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Renewing the Sectional Struggle

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1848–1854

Secession! Peaceable secession! Sir, your eyes and mine are never destined to see that miracle.

DANIEL WEBSTER, SEVENTH OF MARCH SPEECH, 1850

The year 1848, highlighted by a rash of revolu-tions in Europe, was filled with unrest in Amer- ica. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo had officially ended the war with Mexico, but it had initiated a new and perilous round of political warfare in the United States. The vanquished Mexicans had been forced to relinquish an enormous tract of real estate, including Texas, California, and all the area between. The acquisition of this huge domain raised anew the burning issue of extending slavery into the territories.

Northern antislaveryites had rallied behind the Wilmot Proviso, which flatly prohibited slavery in any territory acquired in the Mexican War. Southern senators had blocked the passage of the proviso, but the issue would not die. Ominously, debate over slavery in the area of the Mexican Cession threat- ened to disrupt the ranks of both Whigs and Demo- crats and split national politics along North-South sectional lines.

The Popular Sovereignty Panacea

Each of the two great political parties was a vital bond of national unity, for each enjoyed powerful support in both North and South. If they should be replaced by two purely sectional groupings, the Union would be in peril. To politicians, the wisest strategy seemed to be to sit on the lid of the slavery issue and ignore the boiling beneath. Even so, the cover bobbed up and down ominously in response to the agitation of zealous northern abolitionists and impassioned southern “fire-eaters.’’

Anxious Democrats were forced to seek a new standard-bearer in 1848. President Polk, broken in health by overwork and chronic diarrhea, had pledged himself to a single term. The Democratic National Convention at Baltimore turned to an aging leader, General Lewis Cass, a veteran of the War of 1812. Although a senator and diplomat of

wide experience and considerable ability, he was sour-visaged and somewhat pompous. His enemies dubbed him General “Gass’’ and quickly noted that Cass rhymed with jackass. The Democratic plat- form, in line with the lid-sitting strategy, was silent on the burning issue of slavery in the territories.

But Cass himself had not been silent. His views on the extension of slavery were well known because he was the reputed father of “popular sov- ereignty.’’ This was the doctrine that stated that the sovereign people of a territory, under the general principles of the Constitution, should themselves determine the status of slavery.

Popular sovereignty had a persuasive appeal. The public liked it because it accorded with the democratic tradition of self-determination. Politi- cians liked it because it seemed a comfortable com- promise between the abolitionist bid for a ban on slavery in the territories and southern demands that Congress protect slavery in the territories. Popular sovereignty tossed the slavery problem into the laps of the people in the various territories. Advocates of the principle thus hoped to dissolve the most stub- born national issue of the day into a series of local issues. Yet popular sovereignty had one fatal defect: it might serve to spread the blight of slavery.

Political Triumphs for General Taylor

The Whigs, meeting in Philadelphia, cashed in on the “Taylor fever.’’ They nominated frank and honest Zachary Taylor, the “Hero of Buena Vista,’’ who had never held civil office or even voted for president. Henry Clay, the living embodiment of Whiggism, should logically have been nominated. But Clay had made too many speeches—and too many enemies.

As usual, the Whigs pussyfooted in their plat- form. Eager to win at any cost, they dodged all trou- blesome issues and merely extolled the homespun virtues of their candidate. The self-reliant old fron- tier fighter had not committed himself on the issue of slavery extension. But as a wealthy resident of Louisiana, living on a sugar plantation, he owned scores of slaves.

Ardent antislavery men in the North, distrusting both Cass and Taylor, organized the Free Soil party. Aroused by the conspiracy of silence in the Demo- cratic and Whig platforms, the Free-Soilers made no bones about their own stand. They came out

foursquare for the Wilmot Proviso and against slav- ery in the territories. Going beyond other antislav- ery groups, they broadened their appeal by advocating federal aid for internal improvements and by urging free government homesteads for settlers.

The new party assembled a strange assortment of new fellows in the same political bed. It attracted industrialists miffed at Polk’s reduction of protective tariffs. It appealed to Democrats resentful of Polk’s settling for part of Oregon while insisting on all of Texas—a disparity that suggested a menacing southern dominance in the Democratic party. It harbored many northerners whose hatred was directed not so much at slavery as at blacks and

The Popular Sovereignty Doctrine 391

who gagged at the prospect of sharing the newly acquired western territories with African- Americans. It also contained a large element of “conscience Whigs,’’ heavily influenced by the aboli- tionist crusade, who condemned slavery on moral grounds. The Free-Soilers trotted out wizened for- mer president Van Buren and marched into the fray, shouting, “Free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men.” These freedoms provided the bedrock on which the Free-Soilers built their party. Free-Soilers condemned slavery not so much for enslaving blacks but for destroying the chances of free white workers to rise up from wage-earning dependence to the esteemed status of self-employment. Free- Soilers argued that only with free soil in the West could a traditional American commitment to upward mobility continue to flourish. If forced to compete with slave labor, more costly wage labor would inevitably wither away, and with it the chance for the American worker to own property. As the first widely inclusive party organized around the issue of slavery and confined to a single section, the Free Soil party foreshadowed the emergence of the Republican party six years later.

With the slavery issue officially shoved under the rug by the two major parties, the politicians on both sides opened fire on personalities. The ama- teurish Taylor had to be carefully watched, lest his indiscreet pen puncture the reputation won by his sword. His admirers puffed him up as a gallant knight and a Napoleon, and sloganized his remark, allegedly uttered during the Battle of Buena Vista, “General Taylor never surrenders.’’ Taylor’s wartime popularity pulled him through. He harvested 1,360,967 popular and 163 electoral votes, as com- pared with Cass’s 1,222,342 popular and 127 elec- toral votes. Free-Soiler Van Buren, although winning no state, polled 291,263 ballots and apparently diverted enough Democratic strength from Cass in the crucial state of New York to throw the election to Taylor.

“Californy Gold’’

Tobacco-chewing President Taylor—with his stumpy legs, rough features, heavy jaw, black hair, ruddy complexion, and squinty gray eyes—was a military square peg in a political round hole. He would have been spared much turmoil if he could have continued to sit on the slavery lid. But the dis-

covery of gold in California, early in 1848, blew the cover off.

A horde of adventurers poured into the valleys of California. Singing “O Susannah!’’ and shouting “Gold! Gold! Gold!’’ they began tearing frantically at the yellow-graveled streams and hills. A fortunate few of the bearded miners “struck it rich’’ at the “dig- gings.’’ But the luckless many, who netted blisters instead of nuggets, probably would have been money well ahead if they had stayed at home unaf- fected by the “gold fever,’’ which was often followed by more deadly fevers. The most reliable profits were made by those who mined the miners, notably by charging outrageous rates for laundry and other personal services. Some soiled clothing was even sent as far away as the Hawaiian Islands for washing.

392 CHAPTER 18 Renewing the Sectional Struggle, 1848–1854

California Gold Rush Country Miners from all over the world swarmed over the rivers that drained the western slope of California’s Sierra Nevada. Their nationalities and religions, their languages and their ways of life, are recorded in the colorful place names they left behind.

The overnight inpouring of tens of thousands of people into the future Golden State completely overwhelmed the one-horse government of Califor- nia. A distressingly high proportion of the newcom- ers were lawless men, accompanied or followed by virtueless women. A contemporary song ran,

Oh what was your name in the States? Was it Thompson or Johnson or Bates? Did you murder your wife, And fly for your life? Say, what was your name in the States?

An outburst of crime inevitably resulted from the presence of so many miscreants and outcasts. Robbery, claim jumping, and murder were com- monplace, and such violence was only partly discouraged by rough vigilante justice. In San Fran- cisco, from 1848 to 1856, there were scores of law- less killings but only three semilegal hangings.

A majority of Californians, as decent and law- abiding citizens needing protection, grappled earnestly with the problem of erecting an adequate state government. Privately encouraged by Presi- dent Taylor, they drafted a constitution in 1849 that excluded slavery and then boldly applied to Con- gress for admission. California would thus bypass the usual territorial stage, thwarting southern con- gressmen seeking to block free soil. Southern politi- cians, alarmed by the Californians’ “impertinent’’ stroke for freedom, arose in violent opposition. Would California prove to be the golden straw that broke the back of the Union?

The California Gold Rush 393

The idea that many ne’er-do-wells went west is found in the Journals ( January 1849) of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882):

“If a man is going to California, he announces it with some hesitation; because it is a confession that he has failed at home.”

A married woman wrote from the California goldfields to her sister in New England in 1853,

“i tell you the woman are in great demand in this country no matter whether they are married or not you need not think strange if you see me coming home with some good looking man some of these times with a pocket full of rocks. . . . it is all the go here for Ladys to leave there Husbands two out of three do it there is a first rate Chance for a single woman she can have her choice of thousands i wish mother was here she could marry a rich man and not have to lift her hand to do her work. . . .”

394 CHAPTER 18 Renewing the Sectional Struggle, 1848–1854

Sectional Balance and the Underground Railroad

The South of 1850 was relatively well-off. It then enjoyed, as it had from the beginning, more than its share of the nation’s leadership. It had seated in the White House the war hero Zachary Taylor, a Virginia-born, slaveowning planter from Louisiana. It boasted a majority in the cabinet and on the Supreme Court. If outnumbered in the House, the South had equality in the Senate, where it could at least neutralize northern maneuvers. Its cotton fields were expanding, and cotton prices were prof- itably high. Few sane people, North or South, believed that slavery was seriously threatened where it already existed below the Mason-Dixon line. The fifteen slave states could easily veto any proposed constitutional amendment.

Yet the South was deeply worried, as it had been for several decades, by the ever-tipping political bal- ance. There were then fifteen slave states and fifteen free states. The admission of California would destroy the delicate equilibrium in the Senate, per- haps forever. Potential slave territory under the American flag was running short, if it had not in fact

disappeared. Agitation had already developed in the territories of New Mexico and Utah for admission as nonslave states. The fate of California might well establish a precedent for the rest of the Mexican Cession territory—an area purchased largely with southern blood.

Texas nursed an additional grievance of its own. It claimed a huge area east of the Rio Grande and north to the forty-second parallel, embracing in part about half the territory of present-day New Mexico. The federal government was proposing to detach this prize, while hot-blooded Texans were threaten- ing to descend upon Santa Fe and seize what they regarded as rightfully theirs. The explosive quarrel foreshadowed shooting.

Many southerners were also angered by the nagging agitation in the North for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. They looked with alarm on the prospect of a ten-mile-square oasis of free soil thrust between slaveholding Mary- land and slaveholding Virginia.

Even more disagreeable to the South was the loss of runaway slaves, many of whom were assisted north by the Underground Railroad. This virtual freedom train consisted of an informal chain of “stations’’ (antislavery homes), through which

scores of “passengers’’ (runaway slaves) were spir- ited by “conductors’’ (usually white and black abo- litionists) from the slave states to the free-soil sanctuary of Canada.

The most amazing of these “conductors’’ was an illiterate runaway slave from Maryland, fearless Harriet Tubman. During nineteen forays into the South, she rescued more than three hundred slaves, including her aged parents, and deservedly earned the title “Moses.’’ Lively imaginations later exagger- ated the role of the Underground Railroad and its “stationmasters,’’ but its existence was a fact.

By 1850 southerners were demanding a new and more stringent fugitive-slave law. The old one, passed by Congress in 1793, had proved inadequate to cope with runaways, especially since unfriendly state authorities failed to provide needed coopera- tion. Unlike cattle thieves, the abolitionists who ran the Underground Railroad did not gain personally from their lawlessness. But to the slaveowners, the loss was infuriating, whatever the motives. The moral judgments of the abolitionists seemed, in some ways, more galling than outright theft. They

reflected not only a holier-than-thou attitude but a refusal to obey the laws solemnly passed by Congress.

Estimates indicate that the South in 1850 was losing perhaps 1,000 runaways a year out of its total of some 4 million slaves. In fact, more blacks proba- bly gained their freedom by self-purchase or volun- tary emancipation than ever escaped. But the principle weighed heavily with the slavemasters. They rested their argument on the Constitution, which protected slavery, and on the laws of Con- gress, which provided for slave-catching. “Although the loss of property is felt,’’ said a southern senator, “the loss of honor is felt still more.’’

Southern Anxieties 395

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Twilight of the Senatorial Giants

Southern fears were such that Congress was con- fronted with catastrophe in 1850. Free-soil Califor- nia was banging on the door for admission, and “fire-eaters’’ in the South were voicing ominous threats of secession. The crisis brought into the con- gressional forum the most distinguished assem- blage of statesmen since the Constitutional Convention of 1787—the Old Guard of the dying generation and the young gladiators of the new. That “immortal trio’’—Clay, Calhoun, and Web- ster—appeared together for the last time on the public stage.

Henry Clay, now seventy-three years of age, played a crucial role. The “Great Pacificator’’ had come to the Senate from Kentucky to engineer his third great compromise. The once-glamorous statesman—though disillusioned, enfeebled, and racked by a cruel cough—was still eloquent, concil- iatory, and captivating. He proposed and skillfully defended a series of compromises. He was ably sec- onded by thirty-seven-year-old Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, the “Little Giant’’ (five feet four inches), whose role was less spectacular but even more important. Clay urged with all his per- suasiveness that the North and South both make concessions and that the North partially yield by enacting a more feasible fugitive-slave law.

Senator John C. Calhoun, the “Great Nullifier,” then sixty-eight and dying of tuberculosis, champi- oned the South in his last formal speech. Too weak

to deliver it himself, he sat bundled up in the Senate chamber, his eyes glowing within a stern face, while a younger colleague read his fateful words. Although approving the purpose of Clay’s proposed conces- sions, Calhoun rejected them as not providing ade- quate safeguards. His impassioned plea was to leave slavery alone, return runaway slaves, give the South its rights as a minority, and restore the political bal- ance. He had in view, as was later revealed, an utterly unworkable scheme of electing two presi- dents, one from the North and one from the South, each wielding a veto.

Calhoun died in 1850, before the debate was over, murmuring the sad words, “The South! The South! God knows what will become of her!’’ Appre- ciative fellow citizens in Charleston erected to his memory an imposing monument, which bore the inscription “Truth, Justice, and the Constitution.’’ Calhoun had labored to preserve the Union and had taken his stand on the Constitution, but his propos- als in their behalf almost undid both.

Daniel Webster next took the Senate spotlight to uphold Clay’s compromise measures in his last great speech, a three-hour effort. Now sixty-eight years old and suffering from a liver complaint aggravated by high living, he had lost some of the fire in his magnificent voice. Speaking deliberately and before overflowing galleries, he urged all rea- sonable concessions to the South, including a new fugitive-slave law with teeth.

As for slavery in the territories, asked Webster, why legislate on the subject? To do so was an act of sacrilege, for Almighty God had already passed the Wilmot Proviso. The good Lord had decreed— through climate, topography, and geography—that a plantation economy, and hence a slave economy, could not profitably exist in the Mexican Cession territory.* Webster sanely concluded that compro- mise, concession, and sweet reasonableness would provide the only solutions. “Let us not be pygmies,’’ he pleaded, “in a case that calls for men.’’

If measured by its immediate effects, Webster’s famed Seventh of March speech, 1850, was his finest. It helped turn the tide in the North toward compromise. The clamor for printed copies became so great that Webster mailed out more than 100,000, remarking that 200,000 would not satisfy the demand. His tremendous effort visibly strength-

396 CHAPTER 18 Renewing the Sectional Struggle, 1848–1854

*Webster was wrong here; within one hundred years, California had become one of the great cotton-producing states of the Union.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the philosopher and moderate abolitionist, was outraged by Webster’s support of concessions to the South in the Fugitive Slave Act. In February 1851 he wrote in his Journal,

“I opened a paper to-day in which he [Web- ster] pounds on the old strings [of liberty] in a letter to the Washington Birthday feasters at New York. ‘Liberty! liberty!’ Pho! Let Mr. Webster, for decency’s sake, shut his lips once and forever on this word. The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.”

ened Union sentiment. It was especially pleasing to the banking and commercial centers of the North, which stood to lose millions of dollars by secession. One prominent Washington banker canceled two notes of Webster’s, totaling $5,000, and sent him a personal check for $1,000 and a message of congratulations.

But the abolitionists, who had assumed Webster was one of them, upbraided him as a traitor, worthy of bracketing with Benedict Arnold. The poet Whit- tier lamented,

So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn Which once he wore!

The glory from his gray hairs gone For evermore!

These reproaches were most unfair. Webster, who had long regarded slavery as evil but disunion as worse, had, in fact, always despised the abolitionists and never joined their ranks.

Deadlock and Danger on Capitol Hill

The stormy congressional debate of 1850 was not finished, for the Young Guard from the North were yet to have their say. This was the group of newer leaders who, unlike the aging Old Guard, had not grown up with the Union. They were more inter- ested in purging and purifying it than in patching and preserving it.

William H. Seward, the wiry and husky-throated freshman senator from New York, was the able spokesman for many of the younger northern radi- cals. A strong antislaveryite, he came out unequivo- cally against concession. He seemed not to realize that compromise had brought the Union together

and that when the sections could no longer com- promise, they would have to part company.

Seward argued earnestly that Christian legisla- tors must obey God’s moral law as well as man’s mundane law. He therefore appealed, with refer- ence to excluding slavery in the territories, to an even “higher law’’ than the Constitution. This alarming phrase, wrenched from its context, may have cost him the presidential nomination and the presidency in 1860.

The Compromise of 1850 397

Compromise of 1850

Concessions to the North Concessions to the South

California admitted as a free state The remainder of the Mexican Cession area to be formed into the territories of New Mexico and Utah, without restriction on slavery, hence open to popular sovereignty

Territory disputed by Texas and New Mexico to be Texas to receive $10 million from the federal

surrendered to New Mexico government as compensation

Abolition of the slave trade (but not slavery) in the A more stringent fugitive-slave law, going beyond that

District of Columbia of 1793

As the great debate in Congress ran its heated course, deadlock seemed certain. Blunt old Presi- dent Taylor, who had allegedly fallen under the influence of men like “Higher Law’’ Seward, seemed bent on vetoing any compromise passed by Con- gress. His military ire was aroused by the threats of Texas to seize Santa Fe. He appeared to be doggedly determined to “Jacksonize’’ the dissenters, if need be, by leading an army against the Texans in person and hanging all “damned traitors.’’ If troops had begun to march, the South probably would have ral- lied to the defense of Texas, and the Civil War might have erupted in 1850.

Breaking the Congressional Logjam

At the height of the controversy in 1850, President Taylor unknowingly helped the cause of concession by dying suddenly, probably of an acute intestinal disorder. Portly, round-faced Vice President Millard Fillmore, a colorless and conciliatory New York lawyer-politician, took over the reins. As presiding officer of the Senate, he had been impressed with the arguments for conciliation, and he gladly signed the series of compromise measures that passed Congress after seven long months of stormy debate. The balancing of interests in the Compromise of 1850 was delicate in the extreme.

The struggle to get these measures accepted by the country was hardly less heated than in Congress. In the northern states, “Union savers’’ like Senators Clay, Webster, and Douglas orated on behalf of the compromise. The ailing Clay himself delivered more than seventy speeches, as a powerful sentiment for acceptance gradually crystallized in the North. It was strengthened by a growing spirit of goodwill, which sprang partly from a feeling of relief and partly from an upsurge of prosperity enriched by California gold.

But the “fire-eaters’’ of the South were still vio- lently opposed to concessions. One extreme South Carolina newspaper avowed that it loathed the Union and hated the North as much as it did Hell itself. A movement in the South to boycott northern goods gained some headway, but in the end the southern Unionists, assisted by the warm glow of prosperity, prevailed.

In mid-1850 an assemblage of southern extrem- ists had met in Nashville, Tennessee, ironically near

the burial place of Andrew Jackson. The delegates not only took a strong position in favor of slavery but condemned the compromise measures then being hammered out in Congress. Meeting again later in the year after the bills had passed, the con- vention proved to be a dud. By that time southern opinion had reluctantly accepted the verdict of Congress.

Like the calm after a storm, a second Era of Good Feelings dawned. Disquieting talk of seces- sion subsided. Peace-loving people, both North and South, were determined that the compromises should be a “finality’’ and that the explosive issue of slavery should be buried. But this placid period of reason proved all too brief.

Balancing the Compromise Scales

Who got the better deal in the Compromise of 1850? The answer is clearly the North. California, as a free state, tipped the Senate balance permanently against the South. The territories of New Mexico and Utah were open to slavery on the basis of popu- lar sovereignty. But the iron law of nature—the “highest law’’ of all—had loaded the dice in favor of free soil. The southerners urgently needed more slave territory to restore the “sacred balance.’’ If they could not carve new states out of the recent con- quests from Mexico, where else might they get them? In the Caribbean was one answer.

Even the apparent gains of the South rang hol- low. Disgruntled Texas was to be paid $10 million toward discharging its indebtedness, but in the long run this was a modest sum. The immense area in dispute had been torn from the side of slaveholding Texas and was almost certain to be free. The South had halted the drive toward abolition in the District of Columbia, at least temporarily, by permitting the outlawing of the slave trade in the federal district. But even this move was an entering wedge toward complete emancipation in the nation’s capital.

Most alarming of all, the drastic new Fugitive Slave Law of 1850—“the Bloodhound Bill’’—stirred up a storm of opposition in the North. The fleeing slaves could not testify in their own behalf, and they were denied a jury trial. These harsh practices, some citizens feared, threatened to create dangerous precedents for white Americans. The federal com- missioner who handled the case of a fugitive would

398 CHAPTER 18 Renewing the Sectional Struggle, 1848–1854

receive five dollars if the runaway were freed and ten dollars if not—an arrangement that strongly resembled a bribe. Freedom-loving northerners who aided the slave to escape were liable to heavy fines and jail sentences. They might even be ordered to join the slave-catchers, and this possibility rubbed salt into old sores.

So savage was this “Man-Stealing Law’’ that it touched off an explosive chain reaction in the North. Many shocked moderates, hitherto passive, were driven into the swelling ranks of the antislaveryites. When a runaway slave from Virginia was captured in Boston in 1854, he had to be removed from the city under heavy federal guard through streets lined with

The Fugitive Slave Law 399

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Free Slave Decision left to territory

Slavery After the Compromise of 1850 Regarding the Fugitive Slave Act provisions of the Com- promise of 1850, Ralph Waldo Emerson declared (May 1851) at Concord, Massachusetts, “The act of Congress . . . is a law which every one of you will break on the earliest occasion—a law which no man can obey, or abet the obey- ing, without loss of self-respect and forfeiture of the name of gentleman.” Privately he wrote in his Journal, “This filthy enact- ment was made in the nineteenth century, by people who could read and write. I will not obey it, by God.”

sullen Yankees and shadowed by black-draped buildings festooned with flags flying upside down. One prominent Bostonian who witnessed this grim spectacle wrote that “we went to bed one night old- fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.’’

The Underground Railroad stepped up its timetable, and infuriated northern mobs rescued slaves from their pursuers. Massachusetts, in a move toward nullification suggestive of South Car- olina in 1832, made it a penal offense for any state official to enforce the new federal statute. Other states passed “personal liberty laws,’’ which denied local jails to federal officials and otherwise ham- pered enforcement. The abolitionists rent the heav- ens with their protests against the man-stealing statute. A meeting presided over by William Lloyd Garrison in 1851 declared, “We execrate it, we spit upon it, we trample it under our feet.’’

Beyond question, the Fugitive Slave Law was an appalling blunder on the part of the South. No sin- gle irritant of the 1850s was more persistently

galling to both sides, and none did more to awaken in the North a spirit of antagonism against the South. The southerners in turn were embittered because the northerners would not in good faith execute the law—the one real and immediate southern “gain’’ from the Great Compromise. Slave- catchers, with some success, redoubled their efforts.

Should the shooting showdown have come in 1850? From the standpoint of the secessionists, yes; from the standpoint of the Unionists, no. Time was fighting for the North. With every passing decade, this huge section was forging further ahead in pop- ulation and wealth—in crops, factories, foundries, ships, and railroads.

Delay also added immensely to the moral strength of the North—to its will to fight for the Union. In 1850 countless thousands of northern moderates were unwilling to pin the South to the rest of the nation with bayonets. But the inflamma- tory events of the 1850s did much to bolster the Yan- kee will to resist secession, whatever the cost. This one feverish decade gave the North time to accumu-

400 CHAPTER 18 Renewing the Sectional Struggle, 1848–1854

The Legal Status of Slavery, from the Revolution to the Civil War

late the material and moral strength that provided the margin of victory. Thus the Compromise of 1850, from one point of view, won the Civil War for the Union.

Defeat and Doom for the Whigs

Meeting in Baltimore, the Democratic nominating convention of 1852 startled the nation. Hopelessly deadlocked, it finally stampeded to the second “dark-horse’’ candidate in American history, an unrenowned lawyer-politician, Franklin Pierce, from the hills of New Hampshire. The Whigs tried to jeer him back into obscurity with the cry, “Who is Frank Pierce?’’ Democrats replied, “The Young Hick- ory of the Granite Hills.’’

Pierce was a weak and indecisive figure. Youngish, handsome, militarily erect, smiling, and convivial, he had served without real distinction in the Mexican War. As a result of a painful groin injury that caused him to fall off a horse, he was known as the “Fainting General,’’ though scandalmongers pointed to a fondness for alcohol. But he was ene- myless because he had been inconspicuous, and as a prosouthern northerner, he was acceptable to the slavery wing of the Democratic party. His platform came out emphatically for the finality of the Com- promise of 1850, Fugitive Slave Law and all.

The Whigs, also convening in Baltimore, missed a splendid opportunity to capitalize on their record in statecraft. Able to boast of a praiseworthy achievement in the Compromise of 1850, they might logically have nominated President Fillmore or Senator Webster, both of whom were associated with it. But having won in the past only with military heroes, they turned to another, “Old Fuss and Feath- ers’’ Winfield Scott, perhaps the ablest American general of his generation. Although he was a huge and impressive figure, his manner bordered on haughtiness. His personality not only repelled the masses but eclipsed his genuinely statesmanlike achievements. The Whig platform praised the Com- promise of 1850 as a lasting arrangement, though less enthusiastically than the Democrats.

With slavery and sectionalism to some extent soft-pedaled, the campaign again degenerated into a dull and childish attack on personalities. Demo- crats ridiculed Scott’s pomposity; Whigs charged that Pierce was the hero of “many a well-fought

bottle.’’ Democrats cried exultantly, “We Polked ’em in ’44; we’ll Pierce ’em in ’52.’’

Luckily for the Democrats, the Whig party was hopelessly split. Antislavery Whigs of the North swallowed Scott as their nominee but deplored his platform, which endorsed the hated Fugitive Slave Law. The current phrase ran, “We accept the candi- date but spit on the platform.’’ Southern Whigs, who doubted Scott’s loyalty to the Compromise of 1850 and especially the Fugitive Slave Law, accepted the platform but spat on the candidate. More than five thousand Georgia Whigs—“finality men’’—voted in vain for Webster, although he had died nearly two weeks before the election.

General Scott, victorious on the battlefield, met defeat at the ballot box. His friends remarked whim- sically that he was not used to “running.’’ Actually, he was stabbed in the back by his fellow Whigs, notably in the South. The pliant Pierce won in a landslide, 254 electoral votes to 42, although the popular count was closer, 1,601,117 to 1,385,453.

The election of 1852 was fraught with frighten- ing significance, though it may have seemed tame at the time. It marked the effective end of the disor- ganized Whig party and, within a few years, its com- plete death. The Whigs’ demise augured the eclipse of national parties and the worrisome rise of purely sectional political alignments. The Whigs were gov- erned at times by the crassest opportunism, and they won only two presidential elections (1840, 1848) in their colorful career, both with war heroes. They finally choked to death trying to swallow the distasteful Fugitive Slave Law. But their great con- tribution—and a noteworthy one indeed—was to help uphold the ideal of the Union through their electoral strength in the South and through the eloquence of leaders like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Both of these statesmen, by unhappy coin- cidence, died during the 1852 campaign. But the good they had done lived after them and con- tributed powerfully to the eventual preservation of a united United States.

President Pierce the Expansionist

At the outset the Pierce administration displayed vigor. The new president, standing confidently before some fifteen thousand people on inaugura- tion day, delivered from memory a clear-voiced

The Election of 1852 401

inaugural address. His cabinet contained aggressive southerners, including as secretary of war one Jef- ferson Davis, future president of the Confederacy. The people of Dixie were determined to acquire more slave territory, and the compliant Pierce was prepared to be their willing tool.

The intoxicating victories of the Mexican War stimulated the spirit of Manifest Destiny. The con- quest of a Pacific frontage, and the discovery of gold on it, aroused lively interest in the transisthmian land routes of Central America, chiefly in Panama and Nicaragua. Many Americans were looking even further ahead to potential canal routes and to the islands flanking them, notably Spain’s Cuba.

These visions especially fired the ambitions of the “slavocrats.’’ They lusted for new territory after the Compromise of 1850 seemingly closed most of the lands of the Mexican Cession to the “peculiar institution.’’ In 1856 a Texan proposed a toast that was drunk with gusto: “To the Southern republic bounded on the north by the Mason and Dixon line and on the South by the Isthmus of Tehuantepec [southern Mexico], including Cuba and all other lands on our Southern shore.’’

Southerners took a special interest in Nicaragua. A brazen American adventurer, William Walker, tried repeatedly to grab control of this Central American country in the 1850s. (He had earlier attempted and

failed to seize Baja California from Mexico and turn it into a slave state.) Backed by an armed force recruited largely in the South, he installed himself as president in July 1856 and promptly legalized slav- ery. One southern newspaper proclaimed to the planter aristocracy that Walker—the “gray-eyed man of destiny’’—“now offers Nicaragua to you and your slaves, at a time when you have not a friend on the face of the earth.’’ But a coalition of Central Ameri- can nations formed an alliance to overthrow him. President Pierce withdrew diplomatic recognition, and the gray-eyed man’s destiny was to crumple before a Honduran firing squad in 1860.

Nicaragua was also of vital concern to Great Britain, the world’s leading maritime and commer- cial power. Fearing that the grasping Yankees would monopolize the trade arteries there, the British made haste to secure a solid foothold at Greytown, the eastern end of the proposed Nicaraguan canal route. This challenge to the Monroe Doctrine forth- with raised the ugly possibility of an armed clash. The crisis was surmounted in 1850 by the Clayton- Bulwer Treaty, which stipulated that neither Amer- ica nor Britain would fortify or secure exclusive control over any future isthmian waterway. This agreement, at the time, seemed necessary to halt the British, but to American canal promoters in later years, it proved to be a ball and chain.

402 CHAPTER 18 Renewing the Sectional Struggle, 1848–1854

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Central America, c. 1850, Showing British Possessions and Proposed Canal Routes Until President Theodore Roosevelt swung into action with his big stick in 1903, a Nicaraguan canal, closer to the United States, was generally judged more desirable than a canal across Panama.

America had become a Pacific power with the acquisition of California and Oregon, both of which faced Asia. The prospects of a rich trade with the Far East now seemed rosier. Americans had already established contacts with China, and shippers were urging Washington to push for commercial inter- course with Japan. The mikado’s empire, after some disagreeable experiences with the European world, had withdrawn into a cocoon of isolationism and had remained there for over two hundred years. The Japanese were so protective of their insularity that they prohibited shipwrecked foreign sailors from leaving and refused to readmit to Japan their own sailors who had been washed up on the West Coast of North America. But by 1853, as events proved, Japan was ready to emerge from reclusion, partly because of the Russian menace.

The Washington government was now eager to pry open the bamboo gates of Japan. It dispatched a fleet of awesome, smoke-belching warships, com- manded by Commodore Matthew C. Perry, brother of the hero of the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813. By a

judicious display of force and tact, he persuaded the Japanese in 1854 to sign a memorable treaty. It pro- vided for only a commercial foot in the door, but it was the beginning of an epochal relationship between the Land of the Rising Sun and the Western world. Ironically, this achievement attracted little notice at the time, partly because Perry devised no memorable slogan.

Coveted Cuba: Pearl of the Antilles

Sugar-rich Cuba, lying off the nation’s southern doorstep, was the prime objective of Manifest Des- tiny in the 1850s. Supporting a large population of enslaved blacks, it was coveted by the South as the most desirable slave territory available. Carved into several states, it would once more restore the politi- cal balance in the Senate.

Cuba was a kind of heirloom—the most impor- tant remnant of Spain’s once-mighty New World empire. Polk, the expansionist, had taken steps to offer $100 million for it, but the sensitive Spaniards had replied that they would see it sunk into the ocean before they would sell it to the Americans at any price. With purchase completely out of the question, seizure was apparently the only way to pluck the ripening fruit.

Private adventurers from the South now under- took to shake the tree of Manifest Destiny. During 1850–1851 two “filibustering” expeditions (from the Spanish filibustero, meaning “freebooter” or “pirate”), each numbering several hundred armed men, descended upon Cuba. Both feeble efforts were repelled, and the last one ended in tragedy when the leader and fifty followers—some of them from the “best families’’ of the South—were summarily shot or strangled. So outraged were the southerners that an angry mob sacked Spain’s consulate in New Orleans.

Spanish officials in Cuba rashly forced a show- down in 1854, when they seized an American steamer, Black Warrior, on a technicality. Now was the time for President Pierce, dominated as he was by the South, to provoke a war with Spain and seize Cuba. The major powers of Europe—England, France, and Russia—were about to become bogged down in the Crimean War and hence were unable to aid Spain.

Caribbean Diplomacy 403

An incredible cloak-and-dagger episode fol- lowed. The secretary of state instructed the Ameri- can ministers in Spain, England, and France to prepare confidential recommendations for the acquisition of Cuba. Meeting initially at Ostend, Belgium, the three envoys drew up a top-secret dis- patch, soon known as the Ostend Manifesto. This startling document urged that the administration offer $120 million for Cuba. If Spain refused, and if its continued ownership endangered American interests, the United States would “be justified in wresting’’ the island from the Spanish.

The secret Ostend Manifesto quickly leaked out. Northern free-soilers, already angered by the Fugi- tive Slave Law and other gains for slavery, rose in an outburst of wrath against the “manifesto of brig- ands.’’ Confronted with disruption at home, the red- faced Pierce administration was forced to drop its brazen schemes for Cuba.

Clearly the slavery issue, like a two-headed snake with the heads at each other’s throat, dead- locked territorial expansion in the 1850s. The North, flushed with Manifest Destiny, was developing a renewed appetite for Canada. The South coveted Cuba. Neither section would permit the other to get the apple of its eye, so neither got either. The shack- led black hands of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom, whose plight had already stung the conscience of the North, now held the South back from Cuba. The internal distresses of the United States were such that, for once, it could not take advantage of Europe’s distresses—in this case the Crimean War.

Pacific Railroad Promoters and the Gadsden Purchase

Acute transportation problems were another legacy of the Mexican War. The newly acquired prizes of California and Oregon might just as well have been islands some eight thousand miles west of the nation’s capital. The sea routes to and from the Isthmus of Panama, to say nothing of those around South America, were too long. Covered- wagon travel past bleaching animal bones was possible, but slow and dangerous. A popular song recalled,

They swam the wide rivers and crossed the tall peaks,

And camped on the prairie for weeks upon weeks.

Starvation and cholera and hard work and slaughter,

They reached California spite of hell and high water.

Feasible land transportation was imperative— or the newly won possessions on the Pacific Coast might break away. Camels were even proposed as the answer. Several score of these temperamental beasts—“ships of the desert’’—were imported from the Near East, but mule-driving Americans did not adjust to them. A transcontinental railroad was clearly the only real solution to the problem.

Railroad promoters, both North and South, had projected many drawing-board routes to the Pacific Coast. But the estimated cost in all cases was so great that for many years there could obviously be only one line. Should its terminus be in the North or in the South? The favored section would reap rich rewards in wealth, population, and influence. The South, losing the economic race with the North, was eager to extend a railroad through adjacent south- western territory all the way to California.

Another chunk of Mexico now seemed desir- able, because the campaigns of the recent war had shown that the best railway route ran slightly south of the Mexican border. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, a Mississippian, arranged to have James Gadsden, a prominent South Carolina railroad man, appointed minister to Mexico. Finding Santa Anna

404 CHAPTER 18 Renewing the Sectional Struggle, 1848–1854

The first platform of the newly born (antislavery) Republican party in 1856 lashed out at the Ostend Manifesto, with its transparent suggestion that Cuba be seized. The plank read,

“Resolved, That the highwayman’s plea, that ‘might makes right,’ embodied in the Ostend Circular, was in every respect unworthy of American diplomacy, and would bring shame and dishonor upon any Government or people that gave it their sanction.”

in power for the sixth and last time, and as usual in need of money, Gadsden made gratifying headway. He negotiated a treaty in 1853, which ceded to the United States the Gadsden Purchase area for $10 million. The transaction aroused much criticism among northerners, who objected to paying a huge sum for a cactus-strewn desert nearly the size of Gadsden’s South Carolina. Undeterred, the Senate approved the pact, in the process shortsightedly eliminating a window on the Sea of Cortez.

No doubt the Gadsden Purchase enabled the South to claim the coveted railroad with even greater insistence. A southern track would be easier to build because the mountains were less high and because the route, unlike the proposed northern lines, would not pass through unorganized territory. Texas was already a state at this point, and New Mexico (with the Gadsden Purchase added) was a formally organized territory, with federal troops available to provide protection against marauding tribes of Indians. Any northern or central railroad line would have to be thrust through the unorgan- ized territory of Nebraska, where the buffalo and Indians roamed.

Northern railroad boosters quickly replied that if organized territory were the test, then Nebraska should be organized. Such a move was not prema- ture, because thousands of land-hungry pioneers were already poised on the Nebraska border. But all schemes proposed in Congress for organizing the territory were greeted with apathy or hostility by many southerners. Why should the South help cre-

ate new free-soil states and thus cut its own throat by facilitating a northern railroad?

Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Scheme

At this point in 1854, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois delivered a counterstroke to offset the Gads- den thrust for southern expansion westward. A squat, bull-necked, and heavy-chested figure, the “Little Giant’’ radiated the energy and breezy opti- mism of the self-made man. An ardent booster for the West, he longed to break the North-South dead- lock over westward expansion and stretch a line of settlements across the continent. He had also invested heavily in Chicago real estate and in rail- way stock and was eager to have the Windy City become the eastern terminus of the proposed Pacific railroad. He would thus endear himself to the voters of Illinois, benefit his section, and enrich his own purse.

A veritable “steam engine in breeches,’’ Douglas threw himself behind a legislative scheme that would enlist the support of a reluctant South. The proposed Territory of Nebraska would be sliced into two territories, Kansas and Nebraska. Their status regarding slavery would be settled by popular sover- eignty—a democratic concept to which Douglas and his western constituents were deeply attached. Kansas, which lay due west of slaveholding Mis- souri, would presumably choose to become a slave

The Gadsden Purchase 405

The Gadsden Purchase, 1853

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state. But Nebraska, lying west of free-soil Iowa, would presumably become a free state.

Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska scheme ran head- long into a formidable political obstacle. The Mis- souri Compromise of 1820 had forbidden slavery in the proposed Nebraska Territory, which lay north of the sacred 36° 30' line, and the only way to open the region to popular sovereignty was to repeal the ancient compact outright. This bold step Douglas was prepared to take, even at the risk of shattering the uneasy truce patched together by the Compro- mise of 1850.

Many southerners, who had not conceived of Kansas as slave soil, rose to the bait. Here was a chance to gain one more slave state. The pliable President Pierce, under the thumb of southern advisers, threw his full weight behind the Kansas- Nebraska Bill.

But the Missouri Compromise, now thirty-four years old, could not be brushed aside lightly. What- ever Congress passes it can repeal, but by this time the North had come to regard the sectional pact as almost as sacred as the Constitution itself. Free-soil members of Congress struck back with a vengeance. They met their match in the violently gesticulating Douglas, who was the ablest rough-and-tumble debater of his generation. Employing twisted logic and oratorical fireworks, he rammed the bill through Congress, with strong support from many southerners. So heated were political passions that bloodshed was barely averted. Some members car- ried a concealed revolver or a bowie knife—or both.

Douglas’s motives in prodding anew the snarling dog of slavery have long puzzled historians. His per-

406 CHAPTER 18 Renewing the Sectional Struggle, 1848–1854

sonal interests have already been mentioned. In addition, his foes accused him of angling for the presidency in 1856. Yet his admirers have argued plausibly in his defense that if he had not champi- oned the ill-omened bill, someone else would have.

The truth seems to be that Douglas acted some- what impulsively and recklessly. His heart did not bleed over the issue of slavery, and he declared repeatedly that he did not care whether it was voted up or down in the territories. What he failed to per- ceive was that hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens in the North did feel deeply on this moral issue. They regarded the repeal of the Missouri Com- promise as an intolerable breach of faith, and they would henceforth resist to the last trench all future southern demands for slave territory. As Abraham Lincoln said, the North wanted to give to pioneers in the West “a clean bed, with no snakes in it.’’

Genuine leaders, like skillful chess players, must foresee the possible effects of their moves. Douglas predicted a “hell of a storm,’’ but he grossly under- estimated its proportions. His critics in the North, branding him a “Judas’’ and a “traitor,’’ greeted his name with frenzied boos, hisses, and “three groans for Doug.’’ But he still enjoyed a high degree of pop- ularity among his following in the Democratic party, especially in Illinois, a stronghold of popular sovereignty.

Congress Legislates a Civil War

The Kansas-Nebraska Act—a curtain raiser to a terrible drama—was one of the most momentous measures ever to pass Congress. By one way of reck- oning, it greased the slippery slope to Civil War.

Antislavery northerners were angered by what they condemned as an act of bad faith by the “Nebrascals’’ and their “Nebrascality.’’ All future

The Kansas-Nebraska Act 407

Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner (1811–1874) described the Kansas-Nebraska Bill as “at once the worst and the best Bill on which Congress ever acted.” It was the worst because it represented a victory for the slave power in the short run. But it was the best, he said prophetically, because it

“annuls all past compromises with slavery, and makes all future compromises impossible. Thus it puts freedom and slavery face to face, and bids them grapple. Who can doubt the result?”

Kansas and Nebraska, 1854 The future Union Pacific Railroad (completed in 1869) is shown. Note the Missouri Compromise line of 36° 30' (1820).

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compromise with the South would be immeasur- ably more difficult, and without compromise there was bound to be conflict.

Henceforth the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, pre- viously enforced in the North only halfheartedly, was a dead letter. The Kansas-Nebraska Act wrecked two compromises: that of 1820, which it repealed specifi- cally, and that of 1850, which northern opinion repealed indirectly. Emerson wrote, “The Fugitive [Slave] Law did much to unglue the eyes of men, and now the Nebraska Bill leaves us staring.’’ Northern abolitionists and southern “fire-eaters’’ alike saw less and less they could live with. The growing legion of antislaveryites gained numerous recruits, who resented the grasping move by the “slavocracy’’ for Kansas. The southerners, in turn, became inflamed when the free-soilers tried to control Kansas, con- trary to the presumed “deal.’’

The proud Democrats—a party now over half a century old—were shattered by the Kansas- Nebraska Act. They did elect a president in 1856, but he was the last one they were to boost into the White House for twenty-eight long years.

Undoubtedly the most durable offspring of the Kansas-Nebraska blunder was the new Republican party. It sprang up spontaneously in the Middle West, notably in Wisconsin and Michigan, as a mighty moral protest against the gains of slavery. Gathering together dissatisfied elements, it soon included dis- gruntled Whigs (among them Abraham Lincoln), Democrats, Free-Soilers, Know-Nothings, and other foes of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The hodgepodge party spread eastward with the swiftness of a prairie fire and with the zeal of a religious crusade. Unheard- of and unheralded at the beginning of 1854, it elected a Republican Speaker of the House of Representa- tives within two years. Never really a third-party movement, it erupted with such force as to become almost overnight the second major political party— and a purely sectional one at that.

At long last the dreaded sectional rift had appeared. The new Republican party would not be allowed south of the Mason-Dixon line. Countless southerners subscribed wholeheartedly to the sen- timent that it was “a nigger stealing, stinking, putrid, abolition party.’’ The Union was in dire peril.

408 CHAPTER 18 Renewing the Sectional Struggle, 1848–1854

C h r o n o l o g y

1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ends Mexican War

Taylor defeats Cass and Van Buren for presidency

1849 California gold rush

1850 Fillmore assumes presidency after Taylor’s death

Compromise of 1850, including Fugitive Slave Law

Clayton-Bulwer Treaty with Britain

1852 Pierce defeats Scott for presidency

1853 Gadsden Purchase from Mexico

1854 Commodore Perry opens Japan Ostend Manifesto proposes seizure of

Cuba Kansas-Nebraska Act Republican party organized

1856 William Walker becomes president of Nicaragua and legalizes slavery

For further reading, see page A13 of the Appendix. For web resources, go to http://college.hmco.com.