A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (56 page)

Another rising force in American politics had stood patiently outside these contentious debates: Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. Born in Vermont, Douglas studied law before moving to Ohio in 1833. There he contracted typhoid fever, recovered, and moved on to Illinois. A natural politician, Douglas had supported continuing the 36-degree 30-minute line and backed Polk on the Mexican War. In 1848 his new wife inherited more than one hundred slaves, which tarnished his image in Illinois; he nevertheless was elected senator by the Illinois legislature in 1846, after which he chaired the important committee on territories. From that position, Douglas could advance popular sovereignty in the territories.

When it came to the Compromise of 1850, Douglas saw the key to passage as exactly the opposite of Clay’s strategy, namely, bringing up the various resolutions again independently and attempting to forge coalitions on each separately. Moreover, Fillmore announced his full support of the compromise and, after accepting the resignation of the Taylor cabinet, named Webster as his secretary of state.
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Meanwhile, Douglas maneuvered the Texas boundary measure through Congress. One explosive issue was settled, and Douglas quickly followed with individual bills that admitted California, established New Mexico as a territory, and provided a fugitive slave law. Utah’s territorial bill also passed. The final vote on the Fugitive Slave Law saw many Northerners abstaining, allowing the South to obtain federal enforcement. Douglas’s strategy was brilliant—and doomed. Lawmakers drank all night after its passage and woke up with terrible hangovers and a sense of dread.

Moreover, whether it was truly a compromise is in doubt: few Southerners voted for any Northern provision, and few Northerners ever voted for any of the pro-Southern resolutions. All the “compromise” came from a group of Ohio Valley representatives who voted for both measures, on opposing sides of the issue. The very states that would become the bloody battlegrounds if war broke out—Maryland, Tennessee, Missouri, Kentucky—provided the entire compromise element. For the North and South, however, the compromise was an agreement to maneuver for still stronger positions, with the North betting on congressional representation as its advantage and the South wagering on federal guarantees on runaway slaves.

Fillmore called the compromise “final and irrevocable,” not noticing that secessionists had nearly won control of four lower Southern state governments.
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By supporting the compromise, Fillmore also ensured that the antislavery wing of the Whig party would block his nomination in 1852 in favor of Winfield Scott. (Scott’s enemies referred to him as Old Fuss and Feathers while his supporters called him by the more affectionate Old Chippewa or Old Chapultapec, after his military victories.) A Virginian, Scott hoped to reprise the “Whig southerner” success of Taylor four years earlier. The Democrats, meanwhile, closed ranks around their candidate, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire. Neither side took seriously the virulent secessionist talk bubbling forth from the lower South.

The Pendulum Swings North

Most man-made laws have unintended consequences. Such is human nature that even the wisest of legislators can seldom foresee every response to the acts of congresses, parliaments, and dumas. Few times, however, have legislators so misjudged the ramifications from their labor than with the Fugitive Slave Law.

The law contained several provisions that Southerners saw as reasonable and necessary, but which were guaranteed to turn ambivalent Northerners into full-fledged abolitionists. Runaway slaves were denied any right to jury trial, including in the jurisdiction to which they had escaped. Special commissions, and not regular civil courts, handled the runaways’ cases. Commissioners received ten dollars for every runaway delivered to claimants, but only five dollars for cases in which the accused was set free, and the law empowered federal marshals to summon any free citizen to assist in the enforcement of the act. Not only did these provisions expose free blacks to outright capture under fraudulent circumstances, but now it also made free whites in the North accessories to their enslavement. When it came to the personal morality of Northerners, purchasing cotton made by slaves was one thing; actually helping to shackle and send a human back to the cotton fields was entirely different. The issue turned the tables on states’ rights proponents by making fugitive slaves now a federal responsilibility.

The law had the effect of both personalizing slavery to Northerners and inflaming their sense of righteous indignation about being dragged into the entire process. And it did not take long until the law was applied ex post facto to slaves who had run away in the past. In 1851, for example, an Indiana black named Mitchum was abducted from his home under the auspices of the act and delivered to a claimant who alleged Mitchum had escaped from him nineteen years earlier.
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The trials were stacked against blacks: the closer one got to the South, the less likely commissioners were to take the word of Negroes over whites, and any black could be identified as a runaway. Northerners responded, not with cooperation, but violence. The arrest of a Detroit black man produced a mass meeting that required military force to disperse; a Pennsylvania mob of free blacks killed a slave owner attempting to corral a fugitive; and in Syracuse and Milwaukee crowds broke into public buildings to rescue alleged fugitives.

Politicians and editors fed the fire, declaring that the law embodied every evil that the radical abolitionists had warned about. Webster described the law as “indescribably base and wicked”; Theodore Parker called it “a hateful statute of kidnappers”; and Emerson termed it “a filthy law.”
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Whig papers urged citizens to “trample the law in the dust,” and the city council of Chicago adopted resolutions declaring Northern representatives who supported it “traitors” like “Benedict Arnold and Judas Iscariot.”
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Even moderates, such as Edward Everett, recommended that Northerners disobey the law by refusing to enforce it. Throughout Ohio, town meetings branded any Northern officials who helped enforce the laws as “an enemy of the human race.”
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Even had this angry resistance not appeared, there remained many practical problems with the law. Enforcement was expensive; Boston spent five thousand dollars to apprehend and return one slave, and after that it never enforced the law again. Part of the expense came from the unflagging efforts of the Underground Railroad, a system of friendly shelters aiding slaves’ escape attempts. Begun sometime around 1842, the railroad involved (it was claimed) some three thousand operators who assisted more than fifty thousand fugitives out of slavery in the decade before the Civil War. One must be skeptical about the numbers ascribed to the Underground Railroad because it was in the interest of both sides—obviously for different reasons—to inflate the influence of the network.
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Census data, for example, does not support the large numbers of escaped slaves in the North, and there is reason to think that much of the undocumented “success” of the Underground Railroad was fueled by a desire of radicals after the fact to have associated themselves with such a heroic undertaking.

Far more important than citizen revolts or daring liberation of slaves in Northern jails was the publication, beginning in 1851, of a serial work of fiction in the Washington-based
National Era
. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author, and the daughter of abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher, saw her serial take hold of the popular imagination like nothing else in American literary history. Compiled and published as
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
in 1852, the best seller sold 300,000 copies in only a few months, eventually selling more than 3 million in America and 3.5 million more abroad.
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Stowe never visited a plantation, and probably only glimpsed slaves in passing near Kentucky or Maryland, and her portrayal of slavery was designed to paint it in the harshest light.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
dramatized the plight of a slave, Uncle Tom, and his family, who worked for benign but financially troubled Arthur Shelby. Shelby had to put the slaves up for sale, leading to the escape of the slave maid, Eliza, who with her son, ultimately crossed the half-frozen Ohio River as the bloodhounds chased her. Uncle Tom, one of the lead characters, was “sold down the river” to a hard life in the fields, and was beaten to death by the evil slave driver, Simon Legree. Even in death, Tom, in Christ-like fashion, forgives Legree and his overseers.

The novel had every effect for which Stowe hoped, and probably more. As historian David Potter aptly put it, “Men who had remained unmoved by real fugitives wept for Tom under the lash and cheered for Eliza with the bloodhounds on her track.”
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Or as Jeffrey Hummel put the equation, “For every four votes that [Franklin] Pierce received from free states in 1852, one copy of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
was sold.”
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Uncle Tom’s Cabin
quickly made it to the theater, which gave it an even wider audience, and by the time the war came, Abraham Lincoln greeted Stowe with the famous line, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.”
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Compared to whatever tremors the initial resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law produced, Stowe’s book generated a seismic shock. The South, reveling in its apparent moral victory less than two years earlier, found the pendulum swinging against it again, with the new momentum coming from developments beyond American shores.

Franklin Pierce and Foreign Intrigue

Millard Fillmore’s brief presidency hobbled to its conclusion as the Democrats gained massively in the off-term elections of 1850. Ohio’s antislavery Whig Ben Wade, reminiscing about John Tyler’s virtual defection from Whig policies and then Fillmore’s inability to implement the Whig agenda, exclaimed, “God save us from Whig Vice Presidents.”
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Democrats sensed their old power returning. Holding two thirds of the House, they hoped to recapture the White House in 1852, which would be critical to the appointment of federal judges. They hewed to the maxim of finding a northern man of southern principles, specifically Franklin Pierce, a Vermont lawyer and ardent expansionist.
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Having attained the rank of brigadier general in the Mexican War, Pierce could not be successfully flanked by another Whig soldier, such as the eventual nominee, Winfield Scott. His friendship with his fellow Bowdoin alumnus, writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, paid dividends when Hawthorne agreed to ink Pierce’s campaign biography. Hawthorne, of course, omitted any mention of Pierce’s drinking problem, producing a thoroughly romanticized and unrealistic book.
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Pierce hardly needed Hawthorne’s assistance to defeat Scott, whose antislavery stance was too abrasive. Winning a commanding 254 electoral votes to Scott’s 42, with a 300,000-vote popular victory, Pierce dominated the Southern balloting. Free-Soiler John Hale had tallied only half of Van Buren’s total four years earlier, but still the direction of the popular vote continued to work against the Democrats. Soon a majority of Americans would be voting for other opposition parties. The 1852 election essentially finished the Whigs, who had become little more than me-too Democrats on the central issue of the day.

Pierce inherited a swirling plot (some of it scarcely concealed) to acquire Cuba for further slavery expansion. Mississippi’s Senator Jefferson Davis brazenly announced, “Cuba must be ours.”
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Albert Brown, the other Mississippi senator, went further, urging the acquisition of Central American states: “Yes, I want these Countries for the spread of slavery. I would spread the blessings of slavery, like a religion of our Divine Master,” and publicly even declared that he would extend slavery into the North, though adding, “I would not force it on them.”
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Brown’s words terrified Northerners, suggesting the “slave power” had no intention of ceasing its expansion, even into free states.
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Pierce appointed Davis secretary of war and made Caleb Cushing, a Massachusetts manifest destiny man, attorney general. Far from distancing himself from expansionist fervor, Pierce fell in behind it. Davis, seeking a Southern transcontinental railroad route that would benefit the cotton South, sought to acquire a strip of land in northwest Mexico along what is modern-day Arizona. The forty-five thousand square miles ostensibly lay in territory governed by popular sovereignty, but the South was willing to trade a small strip of land that potentially could be free soil for Davis’s railroad. Senator James Gadsden, a Democrat from South Carolina, persuaded Mexican president Santa Anna, back in office yet again, to sell the acreage for $10 million. Santa Anna had already spent nearly all the reparations given Mexico in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo five years earlier—much of it on fancy uniforms for his military—and now needed more money to outfit his army. As a result, the Gadsden Purchase became law in 1853.

Meanwhile, American ministers to a conference in Belgium nearly provoked an international incident over Cuba in 1854. For some time, American adventurers had been slipping onto the island, plaguing the Spanish. Overtures to Spain by the U.S. government to purchase Cuba for $130 million were rejected, but Spain’s ability to control the island remained questionable. During a meeting of ministers from England, France, Spain, and the United States in Ostend, Belgium, warnings were heard that a slave revolt might soon occur in Cuba, leading American ministers to draft a confidential memorandum suggesting that if the island became too destabilized, the United States should simply take Cuba from Spain. Word of this Ostend Manifesto reached the public, forcing Pierce to repudiate it. He also cracked down on plans by rogue politicians like former Mississippi governor John A. Quitman to finance and plan the insertion of American soldiers of fortune into Cuba. (Quitman had been inspired by Tennessean William Walker’s failed 1855 takeover of Nicaragua.)
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Taken together, Pierce’s actions dealt the coup de grâce to manifest destiny, and later expansionists would not even use the term.