American Experiment (85 page)

Political balances strengthened governmental ones. Both major parties had their roots in the South and North; both appealed to a variety of economic, social, sectional, and other interests besides the slavery and antislavery groups; both saw the need for building North-South coalitions if they were to realize their great objective—winning presidential elections. Hence each party was a big noisy machine for devouring, morselizing, and blending sharp ideological and local attitudes that otherwise might become indigestible. Each big party machine was a cluster of countervailing state and local parties, interests, classes. Inevitably such equipoises had a static, conservative bias toward the status quo. “Balance was organic,” for leaders like Webster, in Robert Dalzell’s words. “Its roots lay in the past. It grew and developed over time; continuity was its vital force.”

This nationwide equilibrium of rival and conflicting interests, delicately balanced in national institutions and state and local constituencies, was ordinarily flexible and durable, but it was vulnerable too, especially to the single overriding, highly controversial moral cause that, unlike the
ordinary conflicts the system devoured, could not be morselized. That kind of moral conflict rather threatened to shred the machine. Other powerful forces could shock the system—wars, migration of population, severe economic depression. Two great forces, however, ordinarily provided elements of continuity and stability and predictability to the system of balances—the major parties; and the quadrennial presidential elections, which forced even the more extremist politicians to moderate their causes and their tongues, broaden their platforms, build coalitions with rival interests, and offer a candidacy of national appeal. Such an election seemed to be approaching in 1848.

1848! The equilibrium of Europe, at least, was sorely threatened as commotions and rebellions swept through Paris, Vienna, Prague, Venice, Milan. Suddenly established authority on the Continent was demonstrating its impotence. Louis Philippe abdicated; Emperor Ferdinand I escaped to Innsbruck, and then abdicated; Pius IX fled to Gaeta. New leaders were emerging, like Lajos Kossuth in Hungary and Louis Napoleon in France. And in London two men, little known except within international left-wing movements, put out a document called the
Communist Manifesto.
All this was a lesson to Americans that even the most venerable and seemingly stable institutions were open to change. But Americans were hardly listening, save for a fringe of humanitarians who focused their reform activism on the campaign against slavery.

Abolitionists had been agitating against slavery for decades; in the 1840s many resolved that the time had come for political action. It was not an obvious or easy decision. Purists in the movement had argued for years that the Constitution and the government themselves must be considered the enemy, that to take part in electoral and party battle was to be fatally compromised by the proslavery system it defended. And if antislavery militants did lead their movement into political action, further harsh strategic questions arose: Should antislavery men fight for abolition of all existing slavery, or simply for restrictions on the extension of slavery? Should they pursue the tactic of “one-ideaism”—concern themselves only with slavery—or work with reformers pursuing other and sometimes related causes, such as free education, temperance, women’s rights, penal reform? Should they form their own party, or work within one or both of the major parties? This last was perhaps the hardest question, for antislavery leaders knew of some Democrats and even more Whigs who were as hostile to slavery as they were.

By 1840 at least some antislavery leaders were ready for political action, if only because their nonpolitical activity had proved so unrewarding. Meetings of abolitionists organized a loose-knit “Liberty party” and
nominated James G. Birney for President. Birney epitomized the problems and progress of antislavery. A onetime slave owner himself, he had moved to Alabama, entered politics, and advocated the use of legislative power to emancipate slaves and prohibit their interstate sale. Later he sold his plantation and slaves and became an agent for the American Colonization Society. Increasingly convinced that colonization would expand the slave trade, he returned to Kentucky, freeing his last few slaves, helped form the Kentucky Anti-Slavery Society, and called for united action against the evil. As an activist who favored working within the political system, he was a logical candidate for President in 1840. The Liberty-ites, however, polled barely 7,000 votes, and had minimal effect on the outcome. Four years later the party won almost ten times as many votes, but ironically it may have given the election to Polk by cutting into Clay’s Whig support in the crucial New York race.

By 1848 Texas, the war, Oregon, and calls for “Free Soil” had immensely enlarged the antislavery movement. In the Democratic party the movement now included the “Barnburners,” so named because they had repudiated a New York Democratic convention in 1847 rather than accept its conservative platform, on the model of the Dutch farmer who had burned his barn to get rid of the rats. This action had left “Hunkers”—conservative party regulars—in control of a diminished Democracy. As the radical wing of the party, Barnburners turned increasingly toward antislavery in their national posture.

The Whigs, based more in the North, were even more divided over slavery than the Democrats. For some years there had been developing within that party an antislavery movement enjoying the agreeable designation “Conscience Whigs.” Arrayed against them in increasing numbers were the “Cotton Whigs,” so called for their support of cooperation with southern moderates and their close financial and political connections with the cotton growers of the South. Spiritually and intellectually based in Boston’s Unitarianism and Concord’s Transcendentalism, Conscience Whiggery took a moral stand on slavery that aroused compassionate Americans throughout the North and Northwest. Leaders of the two Whig factions seemed often to hate each other more than the common Democratic foe. It was not a Democrat but a Whig who labeled Cotton Whig moderation as a conspiracy between “the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.”

As 1848 approached, antislavery leaders within and outside the major parties stepped up their efforts to offer a presidential candidate clearly opposed to the extension of slavery. What should be the strategy? Purist abolitionists clung to their policy of scorning parties and elections in favor
of moral appeals. Old Liberty party leaders and anti-extension Democrats and Whigs began to think the unthinkable—abandoning their parties and joining a new movement pledged to the Wilmot Proviso. The old “Liberty men” faced difficult choices. Should they exchange the moral impact of their intense single cause for the wider electoral support they could gain through coalition? Under the leadership of Salmon P. Chase, a forty-year-old Cincinnati lawyer who had fought the 1793 fugitive-slave law up to the Supreme Court (and lost), many Liberty men moved toward a broad Free-Soil movement. They would pay the price of compromise through collaboration, for despite all their vaunted militancy the Free-Soilers would be, as Eric Foner has pointed out, the first major antislavery group to avoid the question of Negro rights in their national platform. But it was this kind of concession that made it possible for the Free-Soil movement to embrace strong anti-extensionists, moderate Conscience Whigs, and those Barnburners who were far more concerned with the impact of slavery on whites than on blacks. The desertion of their parties by anti-extension Democrats and Whigs eased tensions within the two major parties, which continued their middle-of-the-road strategy of conciliating pro- and anti-extension delegates in their presidential conventions.

With basic strategic choices made, presidential election politics now unfolded as if following a master scenario.

November 1847:
The Liberty party convenes in New York and nominates Senator John P. Hale, New Hampshire apostate Democrat, for President.

May 1848:
The Democratic national convention, fiercely divided over slavery extension, meeting in Baltimore, promptly splits apart over the question of seating contested delegations of Barnburners and Hunkers from New York; when compromise efforts fail, neither delegation sits in the convention. When the convention nominates Lewis Cass, veteran Democrat, ex-general, opponent of Free Soil, advocate of “squatter sovereignty,” the Hunkers pledge their support; the Barnburners pointedly do not.

Early June:
The Whig national convention assembles in Philadelphia to decide among the often nominated but never elected Henry Clay and a choice of two generals of Mexican War fame, Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott. The Whigs, like the Democrats the month before, oppose congressional power to control slavery in the territories. They choose war hero Taylor.

Now into this scenario intrudes a new anti-extensionist leader but a moderate of yore—the old fox of Kinderhook, ex-President Martin Van Buren himself. As the master organizer and unifier of the Jacksonian
Democratic party, Van Buren had always taken a soft position on slavery; in particular, he had fought the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, amid the taunts of the abolitionists. Since his defeat in 1840 he had reluctantly moved toward a strong anti-extension position. Old Democratic party comrades broke with him, but he had the support of his handsome and personable son John, who doubled as a kind of Democratic party Prince Charming and as an eloquent adversary of slavery. Could the old man now be trusted? Free-Soilers asked, and the verdict was generally yes. Besides, he was immensely available, with his big national reputation and following.

Late June:
The seceding Barnburners hold their own convention in Utica and nominate Van Buren for President.

August:
Liberty-ites, Barnburners and other antislavery Democrats, and Conscience Whigs hold the national convention of the Free-Soil party in a huge, broiling tent in Buffalo and also nominate Van Buren for President, after sidetracking Hale. The Free-Soilers proclaim their slogan:
“FREE SOIL, FREE SPEECH, FREE LABOR, FREE MEN!
”

November:
Taylor defeats Cass by 1,360,000 to 1,220,000 in the popular vote, 163 to 127 in the electoral college.

A striking aspect of the 1848 results was the mottled voting pattern; Taylor carried eight slave states and seven free; Cass, eight free and seven slave. Hence the Whigs, like the Democrats under Polk and Van Buren, would govern with their political support and obligation fixed in slaveholding as well as anti-extension constituencies. Another key outcome was Van Buren’s failure to carry a single state with his 291,000 votes. His main role—ironic for the Democracy’s supreme organization man—was to help pull his old party down. The Barnburners were gleeful—they had set fire to a big barn and they had punished some proslavery rats. But to what avail was this, if a huge new log cabin packed with southern and Cotton Whigs stood in its place?

Americans had come to expect a period of calm following presidential elections. The arguments had been made; the people had spoken; let the new man show what he could do. But the election of 1848 seemed to bring little surcease. Late in January 1849, even before Taylor took office, a caucus of southern senators and representatives, under the leadership of John Calhoun, after heated debate issued a “Southern Address” that charged the North with “acts of aggression” against southern rights. If the North did not moderate its position on fugitive slaves and territorial slavery, the address proclaimed to the South, “nothing would remain for you but to stand up immovably in defense of rights, involving your all—your property, prosperity, equality, liberty, and safety.…” At heart the address
legitimated the need for southern separatism on the ground that the North was bent on demanding emancipation and racial equality. When Congress convened in December the House immediately became the theater of a struggle between southern Democrats and northern Whigs over the Speakership. Only after sixty-three ballotings and bitter threats on both sides was Democrat Howell Cobb of Georgia chosen over Whig Robert C. Winthrop of Massachusetts.

Three thousand miles to the west, something had happened that would affect all the calculations of the geometry of balance. Sutter’s man James Marshall, boss of the mill, had looked into the stream and seen golden specks dancing amid the churning tailrace. Gold! Marshall rushed to Sutter, and soon the news was sweeping through the valley and out into the world.

Indians had often brought small quantities of gold dust to the Spanish missions in California, and white settlers in the early 1840s made two strikes that had aroused little excitement. But as the water coursed through the millrace near the Sacramento River, it led the way to a billion-dollar fortune. By midsummer of 1848, the U.S. military governor reported that “mills were lying idle, fields of wheat were open to cattle and horses, houses vacant, and farms going to waste” the entire length of the territory, as most of the population hurried to the gold fields. The prospectors pried nuggets from the ground with knives and picks, or built dams to uncover the grains of gold in the streambeds. They sifted heavy gold dust from the black river gravel with any tool from a pan to an elaborate wooden frame operated by several men. Word reached the East of yields of fifty or even a hundred dollars a day.

Easterners remained skeptical of the golden tales from California until December, when 230 ounces of almost pure metal arrived in Washington. Then newspapers, shipping lines, and thousands of citizens from every walk of life went wild. The gold seekers rushed to California by sea around Cape Horn, across Panama or Mexico by mule, over the Great Plains in wagons. More than 40,000 people arrived in 1849, with even more to follow in the succeeding years. In San Francisco Bay lay five hundred ships abandoned by their crews, while the sleepy village of San Francisco became a city of several thousand inhabitants in just a few months.

As adventurers from every state and a dozen nations scrambled to reap the golden harvest, law and order broke down. The white and Mexican Californians watched with anguish as the newcomers seized their lands, murdered and hanged one another, and trod over the local Indians in the
race for gold. The territory needed government, and quickly. In August 1849 voters from each district met to choose delegates—lawyers, farmers, merchants, and a scattering of professional men—to a convention on statehood. When they gathered in Monterey in September, the town had no hotels and some of the state-makers had to sleep under the open skies. The delegates’ deliberations were brief and occasionally stormy. Everyone wanted the state capital to be located in his district; the Mexicans, remembering Fremont’s Bear Flag revolt, objected to the inclusion of a bear on the state banner. Nonetheless, all agreed to a constitutional provision that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude…shall ever be tolerated in this state.”