Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (16 page)

Taylor did indeed intend to call the southern bluff, if bluff it was. His message to Congress in January 1850 urged admission of California as a state immediately and of New Mexico when it was ready. Taylor never receded from this position. When Toombs and Stephens appealed

44
. Cooper,
The South and the Politics of Slavery
, 282; Fehrenbacher,
The South and Three Sectional Crises
, 40.

45
.
CG
, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., 27–28, 257–61; Thornton,
Politics and Power in a Slave Society
, 213.

46
. Rhodes,
History of the U.S
., I, 131–33. In the political lexicon of the time a doughface was "a northern man with southern principles."

to him as a southerner, warning him that the South would not "submit" to these insults, Taylor lost his temper. In unpresidential language he told them that he would personally lead an army to enforce the laws and hang any traitors he caught—including Toombs and Stephens—with as little compunction as he had hanged spies and deserters in Mexico. Taylor afterward commented to an associate that he had previously regarded Yankees as the aggressors in sectional disputes, but his experience since taking office had convinced him that southerners were "intolerant and revolutionary" and that his former son-in-law Jefferson Davis was their "chief conspirator."
⁴⁷

Presidential threats did nothing to pacify the South. "There is a bad state of things here," reported an Illinois congressman. "I fear this Union is in danger."
⁴⁸
Calhoun himself found southern congressmen "more determined and bold than I ever saw them. Many avow themselves dis-unionists, and a still greater number admit, that there is little hope of any remedy short of it." Calhoun may have overstated the case. Those who avowed themselves disunionists per se—who scorned Yankees, believed that irreconcilable differences existed between North and South, and earned the label "fire-eaters" because of their passionate avowal of southern nationalism—were still a minority, even in South Carolina. A larger number, including Calhoun himself, preserved at least a "little hope" of a remedy short of secession. In Calhoun's case it was mighty little, to be sure. "As things now stand," he wrote privately on February 16, 1850, the South "cannot with safety remain in the Union . . . and there is little or no prospect of any change for the better." Nevertheless, Calhoun and other southerners continued to press for "some timely and effective measure" of concession by the North to avert secession.
⁴⁹

Hanging over the head of Congress like a sword of Damocles was a scheduled convention of slave-state delegates "to devise and adopt some mode of resistance to northern aggression." Thus had Calhoun's long-ripening project for southern unity come to fruition. Suffering the onset of consumption that would send him to his grave within five months, the South Carolinian remained in the background and let Mississippi

47
.
Ibid
., 134; Thelma Jennings,
The Nashville Convention: Southern Movement for Unity, 1848–1851
(Memphis, 1980), 49.

48
. Potter,
Impending Crisis
, 89.

49
. J. Franklin Jameson, ed.,
Correspondence of John C. Calhoun
, in Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1899, vol. II (Washington, 1900), 780–82; Jennings,
Nashville Convention
, 50.

take the lead. A bipartisan meeting at Jackson in October 1849 issued a call for a convention at Nashville the following June. Few could doubt the purpose of this enterprise: it would form an "unbroken front" of southern states "to present . . . to the North the alternative of dissolving the partnership" if Yankees did not cease violating southern rights. The lower-South cotton states plus Virginia elected delegations during the winter. While Whigs in the upper South held back, the movement generated enough momentum to alarm many Americans.
⁵⁰

In this crisis Henry Clay strode once more on stage and offered a plan to buy off southern threats, as he had done twice before in 1820 and 1833. The ensuing debates of 1850 became the most famous in the history of Congress. Sharing the footlights with Clay were Calhouh and Daniel Webster, the other two members of the great Senate triumvirate that had dominated American statesmanship for decades. All three had been born during the Revolution. They had devoted their careers to preserving the heritage of the Fathers—Clay and Webster as nationalists, and Calhoun as a sectionalist who warned that Union could survive only if the North and South shared equal power within it. All three had known repeated frustration in their quest for the presidency. All were playing in their final show, Clay and Webster as composers of compromise, Calhoun as a brooding presence warning of disaster even after his death at the end of the first act. Some of the rising stars of the next generation also played prominent roles in this great drama: Senators Stephen A. Douglas, William H. Seward, Jefferson Davis, and Salmon P. Chase.

On January 29, 1850, Clay presented eight resolutions to the Senate. He grouped the first six in pairs, each offering a concession to both sections. The first pair would admit California as a state and organize the remainder of the Mexican cession without "any restriction or condition on the subject of slavery." The second pair of resolutions settled the boundary dispute between Texas and New Mexico in favor of the latter and compensated Texas by federal assumption of debts contracted during its existence as an independent republic. This would reduce the potential for carving an additional slave state out of Texas but would put the state's finances on sound footing.
⁵¹
Many holders of Texas bonds

50
. Jennings,
Nashville Convention
, 3–79; quotations from 7, 24–25.

51
. The terms of Texas's annexation had authorized its division into as many as four additional states. This authority was never exercised, but in 1850 some southerners hoped for at least one additional state to be cloned from Texas, especially if its claims to part of New Mexico were upheld.

were southerners; the head of a powerful lobby for this part of the Compromise of 1850 was a South Carolinian. Clay's third pair of resolutions called for abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia but a guarantee of slavery itself in the District. If these six proposals yielded slightly more to the North than to the South, Clay's final pair of resolutions tipped the balance southward by denying congressional power over the interstate slave trade and calling for a stronger law to enable slaveholders to recover their property when it fled to free states.
⁵²

The eventual Compromise of 1850 closely resembled Clay's proposals. But seven months of oratory, debate, and exhausting cloakroom bargaining lay ahead. And the "Compromise" that finally emerged was not really a compromise in which all parties conceded part of what they wanted, but a series of separately enacted measures each of which became law with a majority of congressmen from one section voting against a majority of those from the other. The Compromise of 1850 undoubtedly averted a grave crisis. But hindsight makes clear that it only postponed the trauma.

Generations of schoolchildren recited the famous Senate speeches of the Compromise debate. "I wish to speak to-day, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American," said Daniel Webster as he began his Seventh of March Address that would cause former antislavery admirers to repudiate him. "I speak to-day for the preservation of the Union. Hear me for my cause." Having opposed the Mexican War and supported the Wilmot Proviso, Webster now urged northerners to bury the passions of the past. Do not "taunt or reproach" the South with the Proviso. Nature would exclude slavery from New Mexico. "I would not take pains uselessly to reaffirm an ordinance of nature, nor to re-enact the will of God." As for disunion, Webster warned fire-eaters that it could no more take place "without convulsion" than "the heavenly bodies [could] rush from their spheres, and jostle each other in the realms of space, without causing the wreck of the universe!"
⁵³

Webster's speech appealed to a broad range of Americans who by March 1850 were rallying in support of compromise. But it contrasted

52
. Southerners had already introduced a stringent fugitive slave bill at this session. For more on the fugitive slave issue see the chapter following.

53
.
CG
, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 269–76.

sharply with addresses by senators speaking for citizens outside that middle range. Three days before Webster's speech, the dying Calhoun gave his valedictory to the nation. Too weak to speak for himself, the gaunt Carolinian sat wrapped in flannels while James Mason of Virginia read his speech to the Senate. Calhoun's prophecies of doom were reflected in the piercing eyes that stared from deep sockets within the shroud. "The great and primary cause" of danger "is that the equilibrium between the two sections has been destroyed." The North had grown faster than the South in population, wealth, and power. This had happened because of discriminatory legislation favoring the North: the Northwest Ordinance and the Compromise of 1820 which excluded southern property from a vast domain; tariffs and federal aid to internal improvements (Calhoun neglected to mention that he had once supported these measures) to foster northern enterprises at southern expense. Yankees had wantonly attacked southern institutions until one by one the bonds of Union had snapped: the Methodist and Baptist denominations had separated into northern and southern churches; voluntary associations were dividing over slavery; political parties themselves were splitting in the same way; soon "nothing will be left to hold the States together except force." What could be done to forestall this fate? Because the North had always been the aggressor, it must cease criticizing slavery, return fugitive slaves, give the South equal rights in the territories, and consent to a constitutional amendment "which will restore to the South, in substance, the power she possessed of protecting herself before the equilibrium between the two sections was destroyed."
⁵⁴
California was the test case. Admission of this free state would serve notice of a purpose to "destroy irretrievably the equilibrium between the two sections." In such circumstances southern states could not "remain in the Union consistently with their honor and safety."
⁵⁵

William H. Seward spoke for Americans at the opposite pole from Calhoun. In a speech on March 11, Seward condemned "any such compromise" as Clay had proposed. Slavery was an unjust, backward, dying institution, said the New York senator. Its days were numbered.

54
. Calhoun probably had in mind his posthumously published proposal, in
Disquisition on Government
, for a "concurrent majority" in which the country would have a northern and a southern president each with a veto power over congressional legislation.

55
.
CG
, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 451–55.

"You cannot roll back the tide of social progress." Not only did the Constitution sanction the power of Congress to exclude slavery from the territories, but also "there is a higher law than the Constitution," the law of God in whose sight all persons are equal. The present crisis "embraces the fearful issue whether the Union shall stand, and slavery, under the steady, peaceful action of moral, social, and political causes, be removed by gradual voluntary effort, and with compensation; or whether the Union shall be dissolved and civil war ensue, bringing on violent but complete and immediate emancipation."
⁵⁶

Seward's Higher Law speech caused a sensation. Southerners branded it "monstrous and diabolical"; Clay pronounced it "wild, reckless, and abominable." Even Taylor condemned it. "This is a nice mess Governor Seward has got us into," the president observed to a pro-administration editor. "The speech must be disclaimed at once."
⁵⁷
Disclaimed or not, Seward's sentiments represented opinion in the upper North as accurately as Calhoun's expressed that of the lower South. Nevertheless, men from the upper South and lower North continued to work feverishly for a settlement between the two extremes. While oratory continued before crowded galleries, committees sought a compromise that could command a majority.

A special Senate committee of thirteen with Clay as chairman reported a bill that combined several measures in one package: admission of California; organization of two territories (New Mexico and Utah) without restrictions on slavery; and settlement of the Texas boundary dispute in favor of New Mexico with compensation to Texas of $10 million to fund her pre-statehood debt. Derisively labeled an "Omnibus Bill" by President Taylor, this package was designed to attract a majority from both sections by inducing each to accept the parts it did not like in order to get the parts it wanted. The approach seemed promising enough to defuse the fire-eaters at the Nashville Convention which met on June 3. Disunion fever had abated since late winter. No delegates came from six slave states and only a few unofficial delegates from two others. Whigs in particular were conspicuous by their absence. Recognizing that it had no mandate for radical action, the convention adopted a wait-and-see attitude. Delegates passed a resolution favoring extension