American Experiment (86 page)

The Californians’ decision on slavery accelerated the conflict in Washington. President Taylor urged Congress to admit California into the Union with its free-state constitution. Southerners bridled at the idea of admitting a free state without compensation to southern rights. Debates in the House and Senate raged over slavery extension. When Representative Charles Allen, Massachusetts Free-Soiler, mocked the Southerners for their vain threats against the Union, asserting that “their united force could not remove one of the marble columns which support this Hall,” H. W. Hilliard of Alabama rebuked him: “I say to him and to this whole House, that the
Union of these States is in great peril.
” He had never known such deep and settled feeling in the South, Hilliard added. If the North persisted in its threats to the South,
“THIS UNION CANNOT STAND.”
The Northerners were accused of an act of aggression against the South. To many persons, North and South, the nation appeared on the verge of war.

By 1850 the great balances of the American system seemed to be collapsing. Constitution, parties, Congress, the presidency were no longer acting as resilient, stabilizing foundations for the flexible bonds of union. It was at this point of extreme crisis that two men who had embodied the spirit and calculus of compromise appeared on the scene for one last titanic effort.

Early on the evening of January 21, 1850, Henry Clay plodded through a Washington snowstorm to visit Daniel Webster in the latter’s house. Clay had a bad cough; he was leaner now, an old man entering his mid-seventies, but he was as courtly and charming as ever, and although the visit was unexpected, the two rivals fell into an intense discussion. Clay had a plan—to gather all the issues dividing Congress into one omnibus package of conciliation that might unite it. Clay would admit California as a free state, compel Texas to relinquish its claim to New Mexico but reward it with federal assumption of Texas’ unpaid debt, leave slavery untouched in the District of Columbia but abolish the slave trade in the District, enact a more
effective fugitive-slave law, have Congress declare that it had no power to deal with the interstate slave trade, and, as for the rest of the territory acquired from Mexico, Clay would grant it territorial governments with no slavery provisions at all. For some time the two men talked—Clay lean and nervous, as a witness remembered, the play of emotion on his expressive face; Webster grave, intent, inscrutable. Encouraged by Webster’s response, Clay began planning his speech to the Senate.

Eight days later, Clay presented his omnibus proposal to the Senate. The chamber was so jammed with people that the temperature rose to 100 degrees. He had witnessed many periods of anxiety and peril, he said, but he had “never before arisen to address any assembly so oppressed, so appalled, so anxious.” Clay seemed almost like a death’s-head, with his long, iron-gray hair, sunken cheeks, pinched nose, and black costume. Yet he was able to talk for three hours that day and the next, presenting his plan in detail and beseeching Congress to rise above its sectional animosities. He admitted that the omnibus proposal offered more to the South than the North; the richer and more powerful North could afford to be generous. His final words were to “conjure gentlemen…by all their love of liberty” and for posterity to draw back from the precipice, and he implored Heaven that if the Union should dissolve, “I may not survive to behold the sad and heart-rending spectacle.”

Even the Great Pacificator’s oratory seemed inadequate now. Senators still put their own sectional claims above union, and Congress soon again dissolved into a war of factions. Abolitionists in the North and proslavery extremists in the South were loudly calling for dissolution. Most moderate southern Whigs and northern Democrats favored Clay’s plan, while northern Whigs stood by President Taylor in opposition. Jefferson Davis spoke for southern ultras: the South would yield nothing. On March 4 John Calhoun came to the Senate, though mortally ill. His speech had to be read for him, but the message came through strongly. If California should be admitted, it could only be “with the intention of destroying irretrievably the equilibrium between the two sections,” and the South would be forced to leave the Union.

Three days later, Webster rose in a chamber even more oppressive and crowded than when Clay had spoken. Fashionable women sat in any available chair and gathered around the steps leading to the rostrum. The nation’s notables were there: “Old Bullion” Benton, Clay, Lewis Cass, Davis, Stephen A. Douglas, and a flock of personages from the House. Webster thanked another senator who had yielded his place so that Webster could speak, and began:

“Mr. President, I wish to speak to-day, not as a Massachusetts man, nor
as a northern man, but as an American.…I speak to-day for the preservation of the Union. ‘Hear me for my cause.’…” It was a long speech, studded with historical allusions, references to increasing disunion such as the rift within the Methodist Church, constitutional arguments. On occasion Calhoun feebly intervened, but for the most part, peering out of cavernous eyes shrouded by a mass of snow-white hair, he sat in deathly stillness. Webster’s address was, in effect, a long historical essay, in which he handed out praise and blame variously to South and North, like some supreme arbiter. He ended on a personal note. What would happen if the Constitution actually were overthrown? What states would secede? What would remain American? Where would the flag remain? “What am I to be—an American no longer?” He ended with poetry’s tribute to his great love,
Union:

Now, the broad shield complete, the artist crowned

With his last hand, and poured the ocean round;

In living silver seemed the waves to roll,

And beat the buckler berge, and bound the whole.

If Congress were good theater, the marvelously conciliating speeches of Clay and Webster and others would have come to an early climax in dramatic confrontations as final votes were taken on the omnibus proposal. But Congress was not good theater. Rather, through the complex, fracturing effect of powerful committees, legislative procedures, and personages, the omnibus was stripped apart and converted back into individual measures, which could be picked off in turn by shifting majorities. To make matters worse for the Unionists, President Taylor, while supporting some of the proposals individually, opposed Clay’s omnibus compromise as such. The proposals seemed headed for defeat when Taylor suddenly died of cholera a few days after taking part in the festivities of a Fourth of July celebration of the building of the Washington Monument. Eager to strengthen his relationship with northern Whigs, Taylor had been willing for Webster to be denounced by New Englanders as a traitor and moral renegade for his compromising stand.

The new President was Millard Fillmore, a conciliatory fifty-year-old New Yorker who had been pursuing a lackluster career as a state and congressional politico when he was tapped to balance a presidential ticket led by a southern soldier. Fillmore was more agreeable to the omnibus proposals than Taylor. Unlike his predecessor, he was not expected to veto a general compromise. By now Clay, tired and ailing, and Webster, newly appointed as Fillmore’s Secretary of State, were no longer the central figures on the congressional stage. The measures had passed into the
hands of younger, more practical men who may have lacked the grand Union vision of a Clay or Webster but who knew how to bargain and maneuver, wheedle and pressure. The compromise that Clay and Webster, as supreme transactional leaders, had seen emerging from a carefully calculated geometry of balance, bringing sections and interests and ideologies into a stable and creative equilibrium, the new men saw as a matter of arithmetic, adding here, subtracting there, in a linear series of transactions. California admission, the fugitive-slave bill, and the other key measures went through in a rush in September 1850. The Great Compromise—tattered, battered, mutilated, but still a great compromise—was law.

Something of a lull followed. “There is rejoicing over the land; the bone of contention is removed; disunion, fanaticism, violence, insurrection are defeated,” Philip Hone wrote in his diary. “The lovers of peace, the friends of the Union” had sacrificed sectional prejudices and prevailed. The presidential election of 1852 had little of the excitement and conflict of 1848. The Democrats nominated a party wheelhorse, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, the Whigs another general, sixty-six-year-old Winfield Scott. Both parties supported the Compromise of 1850 and opposed any further agitation of the fugitive-slave question. After a campaign in which neither candidate spoke out on controversial issues, Pierce won the election, carrying all but four states.

California cast four electoral votes for Pierce in 1852, a reminder that the United States now truly did span the continent. Californians celebrated their entry into the Union with cannonades. Those who hoped that order would follow statehood were cruelly disappointed. In California, liberty often came to mean license for the strong and unscrupulous to seize property or pleasure. The individual, reckless and self-confident, was supreme—until he was murdered, as were 4,200 whites and uncounted numbers of Indians during the 1850s.

John Sutter watched, helpless, as prospectors stripped his wheat fields for feed for their horses, thieves butchered and sold $60,000 worth of his cattle, and business agents swindled him out of vast sums. Finally, one summer evening, fire struck the Sacramento office that held his land grants and deeds. A fire bell in the night mocked Sutter’s reliance on law.

Bitter debate in Washington; reckless individualism in California—would the flame burning in New England, kindled by a group of vigorous thinkers and writers, add to the heat of these other fires? Or would it light the way to a deeper understanding of the benefits—and the burdens—of liberty?

“T
HERE WAS NOT A
book, a speech, a conversation, or a thought” in Massachusetts from 1790 to 1830, Emerson noted with poetic license. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, however, a potent alchemy of human forces transmuted the flinty soil of New England thought into a seedbed for intellectual and artistic growth. New England, after undergoing the struggles first of a military revolution and then of an industrial one, seemed to be heeding John Adams’ admonition to himself: “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy…geography, natural history and naval architecture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” At its height in the early 1850s the flowering of New England would bring forth Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter
, Melville’s
Moby-Dick
, Thoreau’s
Walden
, and other notable works.

Only a convergence of powerful forces could produce such a transformation. One was economic. The same mercantile and industrial development that had turned people’s minds toward the shipyard and the counting-house had fostered a more diversified economy that in turn encouraged a more diversified culture, with room at its joints and in its interstices for dissent and experimentation. In particular, the ample fortunes of New England philanthropists, prodded by Puritan duty, made possible the founding of libraries, the patronage of artists, the endowment of academic chairs, the higher education of sons—and occasionally daughters—in painting, poetry, music, and other lively arts.

The maturing New England mind was seasoned and sharpened by conflict. Boston Federalists and their Whig descendants had thundered against the Jeffersons and Jacksons, the Van Burens and Polks, but the fiercest disputes arose over religious doctrine. Congregationalist Calvinism had long been wracked with disputes between conservative belief in literal scriptural and ecclesiastical authority, in the divinity of Jesus, in the depravity of man, and in revelation, as against an ethical-humanitarian Christianity that stressed the potential of individual reason as a guide to truth, the unity rather than the trinity of God, the individual as a source
of reason and conscience, and the possibilities of the regeneration and even the perfectibility of man. For Bostonians this dispute had come to a head over a professorial appointment to the Hollis Chair of Divinity at Harvard in 1805. A pitched battle for support among the Harvard overseers had produced a narrow victory for the liberals and the appointment to the Harvard Divinity School of a string of Unitarian professors of theology. Outvoted, the conservative ministers seceded from Harvard and founded the Andover Theological Seminary, which proceeded to conduct genteel battle with the divinity school. Eloquent theologians reached far beyond their congregations to arouse students, businessmen, writers, and lawyers to higher doctrinal and political consciousness.

But affluence and conflict alone could not account for the flowering of the New England mind; rather they might have degraded or fractured it, save for one other decisive factor—the rise of an intellectual base, an institutional school that supported a system of collective intellectual and artistic leadership. This is what distinguished the collectivity of literary genius in the 1840s from the individual geniuses earlier in the century.

In that early period Washington Irving, growing up in New York City, found no literary companionship that might have lifted him above the level of his witty but superficial writing. Only in England and on the Continent, in Sir Walter Scott and lesser lights, did he find intellectual collegiality. After years abroad, he returned home a literary hero, but as Vernon Parrington wrote, he had “gently detached himself from contemporary America, and detached he remained to the end of a loitering life.” Nor had James Fenimore Cooper found in New York a milieu that drew on his highest intellectual and artistic powers. Born of a rich, manorial family in rural New Jersey, Cooper moved from Mamaroneck to Cooperstown to Scarsdale and then to New York. In 1826, after four years in New York, he left with his family to travel and write in Europe. Later he returned, alienated from his compatriots, to conduct a long running war with his critics and detractors. Affronted by the frontier squalor of America, its bumptious manners, vulgar egalitarianism, debased press and politics, he lived out his days, intellectually and politically isolated, in Cooperstown. William Cullen Bryant was another intellectual semi-isolate. Reared in a small country town in the western Massachusetts mountain land, he had a year’s education at Williams—then a college of four faculty members and a lean curriculum—before family penury forced him to give up higher education. In his early twenties he wrote a much-heralded poem—
Thanatopsis
—and, moving to New York, he soon emerged as the nation’s leading poet of nature. Still, his poetic range was narrow and his poetic creativity limited, essentially of a “self-pollenizing nature,” in Parrington’s words.