CHAPTER 6
We are at a crisis of some importance.
—DANIEL WEBSTER
Lincoln ~ Van Buren ~ Fillmore ~ Tyler ~ Buchanan
The 30th Congress gathered on December 6, 1847. Robert Winthrop of Massachusetts, the Whig nominee for Speaker, was challenged by a southern Democrat who opposed the Wilmot Proviso, a northern Democrat who opposed the Wilmot Proviso, and a northern Democrat who favored the measure. With the Whigs in the majority and the Democrats so divided, it should have been an easy accomplishment for Winthrop. But five Whigs did not vote for their party’s candidate: two abolitionists who believed Winthrop too eager to accommodate slavery, and three southerners who disagreed with his support of the Proviso. The balloting ended only when a southern Whig left the chamber, reducing the number Winthrop needed for a majority.
The following day, Polk sent his annual message to Congress, calling for vast new territory from Mexico as part of any settlement, and increased military funding, despite the collapse of the Mexican military. The president could not have been more at odds with the Whigs in the House, who were eager to bring the war to a conclusion. First-term congressman Abraham Lincoln thought Polk’s address “the half insane mumbling of a fever dream . . . He is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man. God grant he may be able to show, there is not something about his conscience, more painful than all his mental perplexity!”
The Whigs wasted little time in attempting to rein in the war. Some proposals called for immediate peace, some for peace without any territorial gains, while some focused on condemning the war itself and the president who conducted it. On December 22, Lincoln introduced eight resolutions regarding the origins of the war. Did it begin on American soil, as Polk had alleged? Mexican soil? Disputed territory? In a January 17 speech on his resolutions, Lincoln said that the president would not answer because “he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him; that he ordered General Taylor into the midst of a peaceful Mexican settlement purposely to bring on a war, that, originally having some strong motive . . . to involve the two countries in war, and trusting to escape scrutiny by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory—that attractive rainbow, that rises in the showers of blood—that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy—he plunged into it, and has swept on and on till disappointed in this calculation of the ease with which Mexico might be subdued, he now finds himself he knows not where.” The speech produced an uproar in Illinois, where the war was extremely popular.
By the time Lincoln spoke, the House had adopted a resolution that the war was “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States.” It passed 82–81, with Lincoln voting in favor; a subsequent attempt to reverse it failed 105–95. Polk’s request for a loan to underwrite the war was delayed and finally reduced, a signal that the president was now on an increasingly short tether. In their quest to end the war, the Whigs in the House would soon be aided by a renegade diplomat, in one of the more remarkable events in American foreign policy.
Nicholas Trist was sent with Winfield Scott to negotiate a peace treaty with Mexico. Frustrated at the pace of negotiations and wishing to impose harsher terms than he had initially proposed, including perhaps the conquest of all Mexico, Polk recalled his emissary. Initially Trist complied, waiting for a replacement or an escort to bring him safely to Veracruz. But none arrived, and Scott could not spare any men for the dangerous journey. Eventually, through the encouragement of moderates in the Mexican government, the British diplomatic corps, and a visiting newspaper reporter, Trist decided he would continue negotiations for peace, despite Polk’s order. On February 2, Trist signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and sent it to a furious president.
Meanwhile Congress had turned into “a great President making machine,” in the words of one member. Lincoln joined six others in forming “The Young Indians,” committed to promoting General Zachary Taylor’s candidacy. Taylor, who had never held elected office or even voted, was the perfect cipher for a party and a country divided over slavery. Lincoln supported Taylor over Henry Clay, his “beau ideal of a statesman” whom he “almost worshipped.” But as Lincoln wrote, “I go for him, not because I think he would make a better President than Clay, but because I think he would make a better one than Polk, or [Senator Lewis] Cass, or Buchanan, or any such creature, one of whom is sure to be elected, if he is not.”
While the Young Indians took advantage of Taylor’s ambiguity on the Wilmot Proviso, a former president wanted to make clear where he stood. On April 11, a member of the New York legislature took the floor to read an address from Martin Van Buren into the record. Van Buren had watched with concern as the Democratic Party, which he had helped create, became increasingly identified with the spread of slavery. The first draft of his response ran fifteen thousand words. It was a comprehensive treatment of the issue, starting with the Articles of Confederation through the present day, a complete constitutional and political history of the subject, thoroughly refuting the Democratic arguments. The division between Democrats over the Proviso played out in the states as well, and none more so than New York. The Barnburner faction, which favored it, included Van Buren. The Hunkers opposed it, preferring to focus on other issues. A contentious Democratic state convention the previous year had resulted in the Barnburners walking out. In 1848 both Barnburners and Hunkers held their own state conventions, each claiming to be the official Democratic meeting. Both sent their own slate of delegates to the national convention in Baltimore. Van Buren wrote instructions to the Barnburner delegates, encouraging them to be constructive members, and to avoid raising the Proviso issue. He urged them to vote against several candidates, including Buchanan, and Polk in the unlikely event that he was placed for re-nomination.
On June 7, Lincoln joined thousands of his fellow Whigs in Philadelphia for their national convention. On the fourth ballot, the popular general and political novice defeated Clay, a founder and senior statesman of the Whig Party. Now it was time to find him a running mate. Taylor, a slaveholding southerner, would need a credible partner from the North to have any hope of keeping the party unified.
John Collier of New York obtained the floor, explaining that he had been a Clay delegate, but that Taylor could be assured of the support of New York should Millard Fillmore be nominated for vice president. Collier’s motives have been variously ascribed; it has been argued that he aspired to the Senate and believed Fillmore his main obstacle. It has also been said that with Fillmore as vice president, the influence of New York Whig leaders William Seward and Thurlow Weed would be diminished, since patronage would presumably go through Fillmore rather than them. The last time the Whigs had won the White House, their chosen president had barely lasted a month, replaced by John Tyler, who obstructed his party’s priorities before being formally expelled. Despite this, there was precious little debate over the vice presidential spot. After a close first ballot, Millard Fillmore was nominated with 173 votes to 87 for Abbott Lawrence of Massachusetts. Fillmore’s New York was the biggest electoral prize with 36 electoral votes, 10 more than its nearest rival, and 24 percent of the total needed for victory. Fillmore, with a solid eight-year congressional voting record, was well known to the delegates, who now had to decide whether to support Taylor, who had avowed himself “not an ultra Whig.” From his retirement at Sherwood Forest, John Tyler observed that Democratic nominee Lewis “Cass is greatly open to attack. Taylor admits of being highly lauded, and yet the issue is doubtful . . . Fillmore is a dead weight, but nous verrons . . . Clay is dead, and none of the conspirators will succeed.”
On June 22, the Barnburners met in Utica, New York, and despite his wishes, nominated Martin Van Buren for president as an independent on a platform supporting the Wilmot Proviso. There was dissatisfaction with both the Whigs’ Taylor and the Democrats’ Lewis Cass from Proviso supporters in both parties. These disaffected groups, along with members of the abolitionist Liberty Party, met in Buffalo on August 8, as representatives of the new Free Soil Party. Van Buren wrote a letter to the delegates, praising it as the first meeting of its kind, “composed of individuals who have all their lives been on different sides of public questions and politics, state and nation, and who still differ regarding most of these questions but who feel called upon to unite on one issue, slavery extending into the territories.” So they did unite, on that issue and on their nominee—Martin Van Buren. Charles Francis Adams, the son and grandson of presidents, was selected as his running mate. Van Buren accepted the nomination, hoping to advance the cause of Free Soil, to vindicate the Barnburners, and to defeat the Democratic nominee, running on an anti-Proviso platform. He had won a presidential election as a defender of slavery in the District of Columbia, a position he now reversed, and on a policy of non-interference in the places where it existed, which he maintained. The Little Magician of Kinderhook, nearly fifty years after his first campaign for office, would take the field one final time, with no hope of victory, to vindicate a cause he believed in. Van Buren, who had once believed the president should serve as the national pacifier, capitulating to the South when necessary, was condemned by President Polk as “the most fallen man I have ever known.”
Lincoln devoted the summer and fall to electing Taylor and Fillmore. From the House floor he made the case for Taylor and Fillmore, systematically addressing Democratic criticisms while taking apart the rationale for Cass’s candidacy. Lincoln, who had consistently voted for the Wilmot Proviso, expressed his hope that Taylor would sign it. But he also knew that Cass would veto it. “One of the two is to be President; which is preferable?” As to the charge that the Whigs had mistreated Clay, “like an old horse to root,” Lincoln asked whether the Democrats had done the same, perhaps to “a certain Martin Van Buren . . . and is he not rooting a little to your discomfort about now?” The folksy, humorous, yet devastating speech caused a Democratic member to interrupt, shouting, “We give it up!”
During the recess, Lincoln worked at the Central Rough and Ready Club, the Washington headquarters of Taylor’s presidential campaign, corresponding with supporters throughout the country and coordinating the national effort. As Election Day approached, Lincoln traveled throughout Massachusetts making numerous speeches for Taylor and Fillmore. “I had been chosen to Congress then from the Wild West and with hayseed in my hair I went to Massachusetts, the most cultured state in the Union, to take a few lessons in deportment,” he would remember. For the first time, Lincoln would find himself winning over the audiences he would need to achieve his life’s ambition. Lincoln’s great concern was that Van Buren would win enough in Massachusetts to throw the state to Cass. “All agreed that slavery is evil,” he told the Whig Club of Boston, “but that we were not responsible for it and cannot affect it in states of this union where we do not live. But the question of the extension of slavery to new territories of this country is a part of our responsibility and care, and is under our control.” The Free Soilers, he argued, were working against the only issue that united them. They had “hitched their skirts to the artful dodger of Kinderhook and could only spoil the election.”
Lincoln’s Massachusetts campaign was a critical success, generating many positive stories. From there he headed to Buffalo, where he would depart to Illinois over the Great Lakes. On his way, Lincoln and Thurlow Weed paid their respects to Millard Fillmore at Delevan House in Albany. Lincoln and Fillmore would not meet again for more than twelve years, under very different circumstances for both men and for the country.
“And so Taylor is the president-elect,” Tyler wrote his son on November 14. The Whigs would have their first president since he had been drummed out of the party. Though he voted for Cass, Tyler said, “I shall not shed many tears at the result. Poor Van! He is literally a used-up man; and Clay, let him shed tears over the fact that anybody can be elected but himself.” His wife Julia, he noted, was a Taylor supporter.
Van Buren won 10 percent of the national vote, despite receiving no support in the southern or border states. Van Buren had won 26 percent in his own state, relegating Cass to third place in New York, as he did in several other states in the North, helping tip the election to Taylor.
The 30th Congress, which had been so divided by war, slavery, and presidential politics, would meet for one more session. Vast new territory had been added to the United States, which was now a Pacific power. But questions of how the new territory would be organized—free, slave, or some division between the two—would haunt Congress to the final moments of the session. On March 1, with only three days left, the normally non-controversial Civil and Diplomatic Appropriations Bill, vital to the funding of the federal government, became an explosive political device when the Senate amended it to allow the president to organize the new territory as he saw fit. Polk was on the record as favoring an extension of the Missouri Compromise line west to the ocean. Therefore, a vote to fund the government became a bill to open millions of new acres to slavery. When it came to the House the following day, representatives adopted an amendment to keep slavery out of the new territory. Lincoln, who earlier that session had unsuccessfully proposed a bill to eliminate slavery in the District of Columbia, voted “yes.” The House then voted down the Senate amendment. The disagreement was far from resolved on March 3, the final day of the 30th Congress.
At sunset, James Knox Polk observed his empty desk. After four tumultuous years he was returning to private life.* One last obligation remained. He and his cabinet headed for the Capitol for the last-minute consideration of legislation. Armed with a veto message, Polk was determined to reject any law that excluded slavery from the territories. “I did not hesitate for a moment in my course,” he wrote. A conference committee between the Senate and House was unable to come to an agreement. Late in the evening, a government shutdown appeared likely. In the Senate, Daniel Webster decried that “important bills connected with the continuance of the government, which for sixty years have never failed to be passed in time to carry on the government, are now to some degree in jeopardy . . . we are at a crisis of some importance.” There was a vote in the House to withdraw its disagreement from the Senate bill, allowing the measure to be sent directly to the president. This failed by the narrow margin of 110–107, with Lincoln voting “no.” An amendment was then offered to maintain the laws of Mexico in the territories until changed by Congress, which passed 111–105, with Lincoln voting “yes.” Since Mexico forbade slavery, this arrangement would have the same effect as passing the Wilmot Proviso. Southern members flocked to see Polk “in great excitement.” Polk cleared the room in order to consult with his cabinet. First of all, since it was after midnight, was he even still president? He argued that he had won a four-year term, and therefore had until noon the following day. Then came the question of whether to sign the appropriations bill if it came to him in its current form. Secretary of State Buchanan urged the president to sign, arguing that keeping the present laws was distinct from agreeing to the Wilmot Proviso. Buchanan was joined by three others, against only one member who wanted it vetoed. The fighting continued through the night and into the morning. At 4:00 a.m.,Polk retired to the Willard Hotel. Finally the Senate blinked, receding from their own amendment, sending a clean appropriations bill to the president, who signed it, thus leaving the issue of slavery in the new territories to his successor. “Thus concluded my duties as President of the U. States,” Polk wrote.
* Polk’s long-awaited retirement would last little more than three months, the shortest post-presidency in history.