The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (17 page)

In echoing this argument, the Mississippi delegation was led by a man whom Gwin knew well. Four years earlier, he had been preferred over Gwin for a seat in the House of Representatives. He now held the position that Gwin had long coveted. That was Jefferson Davis, now a U.S. senator.

A native of Kentucky, the forty-one-year-old Davis had moved to Mississippi as a young child. The youngest of ten children, he had been greatly influenced by his oldest brother, Joseph, who established a flourishing plantation on bottomland next to the Mississippi River and had arranged young Jefferson’s appointment to West Point. Tall and striking, with deep-set eyes and high cheekbones, Davis was outgoing but also haughty. He had been court-martialed twice, once at West Point for visiting an off-limits tavern, once later for insubordination. He had also been involved in a half-dozen near duels.
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In 1849–50, Davis was in an odd position, as he had once been the son-in-law of Zachary Taylor. He had married Taylor’s daughter in 1835. She had died within months of their marriage of either malaria or yellow fever. He had married again in 1845. Socially, Davis and his former father-in-law maintained a cordial relationship. Politically, however, the two men rarely saw eye to eye. Unlike Taylor, Davis was a zealous expansionist and defender of slavery and Southern interests. Following Calhoun’s common-property doctrine, Davis asserted that the territories belonged to all the states and that no decision could be made to exclude slavery from a territory. He also insisted that slaveholders must have an opportunity to see if slavery was suited to any new territory. As for California, he contended that slaves would do better in the mines than “any other species of labor.”
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But Davis was also a realist. He expected California to gain statehood even though he regarded its constitution as worthless. In his mind, the document had been written by “a few adventurers uniting with a herd as various in color and nearly as ignorant of our government, as Jacob’s cattle.” That such lowlifes might be allowed to “deprive the people of the South of equal participation in the common property of the States” irritated him even more than the Wilmot Proviso. Nonetheless, he expected the “plan of concealing the Wilmot Proviso under a so called state constitution” to succeed. The South simply lacked the votes to stop it. Not even the two Northern senators who could be counted on to support the South on other matters, Daniel S. Dickinson of New York and Daniel Sturgeon of Pennsylvania, would “vote against California as a state.”
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Yet despite his pessimism, Davis led the battle against Clay’s compromise proposal. It enraged him. He wanted to destroy the eight resolutions the moment he heard them. He had trouble restraining himself. He insisted that Clay immediately defend his proposals. Clay refused. So on January 29, the day Clay presented his resolutions, Davis had to limit his protest to a few remarks. Nonetheless, he ripped into Clay’s contention that the mines were unsuited for slave labor. “I do not accord,” said Davis. “It was to work the gold mines on this continent that the Spaniards first brought Africans to the country. The European races now engaged in working the mines of California sink under the burning heat and sudden changes of the climate, to which the African race are altogether better adapted. The production of rice, sugar, and cotton is no better adapted to slave labor than the digging, washing, and quarrying of the gold mines.”

He also took the opportunity to counter Clay’s compromise with one of his own. He essentially called for splitting California in two. “I here assert,” said Davis, “that never will I take less than the Missouri compromise line extended to the Pacific ocean, with the specific recognition of the right to hold slaves in the territory below that line; and that, before such territories are admitted into the Union as States, slaves may be taken there from any of the United States at the option of their owners.” That, he added, was the only fair and peaceful way to make a division of “the common property of the States.”
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This proposal wasn’t new, either. For some time it had been the fallback position of many Southern Democrats, including men like Davis who had repeatedly embraced Calhoun’s common-property argument. Obviously, it was just an expedient. The southern border of Missouri, the famous 36°30´ line, was intrinsically no better than any other line. It just had the advantage of being well known, of having been bandied about many times before, of having the backing of such luminaries as former president Polk. It also had wide support in the South. To most Southerners, extending the 36°30´ line to the Pacific seemed the best way to restore lost equilibrium. Neither section would have to surrender basic principles.
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Two weeks later, on February 13, Davis got his opportunity to lambaste Clay’s compromise. He spent two days doing so, calling Clay’s resolutions “dangerous doctrines” and accusing Clay of throwing his support to the “aggressive” Northerners who had “declared war against the institution of slavery,” rather than to “the cause of the weak against the strong, the cause of the Constitution against its aggressors.” He also declared that the South needed room to expand. Not only did plantation slavery rapidly wear out the soil, but the South needed fresh land for an expanding population of both whites and blacks. Take away the North’s gains from foreign immigration, said Davis, and the increase in population of the two sections was roughly the same. To coop up the slave population on declining soil, moreover, would be to invite trouble.

Davis’s main argument, as before, was constitutional. He contended that since slaves were property “and so recognized by the Constitution,” a slaveholder had “the right to go with that property into any part of the United States where some sovereign power has not forbidden it.” Didn’t the federal government, then, have the right to prohibit it? No, said Davis. “I deny, sir, that this Government has the sovereign power to prohibit it from the Territories. I deny that any territorial community, being a dependence of the United States, has that power, or can prohibit it.”

As for California, he repeated his earlier argument. Nothing, he insisted, could be more outrageous than allowing a bunch of “first-comers, a conglomerated mass of gold hunters, foreign and native,” to exclude slaveholders from the diggings. That was even worse than applying the Wilmot Proviso. However, for the sake of peace and harmony, he was still willing to allow California to be split in two.
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So spoke the man who hoped to be Calhoun’s replacement as the voice of the South. The real article, the sixty-seven-year-old Calhoun, missed most of the fireworks. He didn’t hear Clay present his proposals. Nor did he hear most of the subsequent debate. He was confined to his quarters at Hill’s boardinghouse across from the Capitol.

Like Clay, Calhoun had long had star status. He had first come to Congress in 1811, been secretary of war under James Monroe, and vice president under both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Yet for the past twenty years, he had not been seen as a national leader. He had been hailed instead as the voice of the Deep South, the voice of true Southerners in the eyes of his friends, the voice of extremism in the eyes of his critics. Frail and feeble, he was now fighting a losing battle against tuberculosis and bronchitis.

In early March, having mended slightly, the dying senator obtained permission to have someone read a speech he had prepared. The task, after some confusion, went to Senator James M. Mason of Virginia. In a very defiant tone, Mason then read what everyone knew would be Calhoun’s last words. It would later be described as a last-ditch heroic effort on Calhoun’s part to save the Union. That, however, is sheer nonsense. To Calhoun the admission of California was “worse than the Wilmot Proviso.” It left the South with only two choices: “submission or resistance.” And Calhoun left no doubt where he stood. He clearly championed resistance.

The South, contended Calhoun, was in a state of “almost universal discontent…wide and deep.” The North’s “long-continued” agitation of the slave question and its “many aggressions” against the South had destroyed the equilibrium between the two sections. Especially egregious had been the North’s usurpations of public lands—first through the Northwest Ordinance, then through the Missouri Compromise, and most recently in the prohibition of slavery in the Oregon Territory. And if the present trend continued, the Senate, the last bastion of balance, would be stacked against the South by the end of the decade, with forty Northern senators to twenty-four Southern senators.

None of this was new. Nor were the paragraphs that followed. But then Calhoun went a step further. He called for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing equilibrium. There should be a dual executive, representing the two great sections, each with a veto power over acts of Congress. Unknown to most of his fellow senators, across the street in Calhoun’s quarters were notes detailing this arrangement. The dying senator had been working on it for months.
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John C. Calhoun’s last Senate appearance. Reprinted from Ben: Perley Poore,
Perley’s Reminiscences,
2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1886), 1:366. Unlike most commentators, Perley took note of the fact that Calhoun was accompanied by one of his slaves.

California, concluded Calhoun, was to be the “test.” If it were admitted under the conditions that had been proposed, then the South would infer that the North meant to exclude the South from all of the acquired territories “with the intention of destroying, irretrievably, the equilibrium between the two sections.” The message was clear. For the South to remain in the Union, the North had to rectify the growing imbalance, both by the rejection of California and by an amendment to the Constitution.
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Three weeks later, on March 31, Calhoun died. Many eulogized him. Thomas Hart Benton did not. Instead, he told Daniel Webster: “He is not dead, sir—he is not dead. There may be no vitality in his body, but there is in his doctrines…. Calhoun died with treason in his heart and on his lips…. Whilst I am discharging my duty here, his disciples are disseminating his poison all over my State.”
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Benton wasn’t the only one who worried about the dead senator’s impact. So, too, did Mississippi’s other senator, Henry Foote, who almost jumped out of his seat when Calhoun called for a constitutional amendment. To Foote, it was “most alarming,” certain to make a bad situation even worse.
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If the Senate had a gadfly, the forty-six-year-old Foote was it. Every day he was on his feet, interrupting a fellow senator, quoting Greek, Latin, Shakespeare, the Bible, and whatever else came to his mind. A short, slight, bald man, Foote had the bad habit of picking on men twice his size. He had grown up in Virginia, attended Washington College, and practiced law in Richmond, then moved west, first to Alabama and then to Mississippi, where he had become the state’s leading criminal lawyer and famous for his flamboyant and vituperative rhetoric. Over the years, he had fought four duels with political rivals, one in Alabama, three in Mississippi. He had been shot three times, twice by the same opponent. He had also been involved in numerous brawls, including one with his fellow Mississippi senator, Jefferson Davis, on Christmas Day 1847.
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Oddly, Foote saw himself as a peacemaker, “a lover of concord.” Others saw him as meddlesome, ornery, and contentious. In any event, Foote could usually be counted on to take issue with whatever was said—and to advocate a different approach. Elected senator in 1846, Foote showed little interest in Calhoun’s call for a Nashville convention. He also refused to support Davis’s proposal that California be divided at 36°30´. Instead, he moved that it be divided at 35°30´, approximately sixty miles farther south (roughly on line with today’s Bakersfield), and that the new territory be called Colorado. Other Deep South senators backed his proposal and kept his maneuver alive. But Clay opposed slicing off the bottom third of California, and half of the upper South senators followed Clay’s lead.
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Foote’s main fear was that Clay’s proposals, voted on separately, would leave the South with nothing. Clay’s strategy, said Foote, was dead wrong. It left the North with “all the
trump cards.
” Once Northerners “smuggled” California into the Union, that would be the end of it. Nothing for the South would be done. The territorial bill would soon die. So, too, would the fugitive slave bill. Either Northerners in the House would refuse to vote for these measures, or Zachary Taylor would veto them. The only way around this problem, said Foote, was to tie California to all the other proposals, to bind all of Clay’s resolutions together, to stuff them all into a single omnibus bill.
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Once Foote decided on this course of action, he was persistent. He badgered Clay constantly, and after Calhoun’s death he stepped up the pressure. He called for the formation of a Senate committee to put all Clay’s proposals into a single bill. Several Northern senators, including Daniel Webster, objected. They pointed out that the Senate had been talking about these matters for four months and hadn’t yet done anything. They wanted to get on with it, to deal with California immediately, and then move on to the territorial bills and all the rest. Southern senators, including Virginia’s James Mason and South Carolina’s Andrew Butler, made it clear that they wanted to deal with the territories first. So it went, back and forth, back and forth.