Master of the Senate (8 page)

When he was a lawyer in Kentucky, it had been said of Henry Clay that he could “hypnotize a jury”; as a national spokesman for the Whig Party, he had attracted crowds so large on a speaking tour that it was said that he “depopulated the fields and forests of the West”; as a dinner party guest he was so charming that “the white gloves kissed by Clay became treasured mementoes.” He charmed the Senate as well. “No lover was ever more ardent, more vehement, more impassioned, or more successful in his appeal than Henry Clay”
when he was courting the Senate, an observer wrote, watching him “stepping gracefully, backward and forward and from side to side, flourishing a silk handkerchief,” an actor born to center stage. From time to time, Henry Clay returned to his desk to pick up his snuffbox, and carried it with him for a while, taking a pinch to punctuate an anecdote, tapping it with a forefinger to emphasize a point. Tall, slender, and graceful in a black dress coat and a high white stock, his face was bright, playful, and grinning as he told his wonderful stories, his voice “so penetrating that even in a lower key” it rang through the Chamber “as inspiring as a trumpet.” And when he turned serious, the stamp of his foot and the raising of a tight-clenched fist “made the emotion visible as well as audible,” an historian wrote. “Harry of the West,” “Brave Prince Hal,” “the Gallant Star”—Henry Clay, who had been elected Speaker of the House of Representatives the day he arrived in it, leader of the War Hawks in 1812, Henry Clay whose previous triumphs had already earned him the nickname of “the Great Compromiser”—now, in 1833, with North and South on the very brink of civil war, he proposed a compromise tariff bill that he said was not an ordinary piece of legislation but “a treaty of peace and amity”—a true compromise in which each side would sacrifice something for the sake of unity.

The North—President Jackson—“would, in the enforcement act, send forth alone a flaming sword,” Clay said. “We would send that also, but along with it the olive branch, as a messenger of peace. They cry out, ‘The Law! the law! the law! Power! Power! Power!’ … They would hazard a civil commotion, beginning in South Carolina and ending, God only knows where…. We want no war, above all no civil war, no family strife. We want no sacked cities, no desolated fields, no smoking ruins, no streams of American blood by American arms!”

Calhoun rose to respond in a great silence, for spectators and senators alike knew how much hung on his next words, as so much had hung on Webster’s words three years before. When he agreed to Clay’s proposal, “such was the clapping and thundering applause that… the sensation was indescribable,” an observer wrote. As Jackson’s Force bill moved through the Senate and House, Clay’s compromise tariff bill moved in tandem with it. And the moment the tariff bill passed, Calhoun was on the road to South Carolina. He traveled, as the historian Merrill Peterson has written, “day and night over snow-covered and rain-soaked roads, sometimes in open mail carts,” in order to stop a state convention from taking rash action. When he persuaded the convention to repeal the nullification ordinance, the crisis was over. And “the Compromise Act of 1833,” that Act created among the desks of the Senate, “would generally be celebrated as an act of deliverance.”

Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, three men who each longed for the presidency, and never attained it. The mark they made was in the Senate. But it was quite a mark. The battles they fought—sometimes, in opposition to Andrew Jackson, united; often opposed to each other (increasingly, Calhoun isolated
from the other two and from most of the Senate)—were battles over the most momentous issues of the age, and the Senate was often the dominant arena in which those issues were decided, for it was not the White House but Capitol Hill that was the epicenter of government then, and the Senate was the dominant house of Congress. As Peterson has written,

Sixteen years later, in 1849, it was again in the Senate that Clay, seventy-two years old now, rose to again urge compromise. He had always been thin, but now he was too thin, and frail—he had had to be helped up the stairs in front of the Capitol—and racked by the cough that his friends suspected was consumption although no one dared even to whisper the dreaded word. He didn’t stroll through the desks this time, didn’t move about much at all, in fact, as if he was trying to conserve his strength during the two days he spoke, standing for the most part at his back-row desk in a far corner of the Chamber, but “he spoke with the musical voice of old, with the same passionate intensity”—and, at crucial points, he still tapped the snuffbox. The spectre of sacked cities and desolated fields was very near now, but he was still fighting against it. Victory in the war with Mexico had brought the United States vast new territories—Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California—and the explosive issue of whether these territories should be slave or free was splitting the nation apart, and the dispute was being played out on the floor of the Senate, where for years Calhoun and his followers had successfully blocked admission of the territories as free states, had blocked admission while talk grew of secession, and of civil war. “If any solution to the [problem] … was to be found, it would be up to the Senate to take the lead”—up to the Senate, and to its “Great Compromiser.” For three weeks, Clay had worked and reworked alternate plans, and then, having finally settled on a complicated package of eight separate resolutions, one rainy January evening, haggard and coughing constantly, he had impulsively climbed into a carriage and visited Daniel Webster at Webster’s boardinghouse, and outlined his plan—to which Webster consented. And now, as his biographer wrote, Brave Prince Hal “rose in the Senate chamber and began his last great struggle to save the Union that he loved.”

From his position in the far corner, the long semi-circle of desks stretched below and away from him, and his gaze traveled along the upturned faces of the men sitting at them as he said: “I implore Senators—I entreat them, by all that they expect hereafter, and by all that is dear to them here below, to repress the
ardor of these passions, to look at their country in this crisis—to listen to the voice of reason.” Sometimes the physical effort seemed too much for him, and he faltered, but he always went on, for two long days, and one observer wrote, “when in moments of excitement, he stands so firm and proud, with his eyes all agleam, while his voice rings out clear and strong, it almost seems that… the hot blood of youth was still coursing through his veins…. The wonderful old man!” In a stroke, as Peterson puts it, he “seized the initiative from the President, centered it in the Senate…. and set the legislative agenda for the country.” “What a singular spectacle!” wrote the editor of the
New York Herald
—a newspaper long hostile to Clay. “Of all the leaders of the old parties, of all the aspiring spirits of the new ones, including [the President] and the whole of his cabinet, from head to tail, not a single soul, not a single mind has dared to exhibit the moral courage to come out with any plan for settling the whole except it is Henry Clay … solitary and alone.”

One of the desks below Clay’s had been vacant while he spoke. It was a desk near the center of the Chamber, third from the aisle in the second row on the right—Calhoun’s desk. Calhoun’s boardinghouse was just across from the Capitol, but Calhoun was too ill to attend. When he read Clay’s speech in the newspapers, though, he determined to reply, and his supporters said he would be present on March 4. The galleries again were packed, the walls were lined with spectators, and shortly after noon Calhoun came. “He was emaciated and feeble,” one of his biographers has recounted, “his sallow cheeks sunken, his long hair now almost white, his step short.” He had hoped to deliver his own speech, but he didn’t have the strength. While Senator James Mason of Virginia, standing at his shoulder, read the words Calhoun had written, Calhoun sat at his desk, with a great black coat drawn around him, and a journalist described “his eyes glowing … as he glanced at Senators upon whom he desired to have certain passages make an impression.” And the speech was as defiant as ever. It was on a great theme—“the greatest and gravest question that can ever come under your consideration: How can the union be preserved?”—and he said the question had a simple answer: Only by adopting measures to assure the southern states that they could remain in the Union “consistently with their honor and safety.” The speech rallied the South—against the compromise—and when, on March 7, 1849, Webster stood to reply to Calhoun, at his desk also near the center of the Chamber, “not since the Reply to Hayne did the fate of the nation seem to hang so fatefully on the wisdom, eloquence and power of one man.” Standing in the same Chamber, on almost the same spot, twenty years before, Black Dan Webster had given a speech that would live in history. Now he began another such speech: “Mr. President, I wish to speak today, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a northern man, but as an American, and a member of the Senate of the United States. It is fortunate that there is a Senate of the United States; a body … to which the country looks with confidence, for wise, moderate, patriotic and healing counsels.” Webster, too, was old, but his
voice still pealed through that Chamber like an organ, rolling across the long arc of desks and the crowded galleries as he continued: “I speak today for the preservation of the Union. Hear me for my cause.”

Calhoun had had to be helped from the Chamber after his speech was read; it was expected that he would never return. But he had returned for Webster’s speech. Not seeing his old foe at first, Webster said he regretted his absence. Then another senator shouted: “He is here.” And near the conclusion of Webster’s speech, Calhoun engaged him in a brief, harsh exchange, at the end of which there was an exchange that was less harsh, as if Webster had suddenly realized that it might be the last they would ever have. The “honorable member” had as always refused to cloak his opinions in gentle phrases, Webster said. “He did avow his purpose openly, boldly and manfully; he did not disguise his conduct or his motives.”

Those were indeed the last words they ever exchanged. Calhoun’s health deteriorated rapidly. In his boardinghouse room, he said, “If I could have but one hour to speak in the Senate….” He died on March 31; his funeral was held in the Senate, of course.

The great debate was to roll on among those desks all that year and the next: the great speeches coming one after another—Clay fighting for his compromise (despite his poor health he spoke seventy times during the debate), northerners opposing it because, as William Seward put it, slavery was forbidden by “a higher law than the Constitution.” Once Clay’s clashes with Benton grew so fierce that the Senate adjourned to give the tempers of the two old men time to cool. And there was at least one moment of greater drama still, when an enraged Benton left his desk and advanced on diminutive southern Senator Henry S. Foote of Mississippi during an especially angry exchange, and Foote drew a pistol; the old frontier brawler did not pause but continued striding toward him, shouting, “I have no pistols. Let him fire! Stand out of the way, and let the assassin fire!” until finally Senator Dickerson of New Jersey took the pistol out of Foote’s hand. When, after months of debate in the sweltering summer months, most of Clay’s plan was passed, the Union was preserved by what Peterson calls “a truly monumental legislative achievement.”

Within two years of the Compromise of 1850, all of the Great Triumvirate would be dead; when, in 1859 the Senate, grown too numerous for its beautiful Chamber, moved to larger, but drab, quarters in the Capitol’s new north wing, Vice President John C. Breckinridge, in a final address in the Old Chamber, summed up its spirit by evoking “the mighty three, whose names and fame,
associated in life, death has not been able to sever”—and by pointing to their desks: “There sat Calhoun,
the
Senator, inflexible, austere, oppressed…. This was Webster’s seat. His great efforts are associated with this Chamber, whose very air seems yet to vibrate beneath the strokes of his deep tones and mighty words. On the outer circle sat Clay….”

In the end, of course, the triumvirate could be said to have failed. The Civil War came. Ironically, it was in the Senate, scene of the great—and for decades successful—efforts to preserve the Union, that the fuse was lit that did so much to blow it apart. In 1854, Senator Stephen A. Douglas, to get a railroad built that would benefit his Illinois constituents, persuaded his Senate Committee on Territories to report out a southern-supported bill—the Kansas-Nebraska Act—that would in effect repeal not only the Compromise of 1850 but the Missouri Compromise as well by allowing the creation of a state—Kansas—under conditions that virtually guaranteed that it would be a slave state. Abolitionists assailed the measure; Douglas was to remark that he could travel all the way from Chicago to Washington by the light of his burning effigy. But southern senators saw the chance to force the nation to accept slavery on their terms or break up the Union; for forty years the Senate had been the center of compromise; now it was the center of conflict; “as was so often the case during those great nineteenth-century debates, it seemed as if the whole population of Washington sought admittance to the Senate galleries,” an historian was to write. It was from one of the Senate desks that Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, an uncompromising foe of slavery, struggled to rise when, two days after he passionately denounced the “Crime Against Kansas,” a South Carolina congressman entered the Chamber, came up behind him and struck him again and again on his head with a heavy cane, while another South Carolinian, with another cane, faced the other senators to keep them from intervening. It was under his desk that Sumner’s leg became so entangled that he could not rise as the blows rained on his head and blood began pouring from his wounds; after he finally wrenched himself free, it was among the desks that he reeled, “backwards and forwards,” until he fell. (Whereupon southern senators congratulated the assailant.) By the time, three years later, that Sumner was able to return to the Senate, attempts at compromise had ended, and the smoking ruins and the streams of American blood were almost at hand. But did the triumvirate really fail? The compromises fashioned by Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (and by other senators, too, Benton notable among them) might be said to have merely postponed the settlement of the slavery issue, merely postponed the terrible war. But another view is that perhaps nothing could have stopped that war from coming. And if that is the case, then the Senate’s compromises had bought the time that America needed. An infant Union was crumbling; the Senate’s compromises had held it together year after year, decade after decade, had held it together long enough—as if those compromises had been a great delaying action to give the infant time to grow strong enough to win the war and to endure. Writing of the last of the compromises—the Compromise of 1850—
and of the senators who had created it, Senator Byrd was to say, “Perhaps the greatest credit we can give them is to note that the Civil War began in 1861 rather than in 1851; for, if the war had broken out during the 1850’s, when … public opinion in the North was still divided over the slavery issue, we might today be two nations rather than one.” During a period of about four decades—a period roughly coinciding with the years, 1819 to 1859, during which the Senate occupied its ideal stage—it played magnificently the role the Founding Fathers had written for it. Its compromises cooled seemingly uncoolable passions, and its resistance to “King Andrew” in the Bank War and James Polk in the Mexican—and in the Oregon dispute—made it the republican tribunate against aggressive executive power, the great bulwark of liberty and self-government against the possibility of executive tyranny, that the Founding Fathers had hoped it would be. And the Senate was more. As Peterson says,