Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (39 page)
Authors: Conrad Black
BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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In December 1850, after the Austrian government’s charge in Washington, Johann Georg Hülsemann, registered a protest that the American diplomat A. Dudley Mann had encouraged Hungarian revolutionaries, Clayton’s successor, Daniel Webster (back at State for a second time), wrote a bombastic letter in reply to Hülsemann, asserting America’s right to support factions and movements in Europe that appeared, as did those of 1848, congruent with “those great ideas of responsible and popular government” that inspired the American Revolution. He went on grandly to inform Hülsemann that America had vastly rich and fertile lands compared with which “the possessions of the House of Habsburg are but as a patch on the earth’s surface.” This bumptious disparagement of what was still a substantial if polyglot empire, though it showed the unfamiliarity of even so worldly a man as Webster with accepted diplomatic style, also illustrated the disintegration of the residual Holy Roman Empire, just two years after the fall of Metternich. It was at about this time that this empire’s condition was described as “hopeless but not desperate.” These upheavals in Europe only reinforced the comparative eminence of august and unchallenged early Victorian Britain. The Hungarian revolutionary leader Louis Kossuth was accorded an immense reception when he arrived in New York in December.
There was a farcical expedition in 1851 against Spanish Cuba, led by General Narciso López, a Venezuelan-born Spanish general who had sided with the anti-Spanish faction in Cuba. López was apprehended and publicly garroted. Fifty Americans who accompanied López were executed and more than 70 others shipped back to Spain in unsatisfactory conditions and only released when the United States handed over $25,000 to cover reparations for the sacking by angry crowds of the Spanish consulate in New Orleans on August 21, 1851, following the execution of the 50 Americans. (The fiasco of the landing and the ransoming of the hostages presaged, at least to a slight degree, the debacle of American-backed guerrillas in the Bay of Pigs shambles in 1961, and the seizing of the American hostages in the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1980–1981, Chapters 14 and 16.)
8. THE SLIDE TOWARD DISUNIONThe Democrats met, again at Baltimore, in June 1852, and there was a fierce contest for the presidential nomination between the narrowly defeated (by Van Buren’s spoiler anti-slavery candidacy) General Lewis Cass, senator from Michigan and former governor, minister to France, and secretary of war; Polk’s able war secretary and former judge, senator, and three-term governor of New York, William L. Marcy; Illinois’s capable and energetic Senator Stephen A. Douglas; and Polk’s indecisive doughface secretary of state, James Buchanan of Pennsylvania. None of the four could get a majority of votes, much less the two-thirds majority required for nomination, so for the third straight Democratic convention a dark horse emerged, Franklin Pierce, former general and former U.S. senator from New Hampshire and now that state’s governor. His views on slavery were not well-known, so he could be supported by all the factions, though all the leading candidates except Buchanan would have been better candidates and much better presidents. The vice presidential candidate was Alabama senator and former minister to France William R. King, who, although he and his family owned 500 slaves, was a Unionist and a moderate on the issue of slavery. King shared a house with James Buchanan for 15 years, and Jackson, in particular, had implied with his usual causticity that they were homosexuals, but that has never been substantiated.
The Whigs met in the same place as soon as the Democrats departed and also had a long struggle, between President Fillmore, who ran for reelection as champion of the Compromise of 1850; the anti-slavery general, Winfield Scott, who had fought in every American war (and significant skirmish) since 1812, and was the commanding general of the United States Army for 20 years; and the septuagenarian secretary of state, Daniel Webster. Finally, Scott prevailed on the 53rd ballot. This development eliminated any Whig support from pro-slavery elements and effectively divided the North between those who wanted to restrain or abolish slavery and those who were prepared to abide by the implicit but not unlimited expansion of it foreseen by the Compromise of 1850. The vice presidential candidate was Navy Secretary William Graham of North Carolina.
The platforms were virtually identical, but because Scott, though an upholder of the Compromise of 1850 and a Virginian, was known to be anti-slavery, and Pierce was a doughface appeaser of the South, though also a supporter of the Compromise, Pierce took the slave states en bloc and had the upper hand in the North, where the majority hoped the Great Compromise had solved the slavery controversy. Pierce was a distinguished general, who had served under Scott in Mexico, and as a governor and senator was a more apt campaigner (there was almost no physical campaign) than the stolid and rather guileless Scott, who was 71 and weighed about 300 pounds. Given his many advantages, it was not surprising that Pierce won with 1.6 million votes to 1.39 for Scott, 50 percent to 44 percent. (Almost all the rest went to the old Free Soil Party that Van Buren had led in 1848.)
The Compromise was holding, but its greatest authors were gone; Clay had died, aged 75, at the end of June, and Webster, who had contested the Whig nomination in June, died in October, aged 70. (Webster was succeeded as secretary of state by his most assiduous disciple, Edward Everett, former governor of Massachusetts and minister to Great Britain.) President Fillmore returned to be the most prominent citizen of Buffalo, New York, an undistinguished president, but one who had made a vital and positive contribution at a critical time by supporting the Compromise of 1850. He had also sent Commodore Matthew Perry to open the ports of Japan, an important mission completed by his successor. Douglas was now the leading figure in the Congress. The new vice president, William R. King, was suffering from tuberculosis, for which he went on a curative trip to Cuba. His condition worsened, and he was inaugurated by special act of Congress, at the consulate in Havana, and died after just 45 days in office at his home in Alabama, without ever having got back to Washington. The leading figures in the cabinet were the astute William L. Marcy as secretary of state and the strident Calhounite Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as secretary of war.
The Whigs had effectively become a party that could more or less tolerate the continuation of slavery if the Union depended on it but was opposed to its extension. They could no longer challenge successfully by selecting candidates who were fuzzy on the issue, as Harrison and Taylor, and in his way, Clay, had been. The Democrats were the sole continuators now of the Jackson settlement. There were many northern Democrats who were uncomfortable with the possibility of any expansion of slavery outside cotton, tobacco, and sugar-producing areas. The old Whigs had effectively disintegrated and gravitated toward a new party, alongside the anti-slavery Democrats and the Free Soilers.
On March 31, 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry, whom President Fillmore had sent to Japan, signed an agreement (Treaty of Kanagawa) opening two Japanese ports to the U.S. Perry brought gifts, including a miniature railway and telegraph, which did impress the locals. This was the beginning of the process that brought Japan out of its isolation and turned it very quickly into one of the world’s Great Powers. In June of 1854, the Canadian Reciprocity Treaty resolved many and long-standing fishing disputes, essentially by opening up the waters of each country to the fishing of the other.
Between 1855 and 1860, there would be a series of private attempts led by the adventurer William Walker to take control of Nicaragua to promote an isthmian canal. Pierce professed not to approve the initiative, but Walker purported to be the president of Nicaragua from 1855 to 1857, during which time his emissary was received by Pierce, seeming to legitimize what was again looked upon in the North as another effort to extend the frontiers of slavery illicitly, out the back door of America in an unjustifiable act of aggression. This was reminiscent of the hostile Whig take on the Mexican War. Walker was chased out by Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who owned the local railway. Walker returned a hero to the South, and reinvaded Nicaragua in 1857 unsuccessfully. The whole Ruritanian farce would come to an end with another invasion in 1860, in Honduras, where the local authorities defeated, captured, tried, and executed Walker with commendable efficiency. American public thinking on slavery had by then vastly transcended this type of farcical gasconade.
Pierce was a fine-looking, good-natured, charming, and well-intentioned man, and had been a competent general of division and was a popular governor of New Hampshire. Selected by the Democrats because of the ambiguity of his views and thus the possibility of selling him to a wide range of voters on the omnipresent slavery issue, he had poorly thought-out opinions and little grasp of the strong tides and currents that swept over the country, and no real principles from which to try to hold the country together. Jackson had been a strong and decisive leader, albeit with some primitive opinions; Van Buren was a cunning operator with flashes of principle; Tyler was muddled and inept and unscrupulous in method, though dogmatic in policy matters; and Fillmore was better but clumsy; but they were accidental presidents. Polk was as sly as Van Buren and more discerning, though less formidable than Jackson. Taylor equivocated well and didn’t last long.
But Pierce was a weak leader at a dangerous time. To hold together the coalition that elected him, he would need a sophisticated knowledge of the background and political landscape of the country, and be settled in his views and effective in their implementation, as only Jackson and Polk were, among the presidents of the time; and as Clay, and up to a point, Webster, Douglas, Benton, and the one-term Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln were among the legislators. Pierce missed on all counts, and he and his successor would reveal the vulnerability of the Jackson system. It always depends on leadership, whether the political center is a fulcrum of strength or a vortex of weakness. Jackson and Polk were border-state southerners who knew the South but had held federal offices (army commander and senator for Jackson, Speaker of the House for Polk), and they broadly understood the shoals around them and the possibilities available.
Of the 1852 Democratic contenders for president, Douglas and Cass, though worrisome, would have been better than Pierce and Buchanan, yet Pierce and Buchanan were the next presidential nominees. Scott and even Fillmore (and certainly Webster, had he lived) would have been better than Pierce and Buchanan, but in seeking obscurity of views and therefore comparative invulnerability from steadily angrier factions, the all-conquering Democratic Party fell into the hands of people whose views were indiscernible, not because they were calculatedly subtle and enigmatic but because they didn’t really have any fixed point of conviction to work from and had no idea how to navigate the dangers that loomed at every hand. The baton of leadership had passed from the clever and ferocious Jackson to the cunning Van Buren and Polk, to the palsied hands of Pierce, and would go on to the equally incapable Buchanan.
Van Buren was all tactics and no strategy. Polk was a very astute tactician and a brilliant strategist. Pierce and Buchanan had no tactical or strategic skill. Jackson, Clay, Webster, and Polk were now dead, and Lincoln had not yet arisen. The descent to insurrection and civil war would now enter its last act. America was sleepwalking toward the edge of a cliff.
9. KANSAS AND NEBRASKAThe time bomb in the Compromise of 1850, in the impetuous grip of Douglas, began to sizzle ominously when Douglas presented the Kansas-Nebraska Act in January 1854. This measure adopted the principle of “squatter-sovereignty,” or “popular sovereignty,” leaving it to the territories themselves to determine, when they had the population necessary to be credible as states, whether they wished slavery within their own borders or not. This not only invited extreme friction as partisans of both sides jostled for the local majority, it explicitly repealed the Missouri Compromise line of 36°30 and agitated the North while whetting the appetite of the South by opening the specter (or to the slave states, the prospect) of slavery spreading all over the country, and the entire United States being dragged backward, contra-historically, into a dark age that would degrade and fragment all the proud claims of the founders of the republic based on the “inalienable rights” and “self-evident truths” that “all men are created equal.” It had been enough of a stretch to keep this majestic canard going while over 10 percent of the whole population were slaves, but this was a mortal threat to the collective political self-esteem of the majority, who may not have been overly concerned with the fate of individual African Americans in bondage but were not prepared to be thought of, by themselves or anyone else, as believers in the backward malignancy of slave-holding. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed after three months of bitter debate, formally renouncing any congressional or federal oversight of slavery.
Stephen A. Douglas was a brilliant legislator and a passionate believer in democracy and was not personally an appeaser or sympathizer to slavery. He believed that the people were always right and that the people would do the right thing. It was one of the catastrophic errors in American history, and Pierce was not a sufficiently authoritative leader of the nation to see that this was just civil war on the installment plan and that with so overarching and preoccupying an issue, only the federal Congress and administration could balance the factions and regions and keep the Union functioning. Douglas believed that the economic and cultural absurdity of slaves in Kansas and Nebraska would kill slavery in those states, but without offending the South, to whom the door had not been closed other than by the impeccable operation of the free suffrage of the free inhabitants. He is also thought to have been fishing for southern support, with an inexplicable unawareness of how seriously he could alienate his northern supporters. And he was allegedly rushing the development of central and northern states to facilitate a trans-continental railway from Chicago, rather than the southern route that was being pressed by the war secretary, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, with the usual torpid endorsement of the disconnected president.
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