Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (17 page)

56
.
Ibid
., 260–69.

57
. Nevins,
Ordeal
, I, 301–2. Seward carried the title "Governor" because he had served as governor of New York.

of the 36° 30′ line to the Pacific and adjourned to reconvene again after Congress acted.
⁵⁸

But as the legislators labored through the heat of a Washington summer it became obvious that the omnibus strategy was backfiring. A pro-compromise bloc of upper-South Whigs and lower-North Democrats emerged in support of the strategy. But they numbered fewer than one-third of each house. Most other congressmen signified their intention to vote against the package in order to defeat the parts they opposed. A three-way split among the Whigs grew increasingly bitter. Taylor and most northern Whigs insisted on their California-only policy, believing that acquiescence in (potential) slavery in New Mexico and Utah would wreck the party in the North. Lower-South Whigs adamantly opposed a free California. Clay's pro-compromise Whigs endured the slings and arrows of both sides. The hostility of Taylor toward Clay and Webster became especially caustic.

Into this volatile atmosphere came a new crisis in late June. A handful of civilians and soldiers had convened a convention in Santa Fe to write a free-state constitution. It was ratified by an electorate casting fewer than eight thousand votes. Taylor urged the admission of New Mexico along with that of California, thereby doubling the insult to southern honor. Meanwhile the governor of Texas threatened to uphold with force his state's claim to Santa Fe and all the rest of New Mexico east of the Rio Grande. A clash between Texans and the U. S. army seemed imminent. As July 4 approached, southerners bristled with threats to fight for Texas. "Freemen from the Delaware to the Rio Grande [will] rally to the rescue," squeaked Alexander Stephens with all the bellicosity his ninety pounds could muster. And "when the 'Rubicon' is passed, the days of this Republic will be numbered."
⁵⁹
Taylor did not flinch. After preparing orders for the Santa Fe garrison to stand firm, he spent a hot Fourth of July listening to speeches at the unfinished Washington Monument. Assuaging his hunger and thirst with large quantities of raw vegetables, cherries, and iced milk, the president fell ill next day and died on July 9 of acute gastroenteritis.

Whether for weal or woe, Taylor's death marked a turning point in the crisis. The new president, Millard Fillmore, was a New York Whig hostile to the Seward faction in his own state. Sympathetic to the Compromise,

58
. Jennings,
Nashville Convention
, 135–66.

59
. Holman Hamilton,
Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850
(Lexington, Ky., 1964), 105.

this northern president tilted almost as far South as the southern President Taylor had tilted North. Fillmore shelved New Mexico's application for statehood and gave his support to the omnibus. Nevertheless, the Senate spent a month passing a bewildering series of amendments and rescindments of amendments before sending Clay's measure down to defeat on July 31. Exhausted and disillusioned, the once-redoubtable Kentuckian left Washington to recuperate at Newport. His younger colleagues remained in the caldron on Capitol Hill to pick up the pieces.

And it was by pieces that the "Compromise" finally passed. Representing the new generation, Stephen A. Douglas came on stage to star in the third act. A man whose capacity for liquor was exceeded only by his capacity for work (the combination would kill him eleven years later at the age of 48), Douglas earned the sobriquet Little Giant for his great political prowess contained in a frame five feet four inches tall. Never a believer in the omnibus strategy, Douglas stripped the vehicle down to its component parts and put together a majority for each of those parts. Northerners of both parties and border-state Whigs supplied the votes for admission of California, prohibition of the slave trade in the District, and payment of $10 million to Texas (quickly accepted) to settle the border dispute with New Mexico. Many northern Democrats joined southerners of both parties to enact a stronger fugitive slave law and organize Utah and New Mexico as territories without restrictions on slavery. Fillmore helped the cause by persuading enough northern Whigs to abstain from the votes on the fugitive slave and territorial bills to allow their passage. On all these measures the divisions occurred mainly along sectional rather than party lines, another sign that the existing two-party system was crumbling under the weight of slavery.
⁶⁰

Nevertheless, Douglas's achievement seemed to have broken the deadlock that had paralyzed government and threatened the republic since 1846. It lanced the boil of tension that had festered in Congress during one of its longest and most contentious sessions in history. Most of the country gave a sigh of relief. Champagne and whiskey flowed freely in the capital. Tipsy crowds shouting "The Union is saved!" serenaded the politicians who had saved it. "Every face I meet is happy," wrote one observer. "The successful are rejoicing, the neutrals have all joined the winning side, and the defeated are silent." President Fillmore

60
. The roll-call votes in both houses are conveniently presented in Hamilton,
Prologue to Conflict
, 191–200.

christened the Compromise "a final settlement" of all sectional problems, and this phrase soon became the hallmark of political orthodoxy. Only Calhounites and Free Soilers challenged its finality.
⁶¹

But these curmudgeons of the right and left were temporarily isolated. When the Nashville Convention met again in November only half of the delegates—from seven states—showed up. Even these true believers seemed to recognize the futility of their proceedings. They passed resolutions denouncing the Compromise and affirming the right of secession. But their only concrete proposal was a call for another Southern Rights convention—somewhere, sometime. South Carolina fire-eaters came away from Nashville determined that next time they would not dawdle in cooperative action with other states, which only sicklied o'er the native hue of resolution with the pale cast of thought. They would act alone in the expectation that other states would follow.
⁶²

Free Soilers also condemned "the consummation of the iniquities of this most disgraceful session of Congress"—as Charles Francis Adams expressed it. Salmon P. Chase believed that "the question of slavery in the territories has been avoided. It has not been settled."
⁶³
He was right. In its final form the legislation organizing Utah and New Mexico specified that when admitted as states "they shall be received into the Union, with or without slavery, as their constitution may prescribe at the time of their admission." This said nothing about slavery
during the territorial stage
. The omission was deliberate. Congress passed the buck by expediting the appeal of territorial laws to the Supreme Court. As it happened, no slavery case came up from these territories. Several slaveholders carried their property to Utah, where Governor Brigham Young and his legislature obliged them by legalizing the institution in 1852 (the same year that the Saints openly endorsed polygamy). New Mexico also enacted a slave code in 1859. But neither territory was likely to strengthen the South in Congress. The census of 1860 counted twenty-nine slaves in Utah and none in New Mexico; in any event, statehood for either was distant. California furnished an irony that may have settled Calhoun more comfortably in his grave. Court decisions in that state permitted the "sojourn" (sometimes for several years) of slaveowners with their property. For a time in the 1850s California probably had

61
. Nevins,
Ordeal
, I, 343, 345–46.

62
. Jennings,
Nashville Convention
, 187–211.

63
. Adams quoted in Hamilton,
Prologue to Conflict
, 167; Chase quoted in Potter,
Impending Crisis
, 116.

more slaves than Utah and New Mexico combined. And this new free state did not tip the Senate balance against the South, for its senators were Democrats of a decidedly doughface cast.
⁶⁴

"I think the settlement of the last session and the firm course of the Administration in the execution of the fugitive slave law have given a new lease to slavery," wrote a North Carolina Whig at the beginning of 1851. "Property of that kind has not been so secure for the last twenty-five years."
⁶⁵
He was wrong—and precisely because of the administration's "firm course" in enforcing the fugitive slave law. Although one of the least-debated parts of the Compromise, this measure turned out to be the most divisive legacy of the "final settlement."

64
. Hamilton,
Prologue to Conflict
, 174–77, 203–4; William E. Franklin, "The Archy Case: The California Supreme Court Refuses to Free a Slave,"
Pacific Historical Review
, 32 (1963), 137–54; Paul Finkelman, "The Law of Slavery and Freedom in California 1848–1860,"
California Western Law Review
, 17 (1981), 437–64.

65
. William A. Graham to his brother, Jan. 6, 1851, in Nevins,
Ordeal
, I, 349.

3
An Empire for Slavery

I

On all issues but one, antebellum southerners stood for state's rights and a weak federal government. The exception was the fugitive slave law of 1850, which gave the national government more power than any other law yet passed by Congress. This irony resulted from the Supreme Court's decision in
Prigg v. Pennsylvania
(1842).

In the typical oblique language of the Constitution on slavery, Article IV, Section 2, stipulated that any "person held to service or labor in one state" who escaped to another "shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor shall be due." The Constitution did not specify how this provision should be enforced. A federal law of 1793 authorized slaveowners to cross state lines to recapture their property and bring it before any local magistrate or federal court to prove ownership. This law provided the fugitive with no protection of habeas corpus, no right to a jury trial, no right to testify in his own behalf. Some northerners believed that the law amounted to an invitation for kidnappers to seize free blacks. And indeed, professional slave catchers did not always take pains to make sure they had captured the right man nor did every judge go out of his way to ensure that a supposed fugitive matched the description on the affidavit. A good many slave catchers did not bother to take their captured prey before a court but simply spirited it south by the quickest route.

To remedy such abuses, several northern states enacted personal liberty laws. These measures variously gave fugitives the rights of testimony, habeas corpus, and trial by jury, or they imposed criminal penalties for kidnapping. In the hands of antislavery officials, some of these laws could be used to inhibit the capture of fugitives. In 1837, Pennsylvania convicted Edward Prigg of kidnapping after he had seized a slave woman and her children and returned them to their Maryland owner. Prigg's lawyers appealed the case to the U. S. Supreme Court, which in 1842 rendered a complex decision. Declaring the Pennsylvania anti-kidnapping law of 1826 unconstitutional, the Court upheld the fugitive slave law of 1793 and affirmed that a slaveholder's right to his property overrode any contrary state legislation. At the same time, however, the Court ruled that enforcement of the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution was a federal responsibility and that states need not cooperate in any way. This opened the floodgates for a new series of personal liberty laws (nine between 1842 and 1850) that prohibited the use of state facilities in the recapture of fugitives.
¹

In some areas of the North, owners could not reclaim their escaped property without the help of federal marshals. Black leaders and sympathetic whites in numerous communities formed vigilance committees to organize resistance to such efforts. These committees cooperated with the legendary underground railroad which carried fugitives north toward freedom. Magnified by southerners into an enormous Yankee network of lawbreakers who stole thousands of slaves each year, the underground railroad was also mythologized by its northern conductors who related their heroic deeds to grandchildren. The true number of runaway slaves is impossible to determine. Perhaps several hundred each year made it to the North or to Canada. Few of these fugitives had escaped from the lower South, the region that clamored loudest for a stronger fugitive slave law—less for practical advantage than as a matter of principle. Like a free California, northern aid to escaping slaves was an insult to southern honor. "Although the loss of property is felt," said Senator James Mason of Virginia, "the loss of honor is felt still more." The fugitive slave law, commented another politician, was "the only measure