The Black History of the White House (17 page)

The effort to keep a balance between free and slave states continued over the next eight years when Indiana (1816) and Illinois (1818) were admitted as free states and Mississippi (1817) and Alabama (1819) entered the union as slave states. But as Thomas Jefferson would belatedly note on April 22, 1820, one month after the Missouri Compromise, this strategy “is a reprieve only, not a final sentence,” and “every new irritation will mark [the nation's division] deeper and deeper.”
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Jefferson despaired at the coming fracture in the country, as competing national interests and agendas headed for an inexorable clash over the issue of slavery. Despite the equality in the number of slave and free states, the agriculturally based South dominated the U.S. Congress, in part due to the exaggerated representation it enjoyed in the U.S. House of Representatives by virtue of the 60 percent of its enslaved blacks who were counted as part of its overall population. Capitalism, however, was in transition, in the United States as in Europe, to an industrial model that necessitated the free movement of labor. Southern agricultural interests based on slave labor served as a fetter on industrial and financial interests elsewhere. Northern
political and economic elites increasingly saw the need to break the economic power of the Southern aristocracy, which meant challenging the spread of slavery to the west. The first major battle took place over the admission of Missouri in 1820.

In 1819, when the Missouri territory applied for statehood, Representative James Tallmadge of New York proposed antislavery legislation that would prohibit the growth of slavery in Missouri and eventually free the children of Missouri's enslaved black people. A tart debate unfolded that was divided mostly along regional lines: representatives from the North favored the proposal while Southerners adamantly opposed it. Tallmadge's bill passed in the House of Representatives but failed in the Senate. The fight continued, finally producing a compromise in which slavery was prohibited in all territory north of the 36°30' parallel that had been part of the Louisiana Purchase, except for Missouri. At the same time, to continue the balance, Maine was admitted to the union as a free state. Perhaps most important, it was the fight over Missouri that first raised the specter of civil war, as both sides dug in deep for a long and uncompromising battle. The final agreement was, as Jefferson observed, a reprieve, not an end, to the escalating conflict.

President Monroe, as well as former presidents Madison and Jefferson, gave their full support to the inclusion of Missouri as a slave state, hoping against hope that the diffusion of slavery to the west and a movement to export blacks outside the country would help de-escalate the conflict. The diffusion theory argued that the more widely slavery stretched, the more likely its eventual dissolution, as the shortage of slave labor would make the institution financially unfeasible. It was even argued that “slaves would be happier and better fed if they were spread over the West” and that the institution would eventually wither away as its economic necessity disappeared.
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President Monroe had a faster solution. A strong supporter of the American Colonization Society (ACS), the main white group advocating that the best solution to the problem of black people was to get rid of them, Monroe sent a ship of former slaves to the African territory that had become Liberia. Originally named the American Society for Colonizing Free People of Color in the United States, the ACS was formed in Washington, D.C., in December 1816 at the Davis Hotel by both antislavery advocates and enslavers.
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Its members included former presidents Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Millard Fillmore, Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, Congress members Daniel Webster and Stephen Douglas, and “Star Spangled Banner” writer Francis Scott Key, among others. Diplomat, scholar, and enslaver Sen. Henry Clay was the group's president. In 1820, the Colonization Society sent eighty-six free blacks on the ship
Elizabeth
from the Illinois Territory to Liberia, where they would wait more than a year before getting settled on the land. In 1822, the Colonization Society formally established the new country as a site for African Americans freed from slavery, with the wish that eventually all blacks would be sent to Africa.
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President Monroe was such an enthusiastic sponsor of the project that in 1824 the country named its capital Monrovia in honor of his efforts. However, his commitment to the expatriation movement was driven more by security and nationalist concerns than by a passion to advance the human rights of blacks. He stated, out of a clear sense of danger, “Unhappily while this class of people exists among us we can never count with certainty on its tranquil submission.”
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Others put the problem in clearer terms. Herbert Aptheker relates that the governor of North Carolina was urged to further the cause of the ACS, because it might “rid us more expeditiously of our greatest pest and danger—the free people of colour.”
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The president's commitment to black expatriation notwithstanding, the White House continued to support slavery, suppress black civil and political rights, and delay the inevitable. Enslavers including U.S. presidents Van Buren, Tyler, and Polk professed to detest slavery at the same time they continued to hold blacks in bondage, and on key issues related to the institution during their tenure, such as the “gag rule” controversy (discussed later in this chapter) and westward expansion, they failed to live up to their stated convictions. These U.S. presidents were more inclined to attack abolitionism, which Polk termed “fanatical, wicked and dangerous agitation.”
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On the other hand, presidents Taylor and, in particular, Jackson offered no apologies whatsoever in their staunch defense of slavery and their role in it. Furthermore, both had built reputations as “Indian fighters,” but the term is a gross understatement in regard to Jackson. “Jackson was a land speculator, merchant, slave trader, and the most aggressive enemy of the Indians in early American history,” wrote Howard Zinn.
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Known for ruthlessness in battle, Jackson led U.S. forces in several massacres of indigenous peoples, including the Seminoles, whose villages and crops were burned down by his troops. In fact, both Taylor and Jackson had been military leaders in murderous campaigns to remove Native American communities from lands on which they had lived traditionally for generations. Jackson was infamous for his angry, violent character, and the retribution he visited on slaves attempting to run away sometimes led to their disfigurement, disability, or death.
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As president, Jackson also led the fight against abolitionists. He referred to them as “monsters” that sought to “stir up amongst the South the horrors of servile war.”
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In 1835, abolitionists flooded South Carolina and other Southern states with antislavery literature. Southern leaders and legislators were
outraged and burned stacks of the documents in public squares. In violation of the law, Jackson ordered Postmaster General Amos Kendall to prevent abolitionists from using the mail to spread their propaganda. He also proposed a law that paradoxically would prevent the circulation of antislavery material through the mail but would also publicly identify Southerners who received such mail.
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One of Jackson's most notorious acts against African Americans occurred in 1816. A group of 300 black men, women, and children along with about thirty Native Americans took over an abandoned British fort at Apalachicola, Florida, after driving out the Seminoles who had been occupying the fort. Reacting to demands from the Southern press, the United States army was sent in, led by General Andrew Jackson, to take the fort. After a ten-day siege, Jackson's troops blew up an ammunition dump at the fort that killed 270 of those inside. Garcon, the group's leader, was captured and eventually hanged.
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For his contributions to the country, the U.S. Federal Reserve has etched Jackson's image on twenty-dollar bills since 1928.

President Zachary Taylor, who was in the White House only sixteen months before he ate an excessive amount of cherries and milk at a July Fourth celebration and in a few days died of acute gastroenteritis, was a nationalist who supported rapid expansion in the West. When, as a gesture to ease the cumbersome policy of territorial application, Taylor supported allowing potential new states to decide whether they wanted slavery or not, Southerners rebelled at the idea that the carefully calculated balance between slave and free states would be upset, and they threatened to secede. President Taylor countered with the promise that he would use federal troops to hold the union together, the first whiff of the coming conflagration. His death in 1850 eased the tensions, and a (temporary) compromise was
worked out. Ultimately, however, the Taylor White House—like that of President Jackson—did nothing to end slavery for those who were already trapped in it.

Most frustrating to antislavery White House watchers were the presidents who did not enslave blacks, railed against the institution, but rolled over in the face of Southern intransigence. Fillmore signed and Pierce enforced the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Disappointed in the weak efforts of Northern states to enforce the new law and actually return blacks who had successfully escaped from slavery, Southern legislators included in the 1850 compromise a strengthening of law to increase the role of the federal government in capturing escapees. It also initiated harsher punishments for those who helped them. The law only furthered polarized the country between slavery defenders and abolition advocates.

The most perplexing and frustrating of the presidents regarding race was John Quincy Adams. Although he was the progeny of the second president of the United States and his family had a long history of antislavery politics, during the four years of his presidency (1825–1829) the Adams White House did virtually nothing to address the ongoing misery of the country's enslaved blacks. Instead, his administration focused on large infrastructure and commerce-related issues. Yet, after one relatively unsuccessful term as sixth president of the United States, in 1830 he returned to Congress, and his desk soon became a hub for antislavery proposals, petitions, and policies.

In 1836, amid rising abolitionism and increasing slave uprisings, Southerners in the U.S. House of Representatives managed to pass a “gag rule” that automatically tabled any petition on slavery without consideration. This was actually a milder version of what the hard-liners really wanted—a rule that prevented anti-slavery petitions from being sent in the mail and
indeed prevented Congress from dealing with antislavery petitions under any circumstances. Gag-rule proponents argued, incredibly, that petitions against slavery were unconstitutional and even treasonous. Virginia Congressman Henry Wise railed, “Sir, slavery is interwoven with our very political existence, is guaranteed by our Constitution, and its consequences must be borne by our northern brethren as resulting from our system of government, and they cannot attack the system of slavery without attacking the institutions of our country, our safety, and our welfare.”
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This twisted logic conveniently ignored the First Amendment to the Constitution, which unambiguously states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and
to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
” (Emphasis added.) Thus by passing the gag rule, it was the U.S. House of Representatives that was actually in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

But legal exactitude was never really the point. It was about defending slavery and the political and economic power derived from it. President Adams opposed the gag rule and for nearly eight years used a succession of creative means to try to override it. While future White House commanders Van Buren, Polk, and Buchanan, with votes in mind, sought accommodation with the rule so as not to alienate Northern opponents or Southern supporters, Representative Adams aggressively introduced petitions at the beginning of every session, leading to long and divisive debates on the issue, the very opposite of what the gag rule sought to achieve. In one especially inventive tactic, Adams started a fight by asking if slaves could present a petition, pointing out that he was asking a question about the petitioners, not the petition itself. He followed that act of defiance by noting
that the petition technically would be acceptable, because the presenters were petitioning for slavery
not
to be interfered with in Washington, D.C., and thus it was not a petition calling for interference in slavery as the gag rule stipulated.
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After five days of debate, a 224 to 18 vote decided that slaves could not submit petitions.
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It took eight long years for the gag rule to be eliminated, finally, in 1844.

During this period Adams also made headlines due to his involvement in the
Amistad
affair. In July 1839, fifty-three captive blacks led by Cinque (Sengbe Pieh) rose up and seized the ship
Amistad
, which was taking them from Havana, Cuba, to Puerto Principe on another part of the island. They killed the ship's crew and ordered the two surviving Spanish planters, José Ruiz and Pedro Montes, to take them to Africa. However, Ruiz and Montes deceptively sailed up the east coast of the United States, and the vessel was seized by the U.S. Navy and brought to Connecticut. A great deal of legal wrangling ensued involving the United States, Spain, and the planters in Cuba around issues of murder, kidnapping, ownership, and, most fundamentally, whether the abducted Africans should be freed. The case eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Adams was brought in to present the case for the liberation of the Africans.