A hell of a storm, p.5
A Hell of a Storm, page 5
Contesting this abolitionist agenda informed the response of white South Carolinians to a range of public issues including economic development, policing post offices that disseminated antislavery materials, and limiting political participation to a small planter elite. Not unrelatedly, the Palmetto State claimed the highest percentage of enslaved in the nation (55 percent), while its seafront cities and counties were conspicuously occupied by bondspeople. “In 1830, in the district of Charleston,” a scholar has noted, blacks “outnumbered whites three to one; in Colleton the ratio was four to one; in Beaufort, five to one; in Georgetown, eight to one…. No other area in the Old South contained such a massive, concentrated” slave community.20
Anxious to control this black majority, South Carolina fixated on the federal tariff as the chief source of the state’s “decline.” The nation’s first protective tariff was enacted in 1816 and designed to advance the kind of industrial development that most Americans, survivors of two wars with Britain in two generations, believed necessary for national defense and development. Largely bisectional in its support, the impost passed by a comfortable margin in the House, 88 to 54. Over the next few years, however, as customs duties rose, the slave states began to question what they regarded as an unfair and unequal advantage given to northern manufacturing. John Calhoun, the planter, political theorist, and unbending defender of state power, anonymously drafted in late 1828 a protest against the nation’s tariff policy, in effect revisiting Jefferson’s controversial claim in the Kentucky Resolutions that the states enjoyed the right to reject federal law.
Four years later Congress enacted yet another protectionist tariff and South Carolina’s nullifiers made their move. In October 1832 strict constructionists dominated local elections, soundly defeating the opposing Union Party by capturing strong majorities in both legislative chambers. The following month these men organized a state convention that met in Columbia and demanded a dramatic reduction in the tariff; more provocatively, this gathering also passed (with 83 percent in affirmation) an ordinance declaring the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 unconstitutional. These now “null and void” imposts were, the convention concluded, no longer in force and not to be paid as of February 1.
That winter President Andrew Jackson, who believed the tariff perfectly constitutional, quietly placed federal soldiers in the area of Charleston in case the nullifiers attempted to impede its collection. “I am confidentialy advised,” he wrote to an assistant, “that the nullifyers of the south, have corrupted both the Naval officers, and those of the army in Charleston—that the nullies are determined to push matters to extremities, and expect to get possession of the forts &c…. Therefore let the [locally recruited] officers & men be relieved by a faithful detachment, and this carried into effect as early as possible.”21 Jackson further shepherded through Congress a Force Bill authorizing the military’s use in South Carolina. This proved unnecessary. Unable to garner support from other southern states, the “nullies” now sought to negotiate. Having suspended their self-imposed February 1 deadline, they gave Congress time to conclude yet another compromise—the Tariff of 1833, which lowered the impost over a number of years.
The nullification controversy underscored a growing feeling among southerners that on such vital and interlinking issues as economic development, federal power, and slavery sectional distinctions were increasing rather than diminishing. Though South Carolina’s “null and void” solution smacked of extremism to many of her neighbors, these states nevertheless expressed deep concern at the central government’s apparent preference for industry. “Any attempt on the part of the Government to force manufacturers into existence, by government bounties,” Alabama’s assembly warned, “must of necessity operate unequally, and therefore be unjust.” North Carolina’s legislature pointedly maligned the 1832 tariff as “impolitic, unjust, and oppressive,” arguing that “a large majority of the people [of the state] think those acts unconstitutional.” Thomas Ritchie, longtime publisher of the Richmond Enquirer, one of Virginia’s most important papers, observed during the tariff dispute: “The South cannot acquiesce in such an unjust and unequal system.”22
In the wake of this simmering unease, several fresh disputes widened the North-South divide. These included both the (pro-Dixie) “Gag Rule”—a series of resolutions leading to the tabling without discussion of antislavery petitions sent to Congress—and the (pro-Yankee) personal liberty laws that forbade officials in nine northern states from cooperating in the rendition of southern men and women escaping their enslavement. None compared, however, to the sharp debate over slavery’s standing in the western territories. In 1846 the United States, looking to both secure its claim to Texas and extend its dominion to the Pacific, invaded Mexico. The American victory in 1848 resulted in the vast Mexican cession, the nation’s largest land acquisition except for the purchases of Alaska and the Louisiana Territory, though a new enigma now confronted the country: Would northern capitalism or southern slavery become the dominant economic system in these recently acquired territories?
A small group of Yankee Democrats had attempted to solve this dangerous dispute even before the war’s end. In August 1846 one of their number, a young Pennsylvania congressman named David Wilmot, introduced a proviso to an appropriations bill that would have banned slavery in any territory taken from Mexico.23 The proposal passed through the House 83 to 64, prefacing, against strong southern opposition, the adoption of the entire bill 85 to 80. Two days later President James K. Polk of Tennessee (absentee owner of a nine-hundred-acre northern Mississippi cotton plantation) confided a little irritably to his diary:
Late in the evening of Saturday the 8th, I learned that after an exciting debate in the House a bill passed that body, but with a mischievous and foolish amendment to the effect that no territory which might be acquired by treaty from Mexico should ever be a slaveholding country. What connection slavery had with making peace with Mexico it is difficult to conceive.24
Others conceived quite easily. Concerned about the planters’ expansion into the West, the Cleveland Plain Dealer thought “it… time that the lovers of freedom should unite in opposing the common enemy [the South, not Mexico] by fixing bounds to their aggression”; the Cincinnati Gazette similarly counseled resistance “against… any new slave territory… and against extending the constitutional inequality in favor of slaveholders [i.e., the three-fifths provision] beyond the states already in the Union.”25 Though defeated in the more conservative Senate, Wilmot’s proviso became a rallying cry for advocates of free soil on the unfolding frontier.
The Mexican-American War’s conclusion only amplified pressure to settle slavery’s fate in the territories. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which went into effect in July 1848, gave the United States not only the Rio Grande boundary it had coveted in Texas but also California and all or much of present-day New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arizona. For more than a year a paralyzed Congress stewed over this enormous prize. In January 1850 Clay proposed an elaborate legislative package designed to solve a number of sectionally divisive issues. His compromise included admitting California as a free state; organizing the Utah and New Mexico territories on the basis of popular sovereignty (allowing the territories themselves to decide servitude’s status); abolishing the slave trade—but not slavery—in the District of Columbia; and establishing a stronger fugitive slave act to counter the personal liberty laws popping up in the North. These measures, Clay insisted, would produce “an amicable arrangement of all questions in controversy between the free and slave States, growing out of the subject of slavery.”26 Many, from both sections, disagreed.
In Massachusetts a number of men from all parties thought the compromise gave too much to the South and were particularly aghast at the punitive new fugitive slave bill. Charles Sumner, a leading light of the Bay State’s Free-Soil coalition and about a year away from claiming a Senate seat, urged his political compeers not to “sacrifice one jot or tittle of our principles.” And when, in a sentiment of conciliation, the old Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster delivered a much-anticipated address in early March defending Clay’s ambitious arrangement, Sumner called The Godlike Daniel, formerly revered for his eloquence, an “archangel ruined” and “traitor to a holy cause.”27
President Zachary Taylor precariously straddles the “congressional scales” representing northern and southern sentiment during the fractious debates that led to the Compromise of 1850.
Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis, by contrast, criticized the omnibus package for an entirely different reason—he wished to see much more of the American West opened to slavery. “In certain climates,” he argued, “only the African race are adapted to work in the sun.” He proposed that instead of preserving the entirety of California for free labor the old Missouri Compromise line be run to the Pacific; all legislation relating to land and slaves, he struck a deterministic note, is ultimately “written by the hand of Nature upon the surface of the country.”28
As winter gave way to spring with no resolution to Clay’s recommendations in sight, a number of militant southerners decided to air their options should Congress ban slavery in the new territories. Approximately 170 of them, representing nine states, convened on June 3 in Nashville’s McKendree United Methodist Church to confederate and perhaps to put the national legislature on notice. Unlike earlier examples of states’ rights resistance—the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, South Carolina’s stand against the federal tariff—a more comprehensive if still somewhat marginal sense of southern nationalism now informed the region. It is worth noting that six slave states, most of them in the Upper South, refused to send representatives to Nashville. As happened at Hartford in 1814, moderates took control of this southern convention and played for time. Rather than traffic in secessionary fantasies, they followed Davis’s lead calling for an extension of the Missouri Compromise line, which would have legalized slavery south of Monterey, California. After nine days the assembly adjourned.
A few weeks later radical factions in both sections coalesced to kill Clay’s compromise. As the moderate North Carolina Whig David Outlaw put it, the bill’s defeat constituted a “triumph of ultras and abolitionists.” Beaten, exhausted, and suffering from the tuberculosis that would in two years take his life, Clay left stifling Washington to convalesce in the cool seaside climes of Newport, Rhode Island. At this point, Illinois senator Stephen Douglas assumed responsibility for the proposal. Understanding the difficulty in getting northern and southern congressmen to agree on a single big bill, he shrewdly chopped it into parts and, largely along sectional lines with some crossover appeal among moderates, each individual bill prevailed. By late September Millard Fillmore, the last Whig president, had signed all the measures into law. “I am rejoiced at their passage,” he wrote to a colleague in a staggering display of misplaced optimism, “and trust they will restore harmony and peace to our distracted country.”29
Fillmore’s confidence reflected a still broader buoyancy among the nation’s political class. Clay, now back in Washington and refreshingly unburdened by the hypocrisy of a false modesty, wrote to his son James: “All our Slavery troubles are now supposed to be adjusted. Every measure which I proposed… has substantially passed; and the Country seems to be disposed generally to give me quite as much credit as I deserve.” The aging Webster, born in 1782, a year before the Treaty of Paris officially ended the American Revolutionary War, also indulged in various shades of comfortable confusion. “We have gone [through] the most important crisis, which has occurred since the foundation of the Government,” he told a colleague that fall and, fumbling upon a familiar cliché, promised that “whatever party may prevail, hereafter, the Union stands firm.”30
In fact, the time for compromises had come to an end. And in 1854 Americans were forced once again to reckon with slavery’s role in the West. The settlements of 1820 and 1850 proved ephemeral, inadequate, and unable to contain the aspirations of competing sectional systems. The unraveling of these incomplete accords began in a fractious winter congressional session that set a divisive tone for a difficult year.
Part II WILD WEST
Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, “the Little Giant” of late antebellum politics. Thought to be a president-in-waiting, he instead divided the country by advancing an ill-conceived bill to allow slavery into the western territories.
3 Nebraska in the New Year
If I thank God that Massachusetts is not a slave state, how then can I turn round and let Nebraska or Kansas become one by refusing to interpose for their protection?
Robert C. Winthrop, former Massachusetts senator, 1854
In early January 1854, with the capital city, so the (Washington) Daily National noted, “carpeted with snow… and the cheerful ceremonies of the season… observed by great and small,” Stephen Douglas reported a bill before the Senate to organize a mammoth parcel of land called Nebraska—an anglicization of “Ñí Brásge,” an Oto Indian word for “flat water,” referring to the territory’s prominent Platte River. Having to do with the politics of railroad development, the proposal invariably became entangled in the politics of slavery. No one should have been surprised. Whether in Louisiana or Missouri, Texas or the old Mexican southwest, planter potentates had long looked to extend the edge of their elastic cotton kingdom. Seldom did these saber-rattling occasions occur without the accompaniment of secessionary threats either veiled or visible. John Calhoun’s 1850 caution to his upper chamber colleagues—“I have… believed from the first that the agitation of the subject of slavery would, if not prevented by some timely and effective measure, end in disunion”—is something of an in-character alarum.1 Few knew the sensitivity of this subject better than Douglas. While shepherding Clay’s much-maligned compromise package through a divided Congress nearly four years earlier, he had worked closely with men from all regions of the country, building fragile coalitions and assuaging concerns. Satisfied with his success and armed with an overweening aplomb, he confidently entered the ring once again.
Considering his restless youth, Douglas appeared to be the ideal pilot of the country’s territorial pretentions. Born in Brandon, Vermont, in 1813, and the sixth generation of his family to call New England home, he commenced a succession of migrations to upstate New York, Cleveland, St. Louis, and finally, at the age of twenty, Jacksonville, Illinois—established in 1825 by a wave of Yankee settlers. Along the way he attended two hardscrabble academies and read law with small-town attorneys. Ambitious and proficient, Douglas received appointment to the Illinois bar in 1834, the year the Whig Party formed to protest the presidency of Andrew Jackson and anti-abolition riots—rooted in the growing presence of free-laboring blacks—ripped for a savage week through segregated New York City. Around this time, he wrote to relatives of finding his place on the moving American frontier: “I have become a Western man, have imbibed Western feelings principles and interests and have selected Illinois as the favorite place of my adoption.”2
Douglas’s introduction to the lands beyond the Appalachians included more than a passing familiarity with the institution of slavery. Although outlawed in Illinois by the Northwest Ordinance, there was in this region a system of indentured servitude that, throughout the antebellum period, kept perhaps as many as five hundred men, women, and children virtually enslaved. Antiblack laws, moreover, made it difficult for free people of color to enter Illinois; these deeply entrenched mandates lingered on until late in the Civil War. The state’s mottled relationship with race and slavery undoubtedly touched upon certain demographic realities not to be easily negotiated. Its white population, around two hundred thousand in the early 1830s and growing quickly, included a significant number of migrants from Dixie who put down roots in its several southern counties, an area known colloquially as “Little Egypt.” Much like the nation, this diversely peopled commonwealth admitted to having a host of mixed loyalties.
A coming young man sympathetic to the Jacksonian, which is to say states’ rights, perspective, Douglas served as a loyal Democrat in a spate of local and federal positions before, at the strikingly young age of twenty-seven, winning appointment to the Illinois Supreme Court in 1840. In 1843 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and three years later he ascended to the Senate, which became for this man on the make something of a second home. Washington’s rustic, unfinished capital city, torched by the British only a generation earlier in the latter stages of the War of 1812, now lent its refurbished environs to a golden age of speechifying. Constituents, so one French observer wrote,
take it for granted that their chosen deputy is an orator, that if he can he will speak often, and that in case he is forced to refrain, the few speeches which he does make will show what he can do and include both an examination of all the great affairs of state and a catalog of all their petty grievances…. On these terms they promise to vote for him again.3
