America Aflame (11 page)

The great interest Calhoun sought to protect from an aggressive majority was, of course, slavery. The battle over the extension of slavery into the territories had begun during the Missouri debates thirty years earlier. In Calhoun's political lifetime, the institution had come under siege not only from fellow lawmakers but also from the press and the pulpit. The difficulty of organizing a Congress where neither Whigs nor Democrats comprised a majority of lawmakers, and Free Soilers held the balance, brought the enemy closer to power. He understood that slavery stood at the heart of southern society, and that without a mechanism to protect it for all time, the Union's days were numbered. “I fix its probable [breakup] within twelve years or three presidential terms.… The probability is it will explode in a presidential election.”
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On March 4, 1850, an ailing Calhoun entered the Senate chamber, helped to his chair by a colleague. He slumped down in his seat, a deathly pallor over his face, his hair hanging like wild strings from a head struggling to remain aloft. Too weak to deliver his speech, he passed it on to his South Carolina colleague, Andrew P. Butler, who, due to poor eyesight, handed it to Virginia's James M. Mason, who read Calhoun's words to a hushed chamber and packed gallery. Calhoun dismissed California statehood and the retrieval of runaway slaves as peripheral to the main issue of the North's permanent majority and its threat to the South from an inevitable abuse of power. He denied that he advocated disunion; in fact, quite the opposite. He was offering a way to save the Union from destruction.
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Not all southerners shared Calhoun's perspective on their future in the Union. They recoiled from the threats of secession and disunion attributed to Calhoun and his allies. The
New Orleans Bee
declared that the evils of the proviso were “a thousandfold more endurable” than the “unnumbered” woes of disunion. Others simply dismissed Calhoun as someone who had outlived his time. North Carolina's Whig senator George E. Badger thought that Calhoun “on anything concerning
niggers
[was] absolutely deranged.” Badger for one would not even contemplate leaving the Union for the “privilege of carrying slaves to California or keeping up private jails for slave dealers” in the District of Columbia. The Union still represented an indelible bond of common destiny for many southerners.
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Daniel Webster took the Senate stage next. In declining health, but still a vigorous orator, the Whig senator from Massachusetts had stood down disunionists before. There was scarcely a person in the crammed galleries of the Senate chamber who did not recall his memorable speech during the Nullification Crisis of 1830: “When my eyes shall be turned to behold, for the last time, the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union.… Let their last feeble and lingering glance, rather, behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced.… Liberty
and
Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”
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This article of faith that the Union and liberty could not exist apart from each other propelled Daniel Webster to support Henry Clay's compromise, fugitive slave bill included. While he acknowledged that many of his constituents viewed human bondage as a sin, he also recognized that many in the South saw slavery as a benevolent institution sanctioned by the Bible. In any case, there was no good way southerners could “relieve themselves from this relation” without descending into economic ruin and social chaos, a situation that would eventually threaten all Americans. The best solution, he argued, lay in Clay's compromise: allow the people of the territory to solve the issue of slavery for themselves. Besides, it was unlikely that the new territories, by virtue of geography, climate, and soil, could support slavery.

Recognizing that the issue of slavery expansion had taken on a moral dimension, especially in New England, Webster warned against mixing “religious sentiments” with public policy, the result of which would be “a great degree of excitement” that would preclude an amicable settlement of differences. If politics was the art of compromise, religion, by its nature, allowed no ambiguity. Webster had believed in 1830 that defiance to southern extremism would save the Union; twenty years later, he felt that concessions to the South would produce the same result.
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“Union.” The Great Triumvirate together for the last time during the debates over what became the Compromise of 1850: Henry Clay (seated on the near left), John C. Calhoun, and Daniel Webster each with a hand on the Constitution and surrounded by their colleagues. The Senate would dearly miss their brilliance and civility. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

New England was unforgiving. Daniel Webster, the conscience of a nation, had sold out to the Slave Power. His position broke apart the Whig Party in Massachusetts and led to his name becoming synonymous with “traitor” among the growing anti-slavery sentiment of New England. “Monster,” “fallen angel,” and “personification of all that is vile” were among the epithets that could be printed. An enraged and clearly overreaching William Lloyd Garrison accused the senator of maintaining a harem of “big black wenches as ugly and vulgar as Webster himself.” The storm overwhelmed him, and he died two years later. John Greenleaf Whittier poured the bitterness of his section into the poem “Ichabod,” Hebrew for “inglorious”:

Of all we loved and honored, naught

Save power remains—

A fallen angel's pride of thought,

Still strong in chains.

All else is gone, from those great eyes

The soul has fled;

When faith is lost, when honor dies,

The man is dead!
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It fell to William H. Seward, a fellow Whig from New York, to offer the rebuttal to Webster. Like Calhoun, Seward viewed Clay's compromise proposals as a symptom of a much larger problem. But unlike Webster, he did not think religious faith was irrelevant to the discussion. A Chosen Nation could not take its mission lightly nor adjudicate major questions without an abiding faith in God. Slavery was clearly a sin, and to compromise with sin was a greater evil. Seward was not a theocrat, but, like many Americans, he held a deep belief in God's particular benevolence to America. Whether necessity or the Constitution sanctioned slavery was quite beside the point. As Seward argued, “There is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over this domain, and devotes it to the same noble purposes.”
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Seward's “higher law” doctrine would be familiar to nineteenth-century American evangelicals who believed Peter's order “to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). Americans cherished the Constitution, but it did not serve as the ultimate standard for personal action. Although God may have blessed the American government, “does it therefore follow that Congress may amend the ten commandments, or reverse the principles of Christ's Sermon on the Mount …? Man could not, by any law, make right what God and his own conscience declared wrong.”
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The Senate could not come to an agreement on what God or the Constitution said about Clay's proposals. Even if the Senate agreed on a bill, President Taylor was clearly not in a compromising mood and, despite his deep southern connections, seemed to move closer to Senator Seward's position with each passing day. As the Senate debate droned on, the president celebrated July 4, 1850, a very hot day, with the usual reception at the White House. He cooled off with copious amounts of cherries and milk. Five days later he was dead from gastroenteritis.

Taylor's death failed to break the Senate deadlock, and Henry Clay took the floor for the last time on July 22 to inspire his colleagues to support his compromise and save a nation he believed in great danger from splitting apart. The debate had generated so much acrimony and so many threats of disunion, especially from the southern members, that Clay believed only his compromise could put things rights again. Clay hoped that his proposal would perform a national “lustration”—an archaic term for a ceremony purifying people and places. The cleansing ritual would enable Americans to divest themselves “of all selfish, sinister, and sordid impurities, and think alone of our God, our country, our consciences, and our glorious Union; that Union without which we shall be torn into hostile fragments.” Americans would be born again into patriots instead of self-interested individuals. Without the compromise the world's judgment on America would be harsh, Clay predicted. The United States would no longer be a beacon of hope to a world enveloped in the darkness of despotism. The failed revolutions of Europe would stand as a permanent monument to the futility of self-government, not just a temporary setback. “What will be the judgment of … that portion of mankind who are looking upon the progress of this scheme of self-government as being that which holds out the highest hopes and expectations of ameliorating the condition of mankind?” Clay's plea went unanswered. Despairing, he departed for home. Within eighteen months he was dead.
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Clay's compromise would experience a resurrection in another guise. New Yorker Millard Fillmore, who as vice president succeeded Taylor, signaled he was amenable to compromise. Along with Stephen A. Douglas, the Democratic senator from Illinois, Fillmore believed that they could construct a bipartisan coalition from the men of the Border South and the Old Northwest to provide a core group to pass each of Clay's proposals separately, first pairing with southern lawmakers on one part of the compromise, then with northerners on others. Such a strategy had forged the Missouri Compromise thirty years earlier. With Calhoun dead, Clay ailing at his home in Newport, Kentucky, and Webster now a member of President Fillmore's cabinet, the Senate passed the series of measures collectively known as the Compromise of 1850. The border men had carried the day.

Most Americans accepted the compromise as a whole, even if they did not like one or more of its constituent parts. The Union, they believed, and what it stood for—peace, prosperity, liberty, and the future of mankind—remained more important than sectional grievances. Many hoped with Stephen A. Douglas that the compromise represented the “final settlement” of the slavery issue. “Let us cease agitating,” Douglas implored, “stop the debate, and drop the subject.” His admonition was at once an order and a hope.
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George Templeton Strong, a New York attorney and devoted Whig, summarized the prevailing view on the compromise: “Extreme people on both sides must be disgusted with the result, but the great majority satisfied and relieved.” Strong rejoiced to see “South Carolina spanked.” As for the abolitionists, “They deserve to be scourged and pilloried for sedition or hanged for treason.” Strong concluded his diary entry with an interesting confession, a point of view shared by many residents of the North: “My creed on [the slave] question is: That slave-holding is no sin.… That the slaves of the Southern States are happier and better off than the niggers of the North,… That the reasoning, the tone of feeling, the first principles, the practices, and the designs of Northern Abolitionists are very particularly false, foolish, wicked and unchristian.” The key issue for most Americans was the preservation of the Union, not slavery.
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Northerners, even evangelicals, also drew back from Seward's “higher law” doctrine. If each individual could determine what laws to obey based on a particular interpretation of Scripture, then anarchy would ensue. “Higher lawism” tilted the balance too far toward individual discretion. The appeal to God's law also violated the separation of church and state. As Charles Hodge, a Philadelphia evangelical minister, noted, “Those who resist the magistrate, resist the ordinance of God, and … shall receive unto themselves damnation.” Southern evangelicals held this view as a matter of course, that evangelical abolitionists violated the intent of the Founding Fathers to separate church and state, thereby threatening not only religious freedom but government as well.
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The Compromise of 1850 stifled disunionists in the South, except in South Carolina. More typical of southern sentiment was the “Georgia Platform” of December 1850. The platform avowed that the citizens of Georgia cherished their “beloved Union” and accepted the compromise in total as an effort to secure the national compact. But that acceptance, Georgians warned, required a reciprocal acknowledgment among northerners. Otherwise, Georgians would consider their options “even to the disruption of every tie binding Georgia to the Union.” In the only state that held a referendum on the compromise, Georgians supported the pact overwhelmingly by nearly a two-to-one margin. Henry Clay, exhausted from his months-long ordeal in the Senate, rejoiced that the Georgia vote had “crushed the spirit of discord, disunion and Civil War.” Elsewhere in the South, a special convention in Mississippi resoundingly endorsed the compromise, and pro-compromise candidates for office won handily in Alabama state elections.
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