Penguin History of the United States of America (55 page)

It also exhibited its neurosis in the Nullification Affair. This opened in 1828, when Congressional politicians, beginning a game which was to keep them amused for the next century and more, decreed a new tariff- promptly dubbed the Tariff of Abominations, for it was more concerned to assist the Presidential candidacy of Andrew Jackson than to protect burgeoning American industry or make any other economic sense. Heavy duties on British imports put the South in an uproar, for they might provoke British retaliation, and the cotton regions were dependent on their ability to trade freely with Lancashire. But that was not all: as Calhoun made clear, cotton was valued not only because it was a profitable export, but because it provided a paying occupation for the slaves. It underpinned the peculiar institution, which most Southerners now agreed was the only possible system by which the two races could live together. So the tariff was denounced as a threat to slavery as well as to prosperity. The reaction went to extraordinary lengths: following Calhoun, and using the jargon he invented, South Carolina ‘interposed her state sovereignty’ and in its name ‘nullified’ the tariff-refused, that is, to allow United States customs officials to enforce it within the state boundaries. President Jackson proclaimed this to be treason and rebellion; since no other state joined South Carolina he was able to threaten a march on Charleston with perfect confidence, and actually began to make military preparations; but meanwhile Congress, again led by Henry Clay, pushed through a much-reduced tariff which Calhoun deemed acceptable. Jackson’s view of nullification was generally adopted, and for the time being the policy of a protective tariff was abandoned. So far so good: but the fragility of the American Union had again been convincingly demonstrated. Calhoun, who dreamed of the Presidency, had devised nullification as a substitute for secession. Now nullification was dead. There was too much
reason to suppose that if the South ever again felt itself in danger, it would break up the Union.

Next, the abolitionists began their work of inducing a siege mentality in the slave-holders. Pamphlets denouncing slavery were mailed in large quantities to the South. Southerners, enraged and terrified at the idea that these works might fall into the hands of the slaves and touch off a rebellion, intercepted and destroyed them with the collusion of Amos Kendall, Jackson’s Postmaster-General. There was outrage in the North at such tampering with the mail: petitions of protest poured into Congress from the abolitionists. The South induced Congress to refuse to receive the petitions. This seemed to frustrate the First Amendment right of the people to petition for redress of grievances, and brought the aged John Quincy Adams into action. Retirement had had few charms for the ex-President; he had returned to Congress in 1831 as Representative from Boston; and now embarked on a relentless campaign for lifting the so-called ‘gag rule’ and thus restoring the right of petition. It was all priceless propaganda for the abolitionist cause, and it reinforced the suspicion of the South that there was a serious conspiracy against it.

The expansion of slavery into fresh territory, if it could be obtained, would strengthen the defence of the institution by increasing the planters’ representation in Congress. Furthermore, Southerners were still patriotic, indeed nationalist, Americans: like most of their fellow-citizens they thought that the great republic would and should eventually expand to cover the whole of North America. So covetous eyes were cast on the northernmost provinces of Mexico (which had thrown out its Spanish rulers in 1822). American settlers, with their slaves, had been drifting into the largest province, Texas, for years. In 1833, alienated by the Mexican government, they launched a revolution, and in 1836 their leader, General Sam Houston (1793–1863), a close associate of Andrew Jackson, defeated the Mexican President, General Santa Anna, at the Battle of San Jacinto. He declared Texas to be an independent republic, of which he became the first President.

This touched off a storm in the United States. Instructed by the abolitionists and the rant of the South, many Northerners regarded the whole affair as a conspiracy of slave-holders intent on grabbing immense stretches of territory that might have been developed by free labour. This view gained colour from the fact that slavery was actually illegal under Mexican law, which Houston’s movement overthrew. Jackson himself did not dare to recognize Texan independence until the very last hours of his Presidency, for fear of seeming a party to conspiracy; he only acted at all to spare his successor, Van Buren, a great difficulty. A greater immediately sprang up in its place. For the next seven years there was a steady agitation for the annexation of Texas to the United States: a project much favoured by the Texans themselves, by the South, and by eager American nationalists everywhere; but one regarded with deep suspicion by Northern liberals and with deep concern by many American statesmen, who correctly feared that
annexation would bring much trouble with it. But the high tide of westward expansion was flowing (‘Manifest Destiny’ it was called
¹¹
): in the election of 1844 Van Buren lost the renomination of his party, and Henry Clay lost the election (he was the Whig candidate) because they would not support annexation unequivocally. The political situation was confused. President Harrison had died after a month in office, and been succeeded by Vice-President John Tyler, a no-party man. Tyler was as unsuccessful as Van Buren and Clay: James K. Polk of Tennessee, a veteran Democrat, sometimes known as Young Hickory, won the election; but before he took office Tyler and his Secretary of State, none other than John C. Calhoun, had taken the decisive step of admitting Texas to the Union. Soon an American army under General Zachary Taylor had advanced 150 miles south of the Texan frontier to the Rio Grande. In short, Mexico was invaded, and war followed.

It was a disgraceful affair; the contrast with events in the Pacific North-West at the same time, where President Polk, confronted with the much more formidable rivalry of the British, compromised American claims and settled the frontier with Canada where it runs today, merely makes it more painful. The Mexicans were militarily far too weak to stand up to the enthusiastic volunteer armies of the
gringos;
General Taylor beat them at the Battles of Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma and Buena Vista; General Winfield Scott captured Mexico City and forced them to make peace; other American intruders tore away California and what are now the states of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. Mexico formally relinquished these lands in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848); and then the chickens came home to roost.

To the poet Walt Whitman, editor of the
Brooklyn Eagle
, it was for the interest of mankind that the power and influence of the United States should be extended– ‘the farther the better’. To wiser Americans, such as Emerson’s friend Henry David Thoreau (1817–65), the war of naked grab which Whitman supported was obscene. Thoreau refused to pay the taxes that were to finance it. New England moralists, already much influenced by abolitionism, found it impossible to forgive the South for the business. Still more ominous for the South was the response of North-Westerners, such as Abraham Lincoln, one of the many Whigs who were swept into the House of Representatives in 1846 in reaction against the Democrats’ war. Lincoln regarded slavery as a great wrong, but he was no abolitionist, and, though personally the gentlest of men, he came from Illinois, the state where mobs had murdered Joseph Smith and Elijah Lovejoy. Lincoln, an instinctive and profoundly skilled politician, was not the man to get too far
ahead of his constituents if he could help it: the key to his entire career is to be found in the remark he made, as President, in 1864: ‘I claim not to have controlled events but confess plainly that events have controlled me.’ The events he usually had in mind were political. Illinois farmers, he knew, were prone to violence and unsympathetic to blacks: many of them, like Lincoln himself, were immigrants from the South, and the state laws were notoriously hostile to free African-Americans. But the plantation South was an economic competitor, already far too powerful in the national government: in 1846 it had pushed through Congress another tariff revision, which in effect committed the United States to free trade; Polk’s Oregon compromise had denied free Northern farmers access to the rich country of what is now British Columbia; while the Mexican War looked like opening up a huge new area to slavery expansion. George III had done nothing as bad, and consequently the old Revolutionary rhetoric began to be heard again: the whites of the North were, it was said, threatened with slavery themselves – not chattel slavery, but slavery in the sense that all the important economic and political decisions in America might soon lie with ‘the Slave Power’, which seemed able to sway Congress and Presidency as it pleased. No wonder that the Northern Democrat, Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, in order to save his seat in the 1846 elections, introduced, in August of that year, the so-called Wilmot Proviso, by which slavery would be forbidden in any territory annexed to the United States as a result of the Mexican War; no wonder that Congressman Lincoln not only supported the Proviso, but spoke and voted conspicuously in favour of the Whig slogan, ‘No Territory!’ It was becoming necessary to demonstrate that white Americans still really enjoyed self-government, by checking the South.

The Wilmot Proviso, as such, never passed Congress: the South saw to that, and seemed to be the only gainer by the Presidential election of 1848, for the Democratic party in the North split on the slavery issue, Van Buren and his followers temporarily fusing with the abolitionists to form the Free Soil party, so that Zachary Taylor, the Whig candidate, won narrowly – and Taylor was a slave-holder. Abraham Lincoln did not return to Congress. But this was only the first of many hollow victories that the South was to win in the next twelve years. Underlying the rivalry between slavery and free farming was the stubborn geographical fact that the new territories were mostly quite unsuitable for plantation farming, and therefore for either cotton or slavery, while economic prospects within the South proper were never more alluring; cotton production and cotton profits were to rise to unprecedented heights during the fifties. There was, in fact, no real economic or social impetus behind the plans for slavery expansion: no planter was going to transport his slaves hundreds of miles to a less certain economic future than he was enjoying in Georgia or Mississippi. The planters might have gone to California, but they were denied the chance: in 1848 gold was discovered on the banks of the Sacramento river, and during the subsequent Gold Rush the free white population rose (by 1850) to 92,000, and was
more than four times as large by i860. Slavery would never be allowed to get a foothold there. And meantime, from the South’s point of view, Taylor turned out to be a grave disappointment. He saw no point in quarrelling over territories that could not possibly be won for slavery, and besides he had his re-election to think of. He had only carried New York, and so gained the Presidency, because of the Democratic split: he might not be so lucky next time. To the horror of Southerners generally, and Southern Whigs in particular, he began to work closely with Senator Seward of New York, who was the leader of the Northern anti-slavery Whigs. It really seemed as if, at Seward’s prompting, the President was going to adopt the Wilmot Proviso.

In Southern eyes this was intolerable: even if the slave South could not, in actuality, expand, it must be conceded the right to do so, or lose its equal standing in the Union: were Southerners to be denied their share of territory that they had been the chief instruments in winning? If so, they were no better than slaves themselves (they too could use the Revolutionary vocabulary). ‘Will you submit to be bridled and saddled and rode under whip and spur?’ asked the
Montgomery Advertiser
. On the other side, there was equal determination not to be downtrodden by a set of aristocrats. ‘I am jealous of the
power
of the South,’ wrote David Wilmot to a friend, ‘… the South holds no prerogative under the Constitution, which entitles her to wield forever the sceptre of power in this Republic, to fix by her own arbitrary edict, the principles and policy of this government, and to build up and tear down at pleasure.’ With this temper prevailing on both sides, it began to look as if anything might happen. Calhoun, from his deathbed, was urging the South to unite and stand firm in defence of ‘Southern Rights’: and what might not that entail? Secession? War?

With luck and good management, both were avoided. Henry Clay worked his magic for the last time. He evolved a programme which in the end consisted of five measures: California to be admitted to the Union as a free state; New Mexico and Utah to be organized as territories, but without saying whether they were to be free or slave (let the inhabitants settle that, according to the Democratic party’s doctrine of’popular sovereignty’); the boundary dispute between Texas and the United States, left over from annexation, to be settled, and the Texan republic’s debt to be paid by Congress; the slave-trade in the District of Columbia to be abolished; and a new, stricter Fugitive Slave Law to replace that of 1793.

At first, as was said, Clay’s proposals united the opponents instead of securing the friends of his measures. But Calhoun died, and so did President Taylor, to be succeeded by his Vice-President, Millard Fillmore (1800–1874), one of Seward’s chief rivals in the New York Whig party. Daniel Webster threw his vast authority behind the proposals; Stephen A. Douglas (1813–61), a Democratic Senator from Illinois, took up the hard work, when Clay faltered, of getting the votes needed to pass the legislation through Congress, and succeeded triumphantly with an ever-shifting coalition of
Northern Whigs, Southern Democrats, Northern Democrats, Southern Whigs. The Union men triumphed in the South, the conservatives in the North, ‘the Compromise of 1850’ everywhere. By 1852, the next Presidential year, it seemed that normality had been restored, the territorial question settled, and with it the greater question of the future of slavery: for it had long been assumed that unless slavery could expand, it would die.