had the power to prohibit slavery and should effectively use it. Even though some of its supporters were motivated by racial prejudice and a desire to keep the territories free of slaves, the Wilmot Proviso was a strong and unambiguous statement of anti-slavery sentiment (for one could still be prejudiced against blacks yet believe that slavery was wicked). Such feelings would be shortly described as ‘free soil’ sympathy. Its author, Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, led a coalition of northern Democrats aligned on a series of issues, some far removed from a dislike of slavery, that were distinctly anti-southern (especially opposition to southern domination of political patronage). Furthermore, unexpected events, such as the 1849 Gold Rush to California, served only to highlight the intractable problems surrounding the settlement of the West.18
The Wilmot Proviso (which was never passed) became gospel for all of those who believed that, if only strict limits could be placed on slavery, it would wither and die. As Wilmot claimed, ‘Slavery has written itself the seeds of its own dissolution. Keep it within limits, let it remain where it now is, and in time it will wear itself out’. The only alternative for slaveholders would be emancipation.19 Some observers felt that such a formula was too black and white and forced southern slaveholders into a corner. The Polk Administration supported a proposal advanced in July 1848 by John M. Clayton of Delaware that the Missouri Compromise line of 36°30’ be extended westwards. David Potter writes with considerable enthusiasm in favour of this compromise proposal, as one would expect from a historian who was convinced that the Civil War could have been avoided. It was, he claims, ‘the forgotten alternative of the sectional controversy’. It was unambiguous, ‘it spelt out clearly what each side would gain and lose’.20 Quite so, this clarity explains why it failed: for increasingly self-confident spokesmen in the North were quite unprepared to sanction any further extension of slavery westwards, in whatever form. And that resolve would strengthen and not weaken. Any suggestion that the Missouri Compromise could have provided an enduring solution to these passionate disagreements is fanciful.21
That all these vexed matters agitated politicians, if not the voters, is underlined by the emergence of the Free Soil Party to fight the 1848 presidential election with Martin Van Buren as its nominee. Van Buren was a handsome man, but his comely appearance and charming manner concealed a calculating mien. Indeed, Van Buren enjoyed a Machiavellian reputation and was renowned as a dazzling political manipulator. Occasionally, his reputation could be self-defeating and he excited a good deal of ambivalence. Yet Van Buren’s conversion to the Free Soil creed was sincere, and out of a noisy, excited convention in the railway station at Herkimer, New York, in 1848, had come the roots of the Free Soil Party: ‘Free Trade, Free Labour, Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Men’. Charles Francis Adams, a byword for fastidious integrity, was the vice presidential nominee. Van Buren gave shape to this new party and added political weight and national experience to its rather light air of enthusiasm. His conversion points up the important distinction that southern leaders failed to make between abolitionism and anti-slavery. Whereas the former failed to excite little popular enthusiasm, the latter was now attracting political leaders of weight and reputation.22
The Free Soil Party in the 1848 presidential election improved upon Birney and the Liberty Party’s showing, but not by much. Van Buren had failed to gain a single vote in the electoral college but had managed to get about 10 per cent of the total vote – though more than half of his total stemmed from just two states, Massachusetts and New York. Yet a dozen Free Soil candidates were elected to Congress. Van Buren considered the campaign a ‘forlorn hope’. The voters may not have shared the preoccupation of politicians with slavery and its restriction but slow progress was being made. In a tightly fought contest, the Free Soil Party had denied the Democratic nominee, Lewis Cass, New York and General Zachary Taylor, the Whig candidate and eventual victor, Ohio. Whereas the Liberty Party had paved the way for the Free Soilers, by securing cooperation among anti-slavery Whigs, Democrats and independents, the Free Soil Party laid the foundation stones for the rise of the Republican Party.23
All these disparate groups kept the slavery issue at the forefront of politics. Calhoun had warned ‘Abolition and the Union cannot co-exist’, and one might add those that Calhoun presumed to be abolitionists. Such views indicated a fundamental cleavage but one that did not reflect much political reality let alone strength. The abolitionists were not a powerful force, although they lurked incorrigibly on the flanks of American politics. Their real strength lay not in the numbers of voters they rallied to their cause, but in their articulacy and capacity to project, and defend an argument.24 Out of this resulting controversy rose fear of the so-called ‘slave power’, a malign, ceaselessly active, anti-democratic conspiracy to advance the influence and wealth of the slaveowning oligarchy. Because northern conservatives came to the conclusion that public order and stability demanded the restriction, if not outright stifling of the freedom of speech of those who denounced slavery, the maintenance of the liberties of northern whites became a paramount fear in the anti-slavery agitation.25
Yet within months of taking office, the Taylor Administration was confronted by a sectional crisis that threatened to engulf the Union in war. Whatever the strength of political opinions, and electoral shifts of opinion, it is the action – the decisions taken by politicians – which determine the chain of circumstances that result in war or peace.
The Compromise of 1850
The confrontation culminating in the Compromise of 1850 was the most dangerous crisis confronting the Union since the Nullification Crisis, seventeen years before. It has been correctly identified as a ‘fruit’ of manifest destiny. The extension of American civilization across the continental heartland could serve only to resuscitate sectional strife. At bottom, this perennial and unavoidable conflict was paradoxical. As one historian has observed, ‘If the removal of sectional controversy opened the way to new expansion, expansion would, in its train, bring on a renewal of sectional controversy’. The issues under discussion, although they were expressed in drab and legalistic language, came to assume a graphic and ominous symbolic significance.26 In the opinion of various historians, the Compromise eventually arrived at should be judged an ‘Armistice’ and the process by which it was agreed, a forerunner (though successful, on this occasion) of the final crisis that followed a decade later. In Bruce Collins’s view ‘The crisis of 1850 was a dress rehearsal for the show-down of 1860–1. Many of the arguments were the same. Many of the participants were the same’.27 The focus of the discussion here should be, not how and why the political crisis developed in the way that it did, but rather, why the efforts at compromise were successful and, further, why civil war did not erupt ten years before the detonation of 1861?
This significant sectional crisis grew out of the attempts to bring statehood to the immense patrimony seized after the Mexican War. In California this issue was especially urgent after the Gold Rush of 1849; that territory desired early admission to the Union as a ‘free’ state and had already advanced very far in organizing its own government unaided by federal agencies. President Zachary Taylor was anxious that, if this wish was not speedily attended to, California would declare her independence. The South demanded a new ‘slave’ state to balance this increase in the non-slave states. The threat of anarchy in the South West was given further point by the claim aggressively advanced by Texas to all the territory held by New Mexico, east of the Rio Grande, which included Santa Fé. The federal government denied this claim and the possibility presented itself of a bloody clash between federal troops and Texas volunteer forces. The threat of civil war was indeed very real and took a more substantial and menacing form than just politicians uttering windy threats at one another in Washington.28
A compromise was eventually arrived at and was justified on pragmatic grounds. ‘Ask yourself if it is right’, A. G. Brown of Mississippi was to ask, ‘to exasperate eight millions of [southern] people upon an abstraction; a matter to us of substance and of life, but to you the merest shadow of an abstraction’.29 But at every stage in the crisis those seeking to broker a compromise confronted the rigidities and inertia of the American system of government. A suspicion of ‘strong’ government and efficient centralized control were the keynote of the age.30 Zachary Taylor himself had little experience of executive government or of political tactics (his military tactics had tended to be ragged); he was another example of the ‘outsider’ who entered American politics at the top.31 But he was not without shrewdness, was amenable to advice and had a sound sense of his own objectives and priorities. Above all, like Jackson before him, he understood the paramount need to safeguard the integrity of the federal government. His determination to uphold this was reinforced by flinty resolve and a determination not to be brow-beaten. That Taylor had arrived at this position was itself little short of astonishing. He was a Louisiana slaveholder. He was that rarest of political figures before 1860, a southerner who enjoyed a sense of perspective on the ‘peculiar institution’ and could see the northern point of view. To the horror of southern Whigs, Senator William H. Seward of New York began to exert considerable influence in the Taylor Administration. Whereas northern ‘doughfaces’ supported the southern view, southern faces were very resistant to dough or any other substance that shaped a smile of compromise that was tolerant of northern worries. Perhaps Taylor arrived at this position because he was not a politician at all. Certainly his stance led to Whig anxiety over the future of their party in the South.32
In the Congress, although the Senate was inclined towards compromise, the House of Representatives had been reduced to a state of powerlessness. A southerner, Howell Cobb, had been elected Speaker of the House after a bruising struggle and virtually all business had come to a halt by January 1850 (including consideration of the president’s State of the Union address). Cobb openly sanctioned southern obstructionism; he ensured that the dispute over the Texan frontier did not come to the vote, and the president’s policy was continually denounced. This paralysis was accentuated by the time-consuming preference of the age for expansive oratory; rare was the senatorial speech that concluded after two hours; four or five was nearer the average. This resulted in a southern seizure of the initiative in Congress, and the president was stymied.33
The essence of Taylor’s policy was to secure California and New Mexico as free states at the earliest opportunity without compensation for the South, and further, to resist Texan lawlessness and crush any secessionist resistance by force if such an extreme measure was required. He was also determined to call a halt to filibustering. He was not blind to southern interests; on the contrary, he sought to gain California and New Mexico’s entry to the Union without reference to the Wilmot Proviso (and congressional intrusion into the legitimacy of slavery in the territories) which would have been humiliating for the South.34 By 1850, the ‘Wilmot Proviso’, in William Brock’s words ‘had transformed abstract discussion of southern rights and hypothetical abolitionist designs into a genuine popular movement in defence of southern society’. Consequently, there is a marked contrast between the frantic behaviour of southern politicians and their calmer northern counterparts.35 The frenetic over-reaction of southerners was given shape, and indeed cloaked in respectability, by John С Calhoun’s ‘Address of the southern Delegates in Congress to their Constituents’ delivered in a secret session in January 1849. As an authoritative statement of southern views it has all the piquancy and persuasiveness of a Soviet Pravda pronouncement blaming the United States for starting the Korean War. All actions since the North West Ordinance (including the Missouri Compromise of 1820) were the result of ‘aggression’ against the South. In the ‘Address’ and in his last great speech to the Senate in March 1850, Calhoun argued that this would inevitably result in a disruption of the Union because of the increasing economic, financial and demographic imbalance which the census of 1850 revealed was increasingly favouring the North. Calhoun estimated that if slavery were excluded from the territories seized after the Mexican War, the numbers of senators from the North would reach forty, with only twenty-four from the South.36 But despite the alarm sounded among southern politicians, this had not yet spread to their electorate. Calhoun assumed that ‘the North’ would always act as a unit and frustrate the South, and underestimated the extent of the tolerance of slavery to be found in that section. He also underestimated the extent to which the presidency would be filled by those sympathetic to slavery and the most outrageous southern demands. Slaveholders would continue to exert a commanding influence over the executive branch until they over-reached themselves, split the Democratic Party, and ensured the election of Lincoln in 1860. Calhoun’s most influential legacy was his refinement of this sense of a grotesquely exaggerated, disproportionate threat and sense of northern alienation. By comparison, Taylor’s measured policy and careful, if obstinate, assessment of the courses open to him, seem refreshingly realistic.
Yet, Taylor was opposed bitterly by ‘moderate’ southerners in his own party, such as Alexander H. Stephens and Robert Toombs. This would be a recurring theme of increasing southern separation; ‘moderates’ would show little appreciation of the northern viewpoint, while stressing their Unionism, and would eventually side with the extremists in rejecting that view. Stephens and Toombs probably felt a sense of betrayal because they had both been among Taylor’s earliest supporters for the Whig presidential nomination; watching the ascendancy of William H. Seward must have been a bitter and disillusioning experience for them. In a heated clash with the president, the date of which is disputed (perhaps it took place in February 1850, but more likely a few days before Taylor’s sudden and unexpected death in July 1850) Stephens and Toombs uttered some unpleasant threats. These had been foreshadowed by an earlier meeting with representatives of the southern Whig congressional caucus. They were dismayed that Taylor was not only ‘obstinately fixed’, but also prepared to protect the northern Whig base (of almost ninety congressmen) while sacrificing if necessary his vociferous and disloyal southern colleagues, who amounted to only one-third their number. This was an unusual, not to say freakish state of affairs – a southern leader who was prepared to put his northern political base before his southern. The Secretary of War, George W. Crawford, had ‘leaked’ privileged information to Taylor’s southern critics. When the president instructed that firm orders should be issued to the commander of federal forces at Santa Fé, that any Texan incursions should be resisted by force, Crawford refused to sign them. Taylor signed them himself.
Toombs threatened not only the hostility of the southern Whigs (perhaps leading to efforts at impeachment) but also war, because the southern states would aid Texas if it came to a fight. Taylor was not a man to be threatened. He may not have used the precise words later attributed to him by memoir writers on the exact occasions later described vividly by those who lived through the Civil War, but there can be no doubt that they conveyed the essence of his policy. It was reported that Taylor (like Andrew Jackson before him) was determined to see the laws executed and Texan lawlessness suppressed, and if necessary would take command of the Army himself. If secessionists ‘were taken in rebellion against the Union he would hang them with less reluctance than he had hanged deserters and spies in Mexico’. Southern demands were impertinent, ‘intolerable and revolutionary’. Toombs was left in no doubt about the president’s bellicose intentions. ‘The worst of it is,’ Toombs admitted, ‘he will do it’.37
An unseemly newspaper story later circulated that Toombs and Stephens had harassed Taylor on his deathbed, indeed that their importunate attentions had hastened his death. But nobody had realized how serious Taylor’s illness (typhoid) was, and nobody, least of all he, thought he was going to die. But the critical nature of this confrontation is sometimes overlooked, because of the ameliorating effect of the sudden removal of Taylor’s obstinate and courageous presence from the scene. This effect was hastened by the sustained praise lavished on the later compromisers (especially Clay and Webster) and the simultaneous ridiculing of Taylor’s inexperienced and bumbling efforts as chief executive. Taylor would not modify a policy he deemed correct; he would not surrender in the face of bluster – and he probably calculated that this was exactly what southern calls to ‘act promptly, boldly and decisively, with arms in their hand’ amounted to. Taylor was the only president from Andrew Jackson to Abraham Lincoln with extensive military experience who faced down such threats. He calculated that the South, like South Carolina in 1833, could be overawed by the threat of a blockade of southern ports and a small-scale police action. But one thing is strikingly clear: there was no difference between what his opponents were saying in public and private. Taylor was adamant in defending his constitutional oath and the integrity of the Union ‘at all hazards’. Zachary Taylor was a courageous and underrated chief executive, who showed a rare touch of fire in dealing with southern critics. Had he lived there can be no doubting his determination not to endure the preliminary scorches inflicted by the rising temperatures of the putative southern firebrands. The likelihood of some kind of military confrontation with the southern states was strong, but a discussion of whether this would have resulted in a civil war in 1850 should be deferred to the conclusion of the crisis.38
Even before Taylor’s death the titular leader of the Whig Party, Henry Clay (who had been denied the White House on three occasions) was jostling forward to provide a compromise solution of his own. Clay abandoned Taylor’s insistence that there should be no compensation for the South in the event of California’s admission to the Union. There was an undoubted personal motive for Clay’s intervention. Though his sincere wish to provide conciliatory measures – a soothing balm to calm ruffled nerves – should not be doubted, Clay was not without vanity. He was determined to assert his leadership of the Whig Party, and show beyond peradventure that its leader lay in Congress, and not in the White House, even though he had been unjustly deprived of this prize by unscrupulous ‘politicians’. Doubtless his view would have changed had he resided at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; yet as a Whig, who tended to deplore the rise of a ‘strong’ presidency, Clay felt it right and proper that any solution to national ills should come from the legislature and not the executive branch.
In essence, his proposals included the following: (1) the entry of California into the Union as a free state at the earliest possible date; (2) the organization of New Mexico and Utah for statehood, leaving their legislatures free to decide on the future of slavery; (3) Texas was to give up any parts of New Mexico she had unlawfully seized, yet was compensated by the agreement of the federal government to assume responsibility for the debts incurred by the Texan government before independence; (4) the Federal government was also to introduce legislation permitting the more rapid recovery of escaped slaves; and finally, the North was to be compensated on this point by, (5) the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, which many anti-slavery northerners felt to be a mocking, hypocritical commentary on the very workings of the Federal government itself, lubricated by so many fine declamations on the miracles worked by American freedom.39
A manoeuvre which did much to smooth the course of success was Clay’s enlistment of Daniel Webster as an ally. In what became a celebrated oratorical tournament, on 7 March 1850 Webster, gaunt, gloomy and sepulchral in appearance, but a model of sunny, good health by comparison with Calhoun, delivered a reply to Calhoun’s 4 March speech. In January 1850 Webster had taken the complaisant view that, ‘All this agitation, I think, will subside, without serious result, but still it is mischievous and creates heart burnings. But the Union is not in danger’. Two months later he appeared to think that affairs had deteriorated, but not to the point of ultimate danger, although they had the potential to engender violence and fratricidal strife. At any rate, Webster thought his speech ‘probably the most important effort of my life, and as likely as any other to be often referred to’. In his anthem sung in praise of the Union, Webster placed great faith in ‘the law of nature, of physical geography’ which would prevent slavery spreading westward. The Wilmot Proviso was therefore irrelevant and enshrining it in law, would serve no purpose other than as ‘a taunt or a reproach’. Like other northern conservatives before and after him, Webster denounced anti-slavery dogmatists, and especially the abolitionists for stirring up passion. He agreed that the South had been responsible for this, too, but southern defenders of slavery did not excite the venom which he lavished on its northern critics. Webster’s eloquent address, as polished and smooth as the white marble of which the Congress was built, rested on the standard northern conservative defence of the peculiar institution. But he ridiculed the notion of peaceable secession that had been advanced by Calhoun. Any attempt at secession would result in war; ‘the common property’ of the Federal government could not be shared out equally among the states.40
These speeches were uttered while Taylor was still president, and he and Clay, whose relations were in any case tinged with antipathy and not a little jealousy on both sides, differed profoundly on the question of compensating the South. Although Clay had at first allied himself in the Senate with Thomas Hart Benton, this provoked southern hostility, because Henry J. Foote of Mississippi and others feared that the dismantling of any ‘omnibus’ bill (containing all the various elements of Clay’s compromise package) at the hands of a select committee (a move favoured by Benton) chaired by Clay would lead to a manoeuvre by which California entered the Union without due compensation for the South. Clay and his supporters increasingly veered towards the southern viewpoint during the summer of 1850. The death of Taylor removed one complicating factor from the scene – the second time since 1841 that a Whig presidency had been crippled by the death through illness of an elderly, military incumbent; this looked increasingly like carelessness in choosing candidates for the nomination.
Taylor’s successor was the vice president, Millard Fillmore, a handsome, immaculate, intelligent but rather driven and inflexible, self-made man. Some elements of continuity with the Taylor Administration, such as a determination to control Texan bellicosity, carried over into the new. But the major change came, of course, in relations with Clay and Webster and those who demanded an ‘omnibus’ bill which would assuage the South. A rival of his from New York state, Fillmore had little time for Senator William H. Seward, whose influence in the administration was abruptly curtailed. Webster entered the Cabinet as secretary of state and Clay virtually became the president’s emissary to the Senate. Furthermore, Fillmore, having previously presided over the Senate as its president, listening to the florid and lengthy orations of Clay and Webster, became convinced that they were right and Taylor wrong, and that the Wilmot Proviso was provocative and unnecessary. This attitude, too, signalled the end of Seward’s influence. Thus the opposition of the White House to an omnibus bill came to an end. Clay and Webster relied for the congressional passage of the omnibus bill on a group of moderate southerners. The position was complicated somewhat by the fact that no single party dominated the government: a caretaker Whig sat in the White House, the Democrats controlled the Senate, and no single party dominated the House. In the last week of July in a series of manoeuvres which has correctly been described as a ‘kaleidoscopic’ vortex, the omnibus was defeated.41 Seward was convinced that ‘the extreme men of the South will reject the Compromise’.
Out of the chaos, with Clay’s leadership stymied, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois emerged in the Senate as a political craftsman of inexhaustible enthusiasm and guile. The compromise package was broken up into its constituent parts and each offered for consideration on its relative merits. The moral aspect – especially in connection with the Fugitive Slave Law (which was to provoke so much fury) – was neglected in the technical and rather tedious debates. This might be attributed to the important part played by the Democratic Party in passing the legislation through the Senate and the House, and especially the northern Democrats, and the all-important ambiguity as to whether Democratic calls for ‘non-intervention’ in the affairs of the territories would allow slaveowners to transport their slaves with them should they move there. The bland but rather convenient – and ambiguous – formula inserted into the bills, ‘consistent with the Constitution’ glossed over this severe interpretative difficulty – a difficulty, alas, that could not be smoothed over by a mere concoction of words, blessed with legalistic mendacity though they might be. In this form, with wafer-thin minorities, the Compromise, in a ‘little omnibus’ package, which separated those bills concerned with slavery from those specifying state and territorial boundaries, passed the House of Representatives and was enshrined in law in September 1850.42
Space does not allow a detailed discussion of the legislative majorities, opinion and voting tallies, which have engaged the attention of political historians. Although Douglas, in a Senate speech paid customary obeisance to the Compromise’s symbolic import as a shining beacon of patriotic unity, as ‘no man and no party has acquired a triumph, except the party friendly to the Union triumphing over abolitionism and disunion’,43 the Compromise of 1850 lacked a dedicated, supportive constituency dedicated to its defence. It excited the loyalty of some people who supported some parts of it; but very few, who were politically active, at any rate, uncritically and unconditionally supported all of it, all of the time. Latent tensions and disagreeable realities were bound to percolate and spew their vicious bile on to the fragile sheen of its legalistic surface. Sir Walter Ralegh, in a bitter mood, once reflected that the superficial glitter of the Elizabethan Court shone ‘like rotten wood’. For all the praise that was heaped on it during the 1850s – and by historians since – perhaps because of it – we should apply a similar judgement to the Compromise of 1850. It is significant also how much the dispute that was pursued in the Senate and the House was very much a politicians’ disagreement, and the sense of crisis was largely confined to the visitors’ gallery in those esteemed institutions. Although there was a measure of anxiety in the newspapers, the public was not worried to anything like the extent it was in January–March 1861. The hyperbole and exaggerated threats of southern politicians did not reflect the opinion of the great mass of southern citizens, who were persistently loyal to the Union. However, the extent of this crisis should not be underestimated. Serious pro-secession talk was being heard for the first time from sensible southerners of experience and reputation.
That the Compromise of 1850 reflected the patching up of a rupture between politicians, rather than between peoples, perhaps explains the moral relativism that so permeated it. Politicians who favoured compromise were primarily concerned with ensuring that the machinery of government should continue regardless. Both sides should, therefore, be offered a stake in the continuance of that machinery, which should not be endangered on the grounds of ‘mere abstraction’. It was largely because of a preoccupation with expediency and practicalities that Webster was excoriated by Charles Sumner and others in Massachusetts as an ‘archangel revised’ and ‘a traitor to a holy cause’.44 Though one might recoil before the venom of such language, it was justified to the extent that those who framed the Compromise deluded themselves into believing that legalistic formulae granted the sanction of law had ‘solved’ the sectional crisis; they had not. This perhaps indicated an understandable sigh of relief that the confrontation had been defused. The settlement had merely glossed over a deep-seated dispute over what was going to happen to the territories seized from Mexico in 1846–48. As these had precipitated the crisis of 1850, the treatment of all the residual territories and the manner in which these were nurtured to statehood would only provoke further contests as to the character of these new states. Inevitably, expansion fuelled controversy because expansion was an ingredient of American nationalism, and two competing interpretations existed of the ideals upon which that nationalism rested.45 William R. Brock is surely justified in his judgement – that in the west, at any rate – ‘No regime can long endure when condemned by the intelligent, active and articulate. It was not merely that some intellectuals condemned the system established in 1850, but that so few could be found to defend it.’ Increasingly in the 1850s this system would be attacked from two, competing sides: from northern sceptics who saw it as advancing the unscrupulous, nefarious designs of the ‘slave power’; southern critics held that it was doing too little to prevent the inexorable advance of ‘abolitionism’.46
The issue thus shifted from demanding the preservation, or salvation of the Union, to worry over the complexion of the Union that was being saved. Some southerners appear to have been persuaded that the interpretation of the Constitution that was enshrined in the Compromise of 1850 was pro-slavery. Perhaps this accounts for the quiescence that settled over political life, especially in the South, between 1850 and 1853.47 The simple answer to the question why did war not break out in 1850, was that there were not two sides to fight one. It is doubtful even whether there was one. In 1861, although it was patchy, there was strong support for secession; in 1850 no such issue as the election of Lincoln presented itself to stir up popular passions and fear; certainly the question of the New Mexico-Texas frontier was no substitute for such an issue, no matter how strongly Alexander Stephens might denounce the unconstitutional character of Fillmore’s policy. This illustrates the degree to which the crisis of 1850 was a politicians’ crisis, and lacked a popular dimension. Politicians from both sections were still sustained by the continuing strength of the two-party system; it had been weakened but had not yet started to crumble in the South. Consequently, there was no enthusiasm for secession. The limited impact of the dispute could also explain Taylor’s belief that he could strangle any rebellion without much effort or effusion of blood. Although Fillmore was a northerner, and thus could serve as a southern target, strong passions like secessionary fervour could not be conjured out of the air. Zeal for revolutionary action had to be ignited and stoked up to a fever pitch because of the urgent necessity of breaking the bonds of affection and loyalty to the patriotic symbols of the Union that secessionist sympathisers would have to overcome. With a slaveowner resident in the Executive Mansion, it was all but impossible to begin that process before July 1850.48
Of course, evidence of some secessionist sympathy can be found – mostly in South Carolina, Mississippi and Alabama. A Unionist, Benjamin F. Perry, wrote that most citizens of the southern states appeared content to accept the Compromise. ‘South Carolina alone is disposed to be dissatisfied and overturn the government. This she cannot do’. Secessionist supporters made gains in the 1850 state elections. But a general reluctance to cast aside the existing political structure constrained the state legislature from rash action. Nonetheless, South Carolinians reserved this right to pursue such action should they deem it in their state’s interest. Isaac D. Witherspoon feared that ‘the abolitionist movement cannot be stopped; it may be checked for a season … but it cannot be reined in’. South Carolina ‘has the right to act alone’. But herein lay a problem. After Nullification, the leaders of South Carolina lacked the confidence to act without the cooperation of others. Witherspoon cautioned the state that it ‘should not cut itself off from others’ by an unilateral act ‘to force cooperation by precipitate action’. Some Democrats, such as James L. Orr, still retained a measure of faith in the capacity of the Constitution to preserve and protect slavery.49
But the other main reason for the lack of an armed confrontation in 1850 was that no mechanism for promoting any form of alliance, or confederation, of slave states existed. In so far as inter-slave state relations existed, they were motivated by economic matters, especially worries over the tariff. Before his death in 1850, John C. Calhoun had called for the meeting of a convention in Mississippi in the autumn of 1849 to discuss ‘abolitionist’ designs. This, in turn, called for a southern convention to meet at Nashville, Tennessee in June 1850. Some secessionist sympathizers in South Carolina had already deduced that simple (even simplistic) lines of argument were the key to any future success; they should offer the voters a choice between secession or submission. But a more representative voice at this stage was Benjamin F. Perry. He opined that ‘We are anxious … for a southern Congress, which will secure the rights of the slaveholding States, redress our wrongs, and preserve the Union’. Indeed, nine states dispatched delegations totalling 177 nominees (although 100 of these were from Tennessee alone). But the overall impact of the Nashville Convention on the political landscape was comparable with the Hartford Convention of 1814. The expectations it aroused were in inverse proportion to its audacity. It issued calls for an extension of the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean, bemoaned the deteriorating position of the slave vis-à-vis the free states, and agreed to meet again. James H. Hammond consoled himself that ‘The great point is that the South has met, and acted with great harmony in a nine days’ Convention, and above all has agreed to meet again’. But this harmony was the product of inertia, not action, and the Nashville Convention showed that the secessionist dream of a unified, coordinated southern policy, let alone an independence movement, was a chimera.50
Was war, therefore, even a remote possibility in 1850? No real issue was evident that could have promoted its outbreak. Armies, or navies, were not poised to strike. Various southern states were even less prepared than South Carolina was in 1832–33 to assert an individual policy in defiance of the Federal government. The convoluted passage of the various legislative measures constituting the Compromise of 1850 may have excited politicians and all those who observed political activity, but they hardly roused mass fervour. It would be easy to dismiss all the talk of war as so much hyperbole. But nonetheless the crisis of 1850 provided all the conditions that might have led to the outbreak of civil war by 1852/53. Should we, then, accept the term which has frequently been employed by United States historians to describe the Compromise, namely that it constituted an ‘armistice’?51 An armistice is a ‘ceasefire’, a truce that is reached which terminates a war but precedes a peace agreement or treaty. Should the armistice be broken then the war is likely to be resumed. But this analogy is misleading because ‘war’ between the sections had not yet broken out. The two sides were not clearly demarcated, let alone drawn up to commence battle. At any rate, the significance of the crisis of 1850 as a prospective clash of arms has been somewhat exaggerated.
The Compromise of 1850 may more accurately be described as a truce between politicians. But its terms were hardly held in universal repute. Whatever the precise balance of political power which the Compromise weighed, there can be little doubt concerning the conditional nature of the compact as far as the South was concerned. It depended first and foremost on the behaviour of northern electorates and their politicians. The South implicitly expected the latter to control the former; by enshrining in law a mechanism for coercing blacks back into slavery and demanding that northern state legislatures and judiciaries enforce it with the same zeal as if they were slave states, the symbolic reach of the slave system was extended. It was in this soil, fertilized by the blood and sweat of returned slaves, that anxiety about the growth of the ‘slave power’ sprang up. In truth, the Compromise of 1850 did not ‘settle’, once and for all, the contentious issue of slavery. It was delusion to expect that legalistic formulae, whose elegance might please politicians, would convince certain voters with strong views and deeply held convictions about the immorality of slavery – especially in a political culture so marinated in idealism. And it was delusion to believe that once a compromise could be concocted – ‘non-intervention’ in the territories, or relying on the opinions of the voters therein – ‘popular sovereignty’ – such facile formulae could permit the opening up of the territories and nursing them to statehood. This was the root of the problem – the character of the destiny of the United States – would it be dominated by a free labour system or by chattel slavery? Fresh from his triumph during the Compromise debates Stephen A. Douglas contemplated the future buoyed up by energy and optimism. This misdirected vigour would result within a decade with the rupture of the Democratic Party – the one political grouping that kept suspicious, cantankerous and impulsive southern politicians tied to the American political system.52
1. Quoted in Major L. Wilson, Space, Time and Freedom: The Quest for Nationality and the Irrepressible Conflict, 1815–1861 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1974), p. 167.
2. Howard Temperley, British Anti-Slavery, 1833–1870 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), p. 193.
3. David Donald, ‘Toward a Reconsideration of Abolitionists’, in Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered, 2nd enlarged edn (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), p. 28; Richard Carwardine, Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790–1865 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1978), pp. 19–29, 42–3; Louis Billington, ‘“To America We Will Go”: British Methodist Preachers in the United States, 1800–60’, in Brian Holden Reid and John White (eds) American Studies: Essays in Honour of Marcus Cunliffe (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 44–63.
4. Merton L. Dillon, The Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissenting Minority (New York: Norton, 1974, 1979), pp. 30, 36–8, 43, 58–9, 71; William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: Norton, 1991), pp. 97, 108.
5. William H. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York: Oxford UP, 1990), pp. 290–4; Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Anti-Slavery Politics in the United States, 1837–1860 (New York: Oxford UP, 1980), p. 78.
6. Quoted in Freehling, Road to Disunion, p. 295.
7. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, pp. 8–9, 16, 24, 27, 31–4, 39, 45–51, 64–6, 77, 88; Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case (New York: Oxford UP, 1978), pp. 120–4. The value of Freehling’s detailed study of the gag rule is reduced by his clotted and convoluted style. See Road to Disunion, pp. 310–12. The combination of cloudy rhetoric and ‘Cagney and Lacey’ street slang is very irritating.
8. Fehrenbacher, Dred Scott, pp. 122–3; Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, p. 110; Freehling, Road to Disunion, p. 308.
9. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, pp. 143–7, 172–3.
10. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964), pp. 166–71.
11. Richard Carwardine, ‘Religious Revival and Political Renewal in Antebellum America’, in Colin Mathew and Jane Garett (eds) Revival and Renewal Since 1700: Essays Presented to John Walsh (London: Hambledon Press, 1993), pp. 128, 143.
12. See above, pp. 31–2, 35–6.
13. ‘As was its custom, the United States paid for its territorial acquisitions in order to legitimize their military conquest’, Raymond Aron, The Imperial Republic (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975), p. xxviii.
14. Otis A. Singletary, The Mexican War (Chicago UP, 1960), pp. 160–3; David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–61 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), pp. 1–6; Gordon Connell-Smith, The United States and Latin America (London: Heinemann, 1974), pp. 79–80.
15. Fehrenbacher, Dred Scott, pp. 77–80, 82.
16. Fehrenbacher, Dred Scott, pp. 103, 117; John Niven, Martin Van Buren (New York: Oxford UP, 1983), pp. 565, 568–70.
17. Fehrenbacher, Dred Scott, pp. 122–3; Potter, Impending Crisis, p. 60.
18. Fehrenbacher, Dred Scott, pp. 128–9; Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, pp. 171–5.
19. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, p. 191.
20. Potter, Impending Crisis, pp. 56–7.
21. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, pp. 144, 150–1.
22. Niven, Van Buren, pp. 575–6.
23. Ibid., p. 590; Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, pp. 155, 161, 164–5, 167.
24. Fehrenbacher, Dred Scott, p. 122.
25. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, pp. 199–201; Rush Welter, The Mind of America, 1820–1860 (New York: Columbia UP, 1975), p. 343.
26. Wilson, Space, Time and Freedom, pp. 176–7.
27. Bruce Collins, The Origins of America’s Civil War (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), p. 86.
28. Allan Nevins, The Ordeal of the Union (New York: Scribner’s, 1947), I, pp. 327–34.
29. Quoted in Fehrenbacher, Dred Scott, p. 164.
30. See above, pp. 37–8, 40–1; Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, I, pp. 158–9.
31. Before his election as president in 1848 he had not once voted in a presidential election. Elbert B. Smith, The Presidencies of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1988), pp. 20, 50.
32. Fehrenbacher, Dred Scott, p. 158; Mark J. Stagmaier, ‘Zachary Taylor Versus the South’, Civil War History 33 (1987), p. 219.
33. Fehrenbacher, Dred Scott, pp. 159–60; William R. Brock, Parties and Political Conscience: American Dilemmas, 1840–1850 (Millwood, NY: КТО, 1979), pp. 281–2, 288–9.
34. Smith, Taylor and Fillmore, pp. 100–1, 102, 120.
35. Brock, Parties and Political Conscience, p. 278–80.
36. Smith, Taylor and Fillmore, pp. 107, 112, 113–15, 117. In 1850 they were evenly balanced at thirty senators each. See also Collins, Origins of America’s Civil War, p. 87, who considers Calhoun’s ‘Address’ as ‘a brilliant propaganda ploy … the great debating point among Southern politicians in 1849’, which is true enough.
37. Smith, Taylor and Fillmore, pp. 104, 107; although Seward did not need to support the president in the Senate, see Brock, Parties and Political Conscience, pp. 287, 289. Stagmaier, ‘Zachary Taylor Versus the South’, pp. 224–7, 237–9, is a convincing reconstruction.
38. Smith, Taylor and Fillmore, pp. 104–5, 121; Stagmaier, ‘Zachary Taylor Versus the South’, pp. 238–11.
39. Brock, Parties and Political Conscience, pp. 290–1; Fehrenbacher, Dred Scott, pp. 159–60. The Texas debt amounted to $10 million. See Smith, Taylor and Fillmore, p. 110.
40. Maurice G. Baxter, One and Inseparable: Daniel Webster and the Union (Cambridge, MA: Belknapp, 1984), pp. 409–10, 415–16; Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, I, pp. 286–96.
41. Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (University Press of Kentucky, 1964), pp. 109–11, 114.
42. Ibid., pp. 146, 156–61; Freehling, Road to Disunion, p. 506.
43. Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict, p. 147.
44. David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), pp. 184–5.
45. Wilson, Space, Time and Freedom, p. 176; Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict, pp. 177–8, notes the general confusion that the Compromise of 1850 promoted in most western state boundaries that lasted for almost a century.
46. Brock, Parties and Political Conscience, p. 330.
47. Wilson, Space, Time and Freedom, pp. 160, 177; Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict, pp. 184–5.
48. Smith, Taylor and Fillmore, pp. 105, 184.
49. Ibid., pp. 196–7.
50. Ibid., pp. 158–200; A. V. Huff, Jr, Langdon Cheves of South Carolina (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1970), pp. 228–9. 232; see also J. H. Hammond, Secret and Sacred (New York: Oxford UP, 1988), p. 206 (entry for 30 Nov. 1850), on the need for ‘appearing cautious’.
51. Potter, Impending Crisis, ch. 5; Freehling, Road to Disunion, p. 509.
52. Collins, Origins of America’s Civil War, pp. 94–6; Potter, Impending Crisis, pp. 118–20.