The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (18 page)

Finally Clay relented. Rather than admit California immediately and then move on to the other resolutions, he decided that California statehood would not happen unless it was combined with the territorial bills. He thus embraced Foote’s bundling approach. That decision, in turn, created even more turmoil. Thomas Hart Benton, among others, was furious. He deemed the omnibus bill a “monster” and tried to cripple Foote’s proposed Senate committee with amendments.

Then, on April 17, after many days of wrangling, Foote, who was about half Benton’s size, launched a personal attack. He had done it many times before. At first Benton just fumed. Then suddenly he rose from his desk, threw aside his chair, and went after Foote. The diminutive Mississippian pulled out a revolver, pointed it at Benton, and cocked it. Other senators tried to intervene. Benton threw them out of his way, repeatedly called Foote an “assassin,” and dared him to shoot. Finally, Foote turned his weapon over to Daniel Dickinson, a New York Democrat.
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Nothing was done to punish Foote. He wasn’t expelled. Nor was he contrite. In fact, he eventually got his way. All of Benton’s amendments were voted down, the committee was established, and the omnibus bill became “the” bill. Getting it passed, however, proved impossible. Only a handful of Southerners were willing to vote for California as a free state, and only a handful of Northerners were willing to accept a new, tougher Fugitive Slave Law. With men from both camps casting “no” votes, the “ayes” didn’t have a chance. Henry Clay addressed the Senate seventy times in support of the proposal. But finally, after suffering a major defeat on July 31, he gave up.

Henry Foote attacking Thomas Hart Benton. Scene in Uncle Sam’s Senate, 17th April, 1850. Library of Congress.

Foote then reintroduced his proposal to split California at 35°30´. That, too, was voted down, 33 to 23, with Clay, Benton, and two Delaware Whigs voting with the solid Northern bloc. Clay, physically and emotionally exhausted, then left for Newport, Rhode Island, to recover.

Stephen A. Douglas, “the Little Giant” of Illinois, now stepped into the breach. To Douglas the essence of the situation had long been clear. No more than four or five senators would ever vote in favor of the entire compromise package. Thus trying to get the omnibus bill through the Senate was impossible.

But the package, thought Douglas, could be put through piece by piece. On the California question, Northern support was a sure thing; so all that was needed was the backing of one or two slave-state senators. The same was true on the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia. More daunting was putting together a majority in behalf of the other measures, especially the Fugitive Slave Law. That necessitated getting a sizable number of Northerners in the House to either vote with the South or miss the crucial vote. Who might that be? Northern Whigs? Not a chance. Northern Democrats? That, Douglas knew, was more than likely.

By the time Clay left for Newport, moreover, one major obstacle to compromise was gone. For months Zachary Taylor had made it clear that he opposed the compromise package. He said it was unnecessary, that California should simply be admitted as a free state. What, then, would “Old Rough and Ready” have done if Clay’s package had somehow got through Congress? Would he have vetoed it? Many thought he would. And then what? Clay certainly couldn’t have found the two-thirds majorities in both houses necessary to override the veto.

Then, to everyone’s surprise, the sixty-five-year-old president suddenly became ill. On July 4, after spending hours listening to Henry Foote and other speakers wax eloquent in the hot Washington sun, he returned to the White House and feasted on fruits and vegetables and drank glass after glass of ice-cold water and milk. The next day he was sick. His doctor said he had “cholera morbus” or acute gastroenteritis. Four days later, on the night of July 9, he died.

Was Taylor’s death decisive? It certainly changed the odds dramatically. For the new president, Millard Fillmore of New York, was a compromiser by nature. He saw himself as a peacemaker. He supported the compromise as vigorously as Taylor had opposed it. He was more than willing to use the power and influence of his office to round up votes in its behalf. With Fillmore’s backing, Douglas knew he had a winning formula. He wasted no time. In less than six weeks, he maneuvered every part of Clay’s original proposals through the Senate and House.

In doing so, Douglas never got the two warring sides to actually “compromise.” In the end, most Northerners still voted one way, most Southerners the opposite way. Only four of the sixty senators, for example, voted for all the compromise proposals, whereas forty-eight voted against at least one of the proposals. Among Deep South senators, only Sam Houston of Texas voted for California.
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But Douglas, by getting some men to miss a crucial vote and others to vote with the other side, cobbled together majorities in both houses, and Fillmore signed the measures into law as fast as they were adopted.

Thus on September 9, 1850, California became the thirty-first state in the Union. The next day William Gwin and John C. Frémont were sworn in as senators. And the following day Edward Gilbert and George W. Wright took their seats in the House.

The outcome created storms of protest across the Deep South. From Charleston to New Orleans, fiery speeches and angry letters dominated the news.
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All deplored the admission of California as a free state. Many insisted that California should have been split in two, either at the 36°30´ line or at the 35°30´ line, and two states admitted to the Union, one slave and one free. Many also objected to Californians taking matters into their own hands and framing a state constitution without congressional permission to do so. Whose fault was that? Some blamed it on Zachary Taylor, many on General Riley.

In South Carolina, Calhoun’s replacement in the U.S. Senate, Robert Barnwell Rhett, led the protest. That was as expected. For nearly twenty years, the forty-nine-year-old South Carolina native had been fanning the flames of Southern secession, as well as lambasting Northern abolitionists, the federal tariff, and anyone who disagreed with him. That June he had tried to get the 175 delegates at the Nashville Convention to lead the South out of the Union. Failing there, he now insisted that South Carolina lead the way. He had a wide audience, thanks to his son’s newspaper,
The Charleston Mercury.
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In neighboring Georgia, the
Columbus Sentinel
joined Rhett and the
Mercury
in calling for secession. “We have all along contended that the admission of California would fill to overflowing the poisoned cup of degradation which the North has for years been preparing for the South…. We are for secession, open unqualified secession. Henceforth we are for war upon the government; it has existed but for our ruin and to the extent of our ability to destroy it, it shall exist no longer.”
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Farther west, in the Mississippi Delta, the call for secession was also strident. Leading the pack was Louisiana’s flamboyant senator, Pierre Soulé. The son of a Napoleonic officer and magistrate, the forty-nine-year-old Frenchman had been a fiery militant most of his adult life. Arrested for revolutionary activity in France in the 1820s, he had broken out of jail, sought refuge in England, then Port-au-Prince, Baltimore, and New York, before settling in New Orleans, where he had become a prominent defense lawyer and Jacksonian Democrat. Elected to the U.S. Senate first in 1847, then again in 1849, he had aggressively championed the expansion of slavery and vehemently opposed free soil.

On the floor of the Senate, Soulé had repeatedly denounced Clay’s compromise. “Will honorable Senators,” he asked, “point out to me a single concession from the North to the South which these bills contain? Sir, there is none; no, not ONE.” The compromise, thundered Soulé, was a swindle. It covertly and deceitfully gave the Wilmot Proviso’s sponsors what they had failed to achieve in the previous Congress. And now that its provisions had become the law of the land, he called for secession. He was adamant. The South, he said, had no other choice. He also joined forces with other ardent secessionists in and around New Orleans in seeking “a redress of the balance” by forcibly taking Cuba.
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Marching to the same drummer was Governor John A. Quitman of Mississippi. No one, it seemed, was angrier about the outcome in Washington than the Mississippi governor. The “so-called Compromise,” he fumed, was a defeat for the South and a victory for the supporters of the Wilmot Proviso. Not even the fugitive-slave clause was a Southern gain. Not only would Northerners not enforce it, but slaves now had much more free land to escape to. The clauses allowing the possibility of slavery in New Mexico and Utah, moreover, were meaningless. The land was certain to become free soil. Also, the Texas border settlement with New Mexico cost the slave states 100,000 square miles of slave territory. In essence, the so-called compromise established free soil everywhere west of Texas. It left slaveholders with nowhere to expand in the present United States. The only hope, contended Quitman, was the annexation of Cuba.

In the meantime, thought Quitman, he had to do something to stop “Yankee fanatics” from securing the Wilmot Proviso through this “stupendous plot.” Submission amounted to Southern treason. Not only was California fit for slavery, but Southern slaves would make California mines hum, its ports boom, its fields yield cotton. The value of Southern slaves, moreover, would increase by “at least” 50 percent. In exchange for giving up California, then, the South had to get something substantial—at least half of the territories and massive constitutional guarantees. Let the North have California, but only if the South received all land east of the Sierras up to the 40th parallel. With such thoughts, Quitman called the Mississippi legislature into a special session on November 18 to combat “deep political intrigue” and to assert Mississippi’s “sovereignty.”
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John A. Quitman. Library of Congress. Quitman always wanted to be seen as a commanding general on horseback. In this portrait, he got his wish.

Quitman’s summons rang like a fire bell through the Deep South. As soon as Robert Barnwell Rhett heard about it, he fired off a letter of approval. The people of Charleston, said Rhett, were delighted. They all saw it as the first step toward Southern independence. Governor Seabrook of South Carolina agreed. Secession, said Seabrook, was popular throughout South Carolina, even in districts “where a large portion of the population” were “non-slaveholders.” He had just toured the state and had not met “with one man who was not favorable to the only certain remedy—secession.” He also promised that South Carolina would be quick to follow Mississippi’s lead.
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On November 18, Quitman addressed the Mississippi legislature. After condemning at length California statehood and Northern “aggression,” he spoke of the future of slavery. The “institution,” he contended, was obviously “doomed” if “left to the tender mercies of the federal government.” For there was no doubt that the national government was “now hostile to slavery.” And while last-ditch efforts might be made to get the non-slaveholding states “to remedy the wrong” by splitting California in two and by granting amendments to the Constitution, it was his “decided opinion that the only effectual remedy” was “peaceable secession of the aggrieved states.” He thus called for a convention to consider all the state’s options, especially secession.
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In response, the legislature scheduled an election of delegates for early September 1851. That election, in turn, quickly became part of a larger contest between unionists and states’ righters for control of the state. The states’ righters backed Quitman, the arch secessionist, for another term as governor. The unionists chose Henry Foote as their gubernatorial candidate. The two candidates then set out on a joint speaking tour. Foote, who was widely regarded as “the best stump speaker then living,” generally got the better of Quitman, who was a man of action, not of words. Meanwhile, their followers literally got into hundreds of fistfights and dozens of duels. Then, at Sledgeville, the two candidates themselves got into a brawl. That ended the speaking tour.
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