A Disease in the Public Mind (27 page)

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In the South, Senator John C. Calhoun was telling people, “We have borne the wrongs and insults of the North long enough.” He called for a southern convention that would, like the Hartford Convention of 1814, put George Washington's sacred Union out of business by forming a separate confederacy. Calhoun had a pretext more serious than abolitionist smears—the threat of admitting California to the Union as a free state, barring slavery.

Calhoun's fellow senator, Henry Clay of Kentucky, disagreed. Speaking as a fellow Southerner, he asked Calhoun if there was anything the South had demanded in the previous decades that she had not obtained. President Polk had lowered the tariff to the vanishing point, to the chagrin of New England's textile magnates. Slavery still flourished in the nation's capital. Florida, the Louisiana Territory, and now Texas had created opportunities for an enormous expansion of their peculiar institution.

All true enough. But Calhoun and his followers felt that they were surrounded by enemies. A British naval squadron cruised the Atlantic, seizing ships that attempted to transport slaves from Africa. Urged by British diplomats, every other nation and colony in South America except Brazil and Cuba had freed their slaves. On nearby Jamaica and other West Indian islands, freed slaves seemed to be living peacefully with their former masters, undermining the assumption that emancipation meant insurrection. More and more, it looked as if the South would soon become an isolated community, despised for their refusal to consider some form of gradual emancipation.

To counter this isolation, Southerners like Calhoun began yearning for an empire. Their purple dream had ironic similarity to the fantasy John Quincy Adams created in one of his early rants against The Slave Power. It would stretch from the Potomac River to California and extend into the Caribbean, with slave-owning Cuba a first and obvious prize. At the close of the Mexican War, many people in the northern Mexican states had expressed a desire to join the United States. Why not occupy them and convert them into slave states? Each year, the price of cotton increased, as England's and New England's mills prospered and grew. Why should the South be limited by lines drawn on a map by the aging architects of the Missouri Compromise?
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This purple dream redoubled the South's rage at the slanderous abuse they were receiving from the North. Soon there was a flourishing paranoid conviction that the abolitionists were a conspiracy aimed at destroying the South. This belief was intensified by the slaves who fled to the northern
states with the help of an abolitionist creation, the Underground Railroad. The members of this organization, many of them courageous free blacks, helped runaways dodge federal marshals and professional slave catchers until they were across the border into Canada and settled in free communities.

Compared to the three and a half million men and women living in slavery, the actual number of these escapees was trivial—about two thousand a year. Almost all came from the border states of the upper South. But the symbolic impact of these fugitives was large. When a runaway was caught, abolitionists and their sympathizers began defying the U.S. Supreme Court, which had ruled in 1842 that state laws providing jury trials to determine a runaway's status were invalid. Northern state legislatures passed new laws, forbidding their officials from cooperating in any way with federal pursuers.

Then there was California. Thanks to the discovery of gold in 1848, its population had multiplied almost overnight. A cry for statehood soon produced a constitution that barred slavery. Next came a governor and a legislature, asking for admission to the Union. When the new president, Mexican War hero General Zachary Taylor, took office in 1849, he recommended in his first message to Congress that California be admitted immediately. Southerners were infuriated and all but shouted secession in his face. The old soldier replied that he would personally take charge of the federal army and smash any such venture without mercy, a la Andrew Jackson.
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Meanwhile, slavery was paralyzing that crucial arm of the federal government, Congress. When the legislators gathered for their first session under the new president, it took sixty-three ballots to elect a speaker of the House of Representatives. The contest was between the previous speaker, Whig Robert Winthrop of Massachusetts, and Howell Cobb, a Georgia Democrat, with eight other candidates churning on the fringes. For three weeks the House's walls vibrated with furious oratory. The Whig Party virtually dissolved in the cauldron, as southern Whigs deserted in favor of Cobb. Finally, for the first time in its history, the House voted to accept someone who won by a plurality, rather than a majority, and Cobb became the speaker.

So rancid was the antagonism between proslavery and antislavery congressmen, even the most trivial jobs, such as doorkeeper of the House, became a contest that depended on the applicant's allegiance. With Cobb in command of appointing committee chairmen, a congressional revolt was soon fermenting. The admission of California would tip the balance of free versus slave states, sixteen to fifteen, in the Senate.

It was time for desperate measures, and seventy-three-year-old Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky summoned his dwindling strength and undertook the rescue of the imperiled Union. With masterful oratory and even more masterful backstairs negotiations, Clay asked Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun to join him in a package of compromises that would, he hoped, settle the issue of slavery without bloodshed or further divisive rancor.

California would be admitted as a free state. As for New Mexico and Utah, two territories that were within California's borders when conquered and then purchased from Mexico, Clay urged that they remain neutral on slavery for the time being, in spite of the Wilmot Proviso (which had never been approved by Congress). Next came a tough new fugitive slave law that would provide both money and legal machinery to capture runaways. Finally, the slave trade, but not slavery, would be abolished in the District of Columbia.

To the amazement of many people, southern congressmen displayed little enthusiasm for defending the Washington, DC, slave trade. The slave pens in the vicinity of the White House were to be dismantled. For the first time, the free blacks of the district would live without fear of being kidnapped and sold south.
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For abolitionists, especially of the Garrison sort, compromise was still a filthy word. They unanimously denounced Clay's political package. This surprised no one, of course. More unexpected was a speech by Senator Clay. Speaking as a Kentuckian, he issued a warning to his fellow Southerners. Secession was not and never would be a peaceful solution. The Americans of the Midwest, of which Kentucky was a geographic neighbor, would never
tolerate the idea of letting a foreign state control New Orleans and the immense commerce from their farms that flowed down the Mississippi River for export to a hungry world. Webster followed Clay with a speech extolling the vital importance of the Union. The abolitionists condemned him as a traitor to New England.

Calhoun, too ill to speak, let a Virginia senator read his speech, while he glared out at the Senate with the angry eyes of a man who accepted nothing, including his imminent death. (He would expire of chronic lung congestion four weeks later.) His words declared he accepted the compromise but warned it would never work unless Congress and the president “did justice to the South” by guaranteeing her the right to bring slaves into all the remaining western territories. Even more important must be an absolute and total end to “the agitation of the slave question.”

These three famous voices did not by any means stifle further debate on the compromise. The oratory lasted for weeks. But sheer exhaustion began to play a part in a growing sentiment to accept these four proposals. This willingness was somewhat ironically accelerated by the sudden death of President Taylor from a stomach disorder and the ascent of mild-mannered Vice President Millard Fillmore of New York. Partly at his suggestion, the package was broken into four separate bills and passed individually, under the leadership of a strong new voice in the Senate, Democrat Stephen Douglas of Illinois.

It would take another year to learn whether the South would accept the compromises of 1850. In the state elections of 1851, the two political parties, Democrats and Whigs, were temporarily irrelevant. The contest was between unionists, who were in favor of the compromise, and secessionists. The unionists met their opponents with a steady and frequently steely denial that secession was a constitutional right. Backed by Henry Clay's warning, James Madison's denunciation of nullification and secession came back to life with surprising force. The unionists won in every state except South Carolina, which remained loyal to its lost prophet, John C. Calhoun.
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In the North, where Slave Power paranoia remained strong, the compromise of 1850 proved to be a temporary truce. The revised fugitive slave law rapidly became unacceptable in New England. Even aloof Ralph Waldo Emerson, the nation's best known writer, who strove to avoid all types of extremism, was enraged. (He had urged abolitionists to love their southern neighbors more and their colored brethren a little less in the name of civic peace.) “This filthy enactment was made in the Nineteenth Century, by people who could read and write. I will not obey it, by God!” declared The Sage of Concord.

The law empowered federal officials to draft northern citizens to assist them in catching and detaining runaway slaves. If a local federal marshal refused to pursue the fugitive, he could be fined $1,000. Any citizen who aided or concealed the runaway was liable to the same fine. All the slave catcher needed was an affidavit from a slave's owner to seize a runaway. Jury trials were banned. A hearing before a federal judge was the only legal procedure permitted.

In states where abolitionist sentiment was strong, there were legal counterattacks. The Wisconsin Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional, freeing a fugitive slave named Joshua Glover. Vermont's legislature passed a “habeas corpus law” that required state officials to do everything in their power to assist a captured runaway. In other states, local juries regularly acquitted men arrested for helping runaways. An infuriated President Fillmore threatened to send the U.S. Army to support federal authority.

The most sensational challenge to the law came in 1853 in Boston, where a Virginia runaway, twenty-year-old Anthony Burns, was arrested. New Hampshire–born President Franklin Pierce, elected by the Democrats in 1852, made it clear that he was going to enforce the law in the name of sectional peace. Undeterred, an enraged crowd stormed the courthouse and battled with fists, clubs, and knives against outnumbered U.S. marshals. In the melee, a deputy marshal was fatally stabbed. But the lawmen finally drove the protestors into the street.

A grimly determined President Pierce rushed hundreds of troops to Boston and a hearing was conducted before Judge Edward G. Loring, who
served as commissioner of the federal circuit court in the state. His ruling was a foregone conclusion—Burns must be returned to his owner. While a huge crowd screamed insults, the soldiers lined the streets from the courthouse to the harbor, where a ship waited to take Burns back to Virginia. One Bostonian said he and his friends “went to bed one night old fashioned conservative compromise Whigs and woke up stark mad abolitionists.”

Not long after Burns left Boston, William Lloyd Garrison presided over a huge protest meeting, at which he burned copies of the Fugitive Slave Act and the U.S. Constitution. Abolitionists launched a movement to dismiss Judge Loring. After another three years of agitation in and out of the legislature, a new Massachusetts governor fired the jurist. The new Democratic president, James Buchanan, promptly gave him an appointment in the federal government.

Among the manic antislavery crusaders in New England and the Midwest, this rescue only confirmed the virtual omnipotence of The Slave Power.
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John Brown grew this beard to hide his identity while reconnoitering Harpers Ferry for his 1859 raid. He was wanted for murdering five defenseless men in Kansas and ordering his sons to chop up their bodies with swords, while their horrified wives and children watched. Brown regularly denied his guilt for this atrocity.
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