What Hath God Wrought (75 page)

Once the federal government legally “divorced” its pet banks (as the saying went), responsibility for bank regulation fell to the states. At the state level, Democrats pursued a variety of banking policies. “Politically the Jacksonians were happiest and most united when they were hunting down the dreaded bank enemy, but once they had their adversary cornered they never knew quite what to do,” one historian has noted. Some Democratic state governments opted to regulate banks, some for a state-run monopoly bank, while some merely banned bank notes below ten or twenty dollars. In New York state, the Albany Regency protected the interests of its favored banks against popular demands to charter additional ones. In the Old Northwest, on the other hand, Democrats came to agree with Whigs that “free banking” provided the solution: Any group who could meet certain standard requirements could incorporate a bank. Democratic politicians throughout the country were primarily interested in building their political party, not in pioneering government regulation of the banking industry. In Massachusetts, the Whigs established a state commission to oversee banks after the failure of a Democratic-owned pet, the Commonwealth Bank; when the Democrats came into power, however, they abolished the commission.
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The depression dealt harshly with state-sponsored internal improvements, and state-run banks suffered even more. Before the downturn had run its course, eight states plus Florida Territory defaulted on interest payments of their bonded indebtedness. All were in the South or West except for Pennsylvania, two-thirds of whose bonds were held overseas. The federal government not only refused to bail out the states but did not even come to the rescue of Florida Territory. American international creditworthiness sustained a heavy blow. The English poet William Wordsworth, whose family had invested in Pennsylvania securities, declared the state’s “high repute, with bounteous Nature’s aid, / Won confidence, now ruthlessly betrayed.”
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After prosperity returned, Pennsylvania and most of the other states resumed interest payments, but Arkansas, Mississippi, and Florida (a state after 1845) repudiated the principal itself, as did Michigan in part. The federal government suffered a loss of its own, since it had invested the original endowment of the Smithsonian Institution in Arkansas bonds. This repudiation had long-term effects on the credit rating of states in the South. A generation later, when the Confederacy tried to market securities in London, British banks remembered that their worst credit experiences had been with southern states and that Jefferson Davis of Mississippi had defended repudiation. Accordingly, they limited their commitment.
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V

From the Executive Mansion, Martin Van Buren continued to apply the maxim he had expounded in his 1827 letter to Thomas Ritchie, that the Democratic Party must rest upon an alliance of the plain republicans of the North with the slaveowning planters of the South. The president felt comfortable with such an alliance. In New York politics, his faction had shown less enthusiasm than DeWitt Clinton’s for the state enacting emancipation. Van Buren’s family had owned slaves before New York’s emancipation law took effect, and he himself had owned at least one person as late as 1814. Possessing no moral feelings on the subject, the president justified his solicitude for slavery as preserving the Democratic Party and the Union of the states. In waging his campaign in 1836, Van Buren had bent over backward to reassure southern politicians that, although a northerner, he could be trusted to protect their “peculiar institution.” He supported censorship of the mails and pledged himself to oppose any effort to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia (where Congress possesses plenary legislative power), a promise he repeated in his inaugural address. When a newspaper in Oneida, New York, backed both Van Buren and abolitionism, his campaign dealt with this embarrassment by instigating a mob (led by a Democratic congressman) to destroy the paper’s office.
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In the House of Representatives, Van Buren’s supporters secured passage of a “gag rule” forbidding even the discussion of petitions addressing the subject of slavery either in the District or anywhere else. On the strength of such assurances, the Red Fox had carried several slave states, including Virginia, where he enjoyed the support of Ritchie’s Richmond Junto.
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Van Buren faithfully fulfilled his proslavery promises once in the White House. His secretary of war, Joel Poinsett of South Carolina, went so far as to demand universal military training for able-bodied white males in their state militias, making sure force would always be available to suppress slave uprisings. (Whigs denounced the proposal as creating a “standing army,” and it got nowhere.)
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Even John C. Calhoun’s state could find no fault with the president’s dedication to slavery. The radical nullifier Thomas Cooper assured Van Buren that the South Carolina political establishment endorsed him: “Your pledges on the abolition question are felt and approved,” he wrote; “they will tell greatly in your favor in the South.” When Van Buren ran for reelection in 1840, Calhoun returned to the Democratic fold and supported him. Reversing his long-standing support for national banking, Calhoun embraced the Independent Treasury. In actuality, defending slavery trumped economic policy for the South Carolinian. With his characteristic zeal for abstractions, Calhoun insisted on the Senate passing six resolutions in favor of the “stability and security” of slavery in the South. Well might John Quincy Adams comment in his diary that Van Buren’s presidency illustrated the successful synthesis (first achieved, he noted, by Thomas Jefferson) of “the Southern interest in domestic Slavery with the Northern riotous Democracy.”
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White supremacy remained central to Jacksonian Democracy throughout the second party system, no less pervasively than economic development was to Whiggery. Virtually every aspect of the Democratic political outlook supported white supremacy and slavery in particular one way or another: Indian Removal, local autonomy and state sovereignty, respect for property rights, distrust of government economic intervention, criticism of early industrial capitalism, and (as will become evident) Texas annexation.
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The Democratic Party endorsed slavery and condemned antislavery explicitly and often, not only in the South but in the North. “The whole democracy of the north,” declared the
Washington Globe
, national party organ, “are opposed upon constitutional principle, as well as upon sound policy, to any attempt of the abolitionists” to accomplish their purposes.
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Where congressional Whigs would divide along sectional lines when votes involved slavery, northern Democrats could usually be found supporting their southern colleagues. A study of 1,300 antebellum politicians has identified 320 of them as “doughfaces,” that is, northern congressmen who voted with the South on critical issues involving slavery. All but ten of these doughfaces turned out to be Democrats.
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Van Buren’s early strategic decision to ally with slaveholders, like the decisions of local party politicians to play to northern working-class racism, helped make the Democratic Party more proslavery than its rival. But probably the most important determinant of party attitudes existed at the grassroots level. Many Whig voters, particularly those in the northern evangelical, Antimasonic wing of the party, wanted to improve the moral quality of American life and disapproved of slavery. Northern Democratic voters, on the other hand, concerned themselves less with moral issues outside their own local community. Slavery seemed somebody else’s problem, one they were content to let their politicians deal with expediently so long as they could rest assured that blacks would not be moving into their neighborhood and competing with them for jobs. From their standpoint, slavery had the virtue of keeping most African Americans in the South.
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Both Democratic and Whig parties committed themselves to nationwide organization, and in both cases, the party’s felt need to maintain a southern wing inhibited criticism of slavery. But there was an important difference. The Whigs tolerated antislavery among their northern supporters, while the Democrats did not. Congressional voting statistics bear out the generalization that whereas the Whigs divided over slavery, Democratic members, even in the North, toed the party’s proslavery line.
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Democrats who nursed antislavery sentiments were silenced or required to recant as the price of party loyalty. “No man, nor set of men,” promised the Democratic Party’s
Address to the People of the United States
in 1835, can “even wish to interfere” with southern slavery “and call himself a Democrat.”
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One of the very few Democrats to dare express any sympathy for the abolitionist movement was the journalist William Leggett. Leggett worked for the Democratic
New York Evening Post
, and when its editor, William Cullen Bryant, went to Europe in 1835, he left Leggett temporarily in charge of the paper. Leggett exercised his authority to run editorials condemning the censorship and mob violence directed against abolitionists. The administration, furious, disowned Leggett; Bryant came home to fire him and reclaim control of the
Post
. Leggett, despite years of service to the party, found himself blackballed and his attempt to gain a Democratic nomination for Congress in 1838 thwarted.
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Another example illustrates the same point. The Christian philanthropists Arthur and Lewis Tappan had a brother named Benjamin who was, like them, a critic of slavery, but, unlike them, a Democrat and a rationalist. When Benjamin Tappan ran for the U.S. Senate from Ohio in 1838, he had to repudiate antislavery as the price of getting the Democratic nomination. Tappan justified his conduct to himself with the reflection that Van Buren’s Independent Treasury was more important than the slavery issue.
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By contrast, in 1838 Ohio’s Whig Party elected the ardent abolitionist Joshua Giddings to Congress. Antislavery sentiment was as strong in Massachusetts as in any state of the Union. Marcus Morton, a Massachusetts Democrat, had cautiously expressed antislavery views during his political career. His party required him, however, to repudiate antislavery before confirming him as Collector of the Port of Boston—“thus demonstrating,” in the words of a historian sympathetic to Morton, “how little room then existed in the Massachusetts (or for that matter, the Northern) Democracy for an antislavery politician.”
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Meanwhile the two-thirds rule at Democratic National Conventions made sure that no one could receive the party’s presidential nomination without southern support. The Whigs had no such rule, and sometimes the northern wing of their party got the nominee it wanted. In shaping the Democratic Party the way they did, Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren forged the instrument that would transform the minority proslavery interest into a majority that would dominate American politics until 1861. The “slave power” of which abolitionists and free-soilers complained was no figment of their imagination.
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VI

Political opposition to the slave power in these years came chiefly over the so-called gag rule. With their mass mailings to southern addresses shut out, abolitionists had turned to circulating antislavery petitions to Congress. The gag rule, preventing the discussion of these petitions in the House of Representatives, represented another aspect of southern politicians’ continuing efforts to prevent the abolitionists from influencing public opinion. “The moral power of the world is against us,” Francis Pickens of South Carolina warned his fellow southerners. “England has emancipated her West Indies islands. France is also moving in the same direction.” In an age of improved communication, only an intellectual blockade could resist the spread of the idea of freedom. “Sooner or later, we shall have to contend” with abolitionism; better to stifle its expression now, before it gets any stronger, he insisted.
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Abolitionists exercised the right “to petition the government for a redress of grievances” guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. No one dared prohibit them from composing, circulating, or signing their petitions, but southerners like Pickens wanted to deny abolitionists the chance to use Congress as a forum to publicize their views.

The gag rule complemented the censorship of the mails and, like that policy, originated with the extremists of South Carolina. James H. Hammond, a young Carolinian hothead, conceived the idea that the Houses of Congress should refuse to receive petitions touching slavery on the grounds that Congress had no authority over the subject. The whole Calhoun clique picked up on the notion, hoping it would further their long-term strategy of uniting the South under their leadership; perhaps thus Calhoun could realize the White House ambitions he still nursed. The project required them to make two constitutional arguments: one, that Congress lacked legal authority to abolish slavery anywhere, even in the District of Columbia; and two, that the freedom of petition guaranteed by the Bill of Rights did not imply that the government would pay any attention to petitions once delivered. The Carolinians were on much stronger ground in the second of these arguments than in the first, but both issues got debated at length. In the Senate, Calhoun’s proposal for a gag rule ran into opposition from Henry Clay and others. An informal practice soon substituted for a formal gag. As soon as a senator introduced an abolitionist petition, another would move that “the question of its reception be laid on the table.” A motion to table an issue is not debatable. The motion would carry and the petition be quietly buried without discussion, action, or even official reception. This practice prevailed from 1836 to 1850. The Senate, despite its fame as a chamber indulgent of long debate, contrived thus to stifle debate over slavery.
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