Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (14 page)

Three days later, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts took the floor of the Senate to deliver what many anticipated would be an equally scathing critique of Clay’s omnibus, this time from an anti-slavery position. To the amazement of the packed Senate galleries (and howls of indignation from anti-slavery Northerners), Webster rose “to speak today not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but an American. … I speak today for the preservation of the Union. ‘Hear me for my cause.’”
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From there, Webster’s great oratory rolled on for three hours, denouncing disunion and calling for the adoption of Clay’s omnibus. Webster paid dearly in Massachusetts for befriending Clay, with mutterings about treason and derangement.

Clay and Webster were acting to save a Union that they could easily see was headed for the breakers, and a Union that Calhoun was only too ready to see hit them. Day after exhausting day, Clay dragged himself to the Senate floor to defend his resolutions on the wings of words that soared far above his own personal political ambitions for the presidency. “I conjure gentlemen”—Americans North and South—to stop and “by all they hold dear in this world—by all their love of liberty—by all their veneration for their ancestors—by all their regard for posterity—by all their gratitude to Him who has bestowed upon them such unnumbered blessings … to pause—solemnly to pause—at the edge of the precipice, before the fearful and disastrous leap is taken into the yawning abyss below, which will inevitably lead to certain and irretrievable destruction.” And if the grappling sections did hurl themselves over the cliff into civil war, Clay’s prayer was, “as the best blessing which heaven can bestow upon me upon earth, that if the direful and sad event of the
dissolution of the Union should happen, I may not survive to behold the sad and heart-rending spectacle.”
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One person, at least, who was moved by none of this rhetorical display in the Senate was President Taylor, and between the upper and nether millstones of Taylor and the Calhounites, the omnibus was ground to bits. When the Senate Committee on Territories finally reported out Clay’s resolutions as a single bill, its component pieces were hacked out by amendments and counterproposals, and on July 31, 1850, all but the provisions for the territorial organization of Utah had crashed to defeat. An enfeebled Henry Clay left the Senate, his political career effectively over, and sick with the tuberculosis that would kill him in less than two years; Webster returned to Massachusetts to be vilified by the anti-slavery press as a “fallen angel,” and he followed Clay to the grave four months later; John Calhoun was dead on March 31, 1850, less than three weeks after his last defiant speech in the Senate.

At this last point before the abyss, the enemies of compromise obligingly removed themselves from the scene. The death of Calhoun in March was followed by the unexpected death of President Taylor in July, and his successor, a self-made and surprisingly capable anti-slavery New Yorker named Millard Fillmore, quickly proclaimed his support for Clay’s compromise. Clay himself withdrew from the Senate after the July 31 debacle, but into his shoes stepped the junior senator from Illinois, a short, scrappy Democrat named Stephen A. Douglas.

Douglas had been born in Vermont in 1813 and half orphaned by the premature death of his lawyer father two years later. He was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker in upstate New York. At age twenty, looking for opportunities whose traces he could see only as they led westward, Douglas moved to Ohio, then to St. Louis, then to Winchester, Illinois. He set up a school, earned enough money to support a year’s law study, and in 1834 was licensed to practice law in Illinois. At a stumpy five feet four inches, Douglas was anything but imposing-looking. But he had energy in overbrimming quantities, and a chip-on-the-shoulder attitude earned him the nickname “the Little Giant.” He was a “perfect ‘steam engine in breeches,’” and starting in 1840 he was appointed to the Illinois state supreme court, elected to Congress, then elected to the U.S. Senate. He was, from the start, a partisan Democrat. Whigs were nothing but the toadies of “consolidation, monopoly, and property privilege.” Douglas was also a man with an eye for the main chance, and he saw in an alliance with Henry Clay a straight path to political stardom.
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Committed from the beginning of the debates to the principle of popular sovereignty, Douglas explained his détente with the figurehead of Whiggism as a joint project for the sake of the popular sovereignty provisions in the “comprehensive scheme.” Popular sovereignty, Douglas explained, is the principle “that each community shall settle this question for itself… and we have no right to complain, either in the North or the South, whichever they do.” Since he had never favored the omnibus approach, Douglas craftily split the omnibus bill into five separate bills and built separate congressional coalitions around each of them, with his fellow Democrats cajoled and caressed into supporting them. With President Taylor out of the way, Fillmore (in an unusual display of bipartisanship) linked forces with Douglas and pressured congressional Whigs to back the Douglas bills. By mid-September all five of them had been passed, and the substance of Clay’s compromise—if not the form—became law. “The difference between Mr. Clay’s Compromise Bill & my… Bills was a wafer,” wrote Douglas before the final votes, “and when they are all passed, you see, they will be collectively Mr. Clay’s Compromise, & separately the Bills Reported by the committee on Territories four months ago.”
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What, exactly, did this great Compromise of 1850 do? In general, it averted a showdown over who would control the new western territories, and that was the chief reason people around the country celebrated the passage of the bills with bell ringing, and in Congress with a drunken spree. In specific terms, the Compromise of 1850 allowed the Missouri Compromise to stand for the old Louisiana Purchase territories, but it established the principle of popular sovereignty as the rule for organizing the Mexican Cession. California, of course, was allowed to dodge both compromises completely and enter the Union directly as a free state without passing through the debated stage of territorial government. The territory of Utah, which lay above the 36°30′ line, and New Mexico, which lay below it, would be allowed to make their own determinations about slavery or nonslavery as they saw fit. The Compromise also added a new Fugitive Slave Law to the federal code and promised noninterference by Congress in the interstate slave trade. After the deaths of Calhoun, Clay, and Webster, Douglas would emerge as one of the most powerful men in the Senate.
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The abyss of disunion had been avoided, but only for the time being. In only six years, a train of unsuspected consequences would throw an entirely new light on the popular sovereignty doctrine, and both it and the Compromise of 1850 would be wrecked with the stroke of a single judicial pen.

The Compromise of 1850 had been created by a Whig (Henry Clay) and pushed through at last by the influence of a Whig president (Millard Fillmore). The laurels for this victory went to Stephen A. Douglas and the Democrats, and the Democrats used the political capital that the Compromise gave them to regain their political wind and win the presidential election of 1852. Both parties ran Mexican War heroes—the Whigs nominated Winfield Scott and the Democrats nominated Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, who had begun the war as a private and ended up as a brigadier general—but Scott proved dull and aristocratic, while the handsome, likable Pierce stood on a pro-Compromise platform and won election easily.

There was a fly in the ointment of the Compromise of 1850, however. With all the attention in the debates of 1850 focused on the Mexican Cession territories, few people paid attention to the contents of the new Fugitive Slave Law, which Clay had included in the Compromise as a sop to wounded Southern feelings over California and popular sovereignty. There had actually been a Fugitive Slave Law on the federal books since 1793 (based on Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution) which allowed Southern slaveholders to pursue and retrieve runaway slaves even in the free states. For that reason, until 1842 runaway slaves such as Josiah Henson had found it safer to run until they had made it to Canada and the safety of British law (where slavery was illegal and where the presumption of the law had always been in favor of freedom).

As Northern opinion turned colder and colder toward slavery, the free states offered pursuing slaveholders less and less cooperation, until in 1842 the Supreme Court (in
Prigg v. Pennsylvania
) ruled that the 1793 federal law did not necessarily require the cooperation of state magistrates and justices of the peace, especially where slave recaptures encroached on state due-process laws. The result, of course, was that numerous Northern state officials refused to cooperate at all in capturing runaways, and in some instances prosecuted slaveholders for kidnapping.

The new Fugitive Slave Law was an attempt to plug the holes
Prigg v. Pennsylvania
had put in the 1793 law. A federal enforcement apparatus was created, consisting of United States commissioners with powers to issue federal warrants for fugitive slaves and to make judgments in fugitive cases without a court hearing on the basis of as little as a simple affidavit of ownership from a slave owner (the commissioner was to receive a $10 fee for each fugitive returned to slavery and only $5 otherwise, so it was clear from the start what the preferred judgment would be). Ominously, the new law established no statute of limitations for runaways, which meant that runaways from as long as twenty years before (and more) could be captured and reenslaved. It threatened both local marshals and citizens with fines of up to $1,000 and liability for civil suits if they harbored fugitives or refused to cooperate in capture proceedings.
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This last provision was the most potentially explosive, for it virtually made every Northerner an accomplice to the betrayal and seizure of runaway slaves. Northerners who had enjoyed little or no contact with slavery, or who thought of slavery as merely an unpleasant moral abstraction, now were forced to consider how they would act if a slave owner or federal marshal in hot pursuit of a runaway should summon them to join a federal slave-catching posse.

Neither Clay nor Douglas had expected the Fugitive Slave Law to attract much controversy, if only because the actual number of runaways was fairly small compared to the entire slave population of the South. They at once learned how badly they had underestimated Northern reaction. Northerners who had never entertained a serious anti-slavery thought before were now treated to a series of public captures and extraditions of runaway slaves that only showed off slavery at its most revolting. Overeager slave owners and hired slave catchers tracked down longtime runaways such as Henry Long, who was haled before a federal judge “as the fugitive slave of John T. Smith, of Russell County, Virginia,” and carted off to Richmond, Virginia, to be sold at public auction on January 18, 1851; Euphemia Williams, who had run away from “William T. J. Purnell, of Worcester County, Maryland,” twenty-two years before, and whom they tried to drag, along with the six children she had raised in Philadelphia, back into slavery; or “a colored man, named Mitchum,” who was arrested in Madison, Indiana, in February 1851 by “George W. Mason, of Davies County, Ky.,” who had convinced a local justice of the peace that Mitchum “had left his service
nineteen years before
,” and who took him back to Kentucky.
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Not all of these pursuits ended well for the slave hunters, however. In September 1851 a Maryland slave owner named Edward Gorsuch crossed into Pennsylvania in pursuit of four runaways. Gorsuch enlisted the aid of a federal marshal and a posse and tracked the runaways to the home of William Parker, a free black, in Christiana, Pennsylvania. There the runaways and their allies shot it out with the posse, killing Gorsuch; Parker and the runaways immediately fled for Canada. Frederick Douglass, then living and editing an anti-slavery newspaper in Rochester, New York, sheltered them and got the fugitives on board a Great Lakes steamer. At parting, one of them gave Douglass a memento that he treasured all his life: Edward Gorsuch’s revolver.
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Across the North, prisons were broken into, posses were disrupted, and juries refused to convict.

The most dramatic of these cases, and the one that added the most fuel to the fire of opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act, occurred in Boston, almost under the nose
of Garrison’s
Liberator
. On May 24, 1854, an escaped Virginia slave named Anthony Burns was seized by three federal deputies as he walked home from the Boston clothing store where he worked. White and black Bostonians at once assembled, and on the evening of May 26, a party of abolitionists led an assault on the prison where Burns was held, only to fail in their attempts to retrieve him. President Pierce was determined to demonstrate his support for the Compromise laws and sent in federal troops and Marines to ensure that Burns was put on a ship to carry him back to Virginia. Two Bostonians actually offered to pay Burns’s market price, and more if necessary, to Burns’s owner, an Alexandria merchant named Charles Suttle. The Pierce administration was determined to return Burns to Suttle for the symbolic importance of the gesture. So on June 2, 1854, while thousands of silent, pale Bostonians looked on, Burns was marched to a waiting ship between files of soldiers. The Burns affair was a massive public disgrace, and it drove many Northerners to conclude that slavery itself was a disgrace that deserved extermination rather than assurances. Amos Lawrence, a pro-Compromise Whig, remembered that after the Burns affair, “we went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad abolitionists.”
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Even the anger stirred up by the Fugitive Slave Law was limited to the relatively small number of fugitive slave warrants that were actually issued and the even smaller number of fugitives who were actually returned to slavery (probably around eighty in all).
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What brought the plight of the runaway under the Fugitive Slave Law into every Northern parlor was a novel,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly
, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the wife of a theology professor at Bowdoin College in Maine. Stowe was the daughter of Lyman Beecher, a New Englander and one of the best-known Northern evangelicals; her sister, Catharine, was an educator, and her brothers, Edward and Henry Ward Beecher, were both anti-slavery clergymen.