Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (13 page)

As early as August 1846, four basic political agendas took shape for dealing with the Mexican Cession (the territory in the far West surrendered by Mexico). The first of these was proposed on August 8, 1846, when President Polk, admitting publicly for the first time that “a cession of territory” by Mexico was a possible result of the war, asked the House to approve $2 million in negotiating funds. A first-term Democratic representative from Pennsylvania named David Wilmot rose to move an amendment to the appropriations bill that added a deadly proviso: “As an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico… neither slavery not involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime.”
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The Wilmot Proviso was, like the Tallmadge Amendment in 1819, a paraphrase of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, whose sweeping ban against slavery Wilmot now wanted applied to the southwestern territories of the Mexican Cession. More than just a frank declaration against slavery, it was an even franker assertion that Congress (based on Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution) had the authority to make judgments about the future of the territories. Just as in 1820 with the Tallmadge Amendment, Congress quickly fractured along sectional rather than party lines. The Northern Whigs and all but four Northern Democrats in the House overrode Southern votes in the House and sent the appropriations bill with its lethal proviso to the Senate, where Polk and the Southern Democrats killed it.

Polk was particularly mortified by the Wilmot Proviso, since the blow had come from a member of his own party. “If the Wilmot Proviso was engrafted on the appropriation or any other Bill and was made to apply to any portion of the acquired territory lying South of 36°30′, the Missouri compromise line,” Polk promised, “I would certainly veto it, be the consequences what they might.”
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As it was, the administration had its own plan ready to launch: extend the Missouri Compromise line all the way through the Mexican Cession. This does not seem like a particularly imaginative proposition, but the idea had behind it the indisputable fact that the Missouri Compromise had worked for twenty-six years in keeping the slavery issue from polarizing Congress, and it offered what looked like a solution that everyone
had already agreed to earlier; most important of all, President Polk was prepared to swing all the weight of his office behind it. “The Missouri question had excited intense agitation of the public mind, and threatened to divide the country into geographical parties,” Polk reasoned. “The compromise allayed the excitement, tranquilized the popular mind, and restored confidence and fraternal feelings,” and he was confident that “a similar adjustment of the questions which now agitate the public mind would produce the same happy results.”
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The trouble with merely tinkering with the Missouri Compromise, however, was that a good deal of angry water had flowed under the bridge since 1820, and a quarter century later, Southerners were no longer satisfied with the spoils they had been awarded then. The new Mississippi senator, Jefferson Davis, warned that “as a property recognized by the Constitution, and held in a portion of the States, the Federal government is bound to admit [slavery] into all the Territories, and to give it such protection as other private property receives.” On February 19, 1847, the white-haired and hollow-cheeked John Calhoun rose to offer a set of resolutions arguing that “the territories of the United States belong to the several States composing this Union, and are held by them as their joint and common property.” This meant—and Calhoun explained himself with frightening lucidity—that “Congress, as the joint agent and representative of the States of this Union, has no right to make any law… that shall… deprive the citizens of any of the States of this Union from emigrating, with their property, into any of the territories of the United States.”
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By Calhoun’s logic, the territories were the common property of all of the states, not the federal government. Congress, in organizing and readying federal territories for statehood, was merely acting as a trustee on behalf of the entire people of the United States. Citizens of any one of the states had equal title to the territories, and therefore ought to be able to take any of their property, including slaves, into any of the territories. Hence, not only did Congress have no authority to enact the Wilmot Proviso, which banned the transportation of slave “property” to the territories, but it had had no authority in 1820 to enact the Missouri Compromise, which banned the transportation of slaves to some of the territories. With this one gesture, Calhoun swung the door of every federal territory open to slavery, and delighted Southern Whigs and Democrats fell in behind him, turning him into the South’s great political figurehead.

The Northern Democrats, however, were less than enthralled with Calhoun’s logic. In December 1847 one of Polk’s chief rivals within the Democratic Party, Michigan senator Lewis Cass, brought forward yet another solution to the problem of the Mexican Cession territories. In a letter published in the
Washington Union
, Cass gingerly agreed with Calhoun that Congress had no authority to impose a settlement of the slavery issue on any of the territories. Surely, observed Cass, the people who were actually living in each of the territories had the right to adopt a “slave” or “free” settlement for themselves. Let the slavery question in the Cession be “left to the people… in their respective local governments,” he argued, and let the sovereignty of the people defuse the confrontations in Washington over slavery and free Congress from the responsibility of solving the problem. Congressional mandates of the sort Wilmot and Calhoun were seeking

should be limited to the creation of proper governments for new countries, acquired or settled, and to the necessary provision for their eventual admission into the Union; leaving, in the meantime, to the people inhabiting them, to regulate their internal concerns in their own way. They are just as capable of doing so as the people of the States; and they can do so, at any rate, as soon as their political independence is recognized by admission into the Union.
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Cass’s “popular sovereignty” proposal appealed to the fundamental American ideological instinct that a democratic people had the right to make their own political decisions. Cass’s letter might have taken him further along the road to the presidency if he had not already managed to make a host of enemies within the Democratic Party. As it was, an unpersuaded President Polk attempted to ram the Missouri Compromise solution through Congress during the summer of 1848, and came out at the end of the session with nothing more to show for his efforts than a single bill authorizing the organization of the Oregon territory without slavery. Chronically ill and disappointed at the defections from Democratic unity by Calhoun, Wilmot, and Cass, Polk announced that he would not seek a second term as president in 1848. The Missouri Compromise extension proposal fizzled.

Worse for the Democrats was yet to come. The party’s presidential nominating convention, as might have been expected, picked Lewis Cass as its nominee. Agitated Northern Democrats wanted the Wilmot Proviso or nothing, and they suspected that if Cass and popular sovereignty were allowed to rule the future of the territories, the popular will could just as easily announce itself in favor of slavery as not. “I am jealous of the
power
of the South,” wrote David Wilmot. “The South holds no prerogative under the Constitution, which entitles her to wield forever the Scepter of Power in this Republic.” Wilmot added that if he could “strike an
effectual & decisive blow against its dominion at this time, I would do so even at the temporary loss of other principles.”
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Wilmot got his chance in June 1848, when a group of anti-slavery Northern Democrats met in Utica, New York, to organize a splinter movement based on the principle that Congress had full authority to ban slavery from the territories. Two months later, in Buffalo, a national “Free-Soil” convention assembled under a great tent, with luminaries as varied as Wilmot and Frederick Douglass among the delegates. In a decisive repudiation of the Democratic Party’s leadership, they nominated Martin Van Buren as the presidential candidate for the Free-Soil Party under the banner, “Free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men.”
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Even more ominous, the split-off of the Free-Soilers marked the movement of the slavery issue from a moral question to a sectional political issue capable of wrecking even the sturdiest of national institutions.

The Whigs might have suffered the same splintering had it not been clear that the divisions among the Democratic Party were the Whigs’ golden opportunity. Rather than risk North-South bickerings within the party, the Whigs nominated Zachary Taylor for the presidency. Taylor’s victory at Buena Vista gave him instant name recognition; on the other hand, to the dismay of many anti-slavery Whigs, he was also a Louisiana slaveholder. Still, at least Taylor had taken no known stand on the territorial question. After reflecting upon the wisdom of nominating candidates with no inconvenient political views to disturb the voters, the Whig Party decided to do likewise, and adopted no party platform. By the end of the summer, it was plain that Taylor was going to beat Cass handily.
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To nearly everyone’s surprise, Zachary Taylor turned out to be no blank slate on the issue of the territories. “No man of ordinary capacity can believe,” Taylor wrote, that Congress would allow slavery into the Mexican Cession or “will ever permit a state made from it to enter our Union with the features of slavery connected with it.” By the time he was inaugurated in March 1849, the California gold rush was in full swing, and Sacramento, the site of the original gold strike, had exploded from a village of four houses into a boom city with a population of 10,000. In order to provide California and the New Mexico territory with some sense of public order, a bill for territorial organization had to be offered at once, and Taylor dispatched his own personal emissaries to prod the California, Utah, and New Mexico settlers into writing state constitutions that would bypass the need for (and the inevitable wrangling over) territorial organization.

Taylor was responding to more than just the practical demands of the California situation. A political novice, Taylor had fallen under the sway of some of the most radical anti-slavery Whigs, especially William Henry Seward of New York, and under their influence Taylor was determined that the California and New Mexico applications would be “free and Whig,” even at the risk of more Southern threats of disunion. By December 1849 Taylor had pushed the Californians to the point where they were ready to make an application to Congress for immediate statehood and thus “remove all causes of uneasiness… and confidence and kind feeling be preserved.” The application would be as a free state.
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Southerners read President Taylor’s proposal as nothing less than the Wilmot Proviso in disguise, and in June 1850 a convention of representatives from the slave-holding states met in Nashville to discuss what their future could be in the Union. At the same time, Taylor faced a challenge from within his own party in the person of Henry Clay, who still believed, even at age seventy-three and after three unsuccessful nominations, that he would have made a better Whig president than Taylor, the “Military Chieftain.”
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On January 29, 1850, Clay laid before the Senate a “comprehensive scheme” of eight resolutions that offered to settle the territorial dispute in practical little pieces rather than by sweeping formulas such as “common property” or “popular sovereignty.” Clay proposed to admit California as a free state (the California constitutional convention had already adopted free-state provisions and there was nothing gained by trying to force them to change their minds), but in order to show that this established no principle for the other territories, New Mexico and a separate Mexican Cession territory of Deseret (or Utah) would be allowed to organize themselves as territories on the basis of popular sovereignty (which left open the possibility that these territories might become slave states). To sweeten the loss of the “common property” principle for Southerners, Clay added a provision for a new Fugitive Slave Law, which would give slaveholders broader powers to stop the flow of runaway slaves northward to the free states, and he offered a final resolution denying that Congress had any authority to regulate the interstate slave trade.
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Clay’s two-day presentation of his compromise was a rhetorical masterpiece, but he fell considerably short of winning the votes he needed for it. The partisans of slavery in the Senate regarded the concession of California as tantamount to accepting the principle, if not the fact, of the Wilmot Proviso, while Northern Free-Soilers
regarded the popular sovereignty allowance for New Mexico and Utah as little more than surrendering the territories outright to slavery. Clay also committed a major tactical error by insisting that all the resolutions be voted upon together as one “omnibus,” without recognizing that while all of the senators would like some of the resolutions, only some of the senators would like all of the resolutions, and the senators in that group were not numerous enough to carry the day.

In particular, Clay’s “comprehensive scheme” did not satisfy the mortally ailing John Calhoun. On March 4, 1850, Calhoun had another senator, James M. Mason of Virginia, read a lengthy and shrewd attack on Clay’s plan, calling again for “an equal right in the acquired territory… to cease the agitation of the slave question, and to provide for the insertion of a provision in the constitution, by an amendment, which will restore to the South, in substance, the power she possessed of protecting herself, before the equilibrium between the section was destroyed by the action of this government.” Otherwise, threatened Calhoun, “the Southern States… cannot remain, as things now are, consistently with safety and honor, in the Union.”
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