The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (68 page)

“I give no advice,” concluded iron-faced old Calhoun. “But I speak as an individual member of that
section of the Union. There I drew my first breaths. There are my hopes”—hopes not just in South Carolina, as in the days of nullification, but also in Alabama, at his son Andrew’s slave labor camp, hopes of an ever-expanding South. “I am,” said Calhoun, “a planter—a cotton planter. I am a southern man and a slaveholder; a kind and merciful one, I trust—and none the worse for being a slaveholder.
I say, for one, I would rather meet any extremity on earth than give up one inch of our equality—one inch of what belongs to us as members of this great republic.” He knew others would agree.
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STILL
,
AS OF
1847, the game Calhoun played was a long con. The bonds of loyalty linking non-planter southern white men to national parties had been forged in the hot fires of the 1830s. And many still
hoped that their party’s leadership would put forward a viable interregional consensus candidate for the next presidential election. James Polk did not plan to be one of those candidates. The president had grown weary of the gridlock over the territories. He was also preoccupied by negotiations in Mexico City, which had been going on almost as long as those in Congress. One reason for their delay
was the Polk administration’s increasing desire to persuade domestic public opinion into demanding that the United States swallow the entire conquered nation.

John G. Palfrey’s Massachusetts Whigs protested that the annexation of Texas had “stimulated the appetite” of the (rest of) the American people for more territory. “If the Slave Power continues to be strong enough,” wrote Palfrey, states
carved from Mexico would be “admitted to the Union with constitutions, forced on them through artifice and intimidation, recognizing and perpetuating slavery,” and adding to the Slave Power’s strength in Congress. About the only thing upon which Calhoun and Palfrey could agree was that all of Mexico was too much. “We have never dreamed of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race,”
Calhoun proclaimed. “More than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. . . . Ours, sir, is the government of the white race.” Palfrey also
thought that Mexico’s “nameless and mongrel breeds” would fit poorly into the United States.
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Just as Calhoun tried to convince southern Whigs and Democrats to align with each other along sectional lines, Palfrey
and his fellow Massachusetts Conscience Whigs were splitting their party’s 1848 state convention by insisting that it should reject any presidential nominee who did not state clear opposition to adding new slave territories. When the resolution failed, Palfrey and his Conscience allies left the party. Meanwhile, the New York Democrats also divided. One faction, led by Martin Van Buren and called
“Barnburners” by their opponents (after an apocryphal farmer who burned down his barn to kill off the rats), argued that the expansion of slavery hurt the “free white laborers of the North and South.” Proclaiming allegiance to “Free Trade, Free Labor, Free Soil, and Free Men,” these dissident Democrats gathered with Whig splinter groups and Liberty Party activists and created the Free Soil Party.
They named Van Buren, a man who had spent decades displaying his allegiance to southern planters, as their presidential candidate. His running mate was Charles Francis Adams, son of original Conscience Whig John Quincy Adams, who had been felled by a fatal stroke on the floor of the House earlier in 1848.
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Back in Washington, the Senate had finally received the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the
result of negotiations with the representatives of defeated Mexico. In addition to confirming Texas annexation, the treaty gave the United States 525,000 additional square miles of the conquered nation-state—13 acres for each of the 23 million people in the Union. This was the third-biggest acquisition of territory in US history, after the Louisiana Purchase and Alaska. The Senate eliminated an
article that promised recognition of land claims granted by the Spanish or Mexican governments. The treaty opened the new southwest to a massive Anglo real-estate grab. If that wasn’t enough incentive for settlers to start dispossessing Mexicans and Indians, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, California, in January 1848.

Yet the great giveaways promised by Guadalupe Hidalgo did not turn a
controversial war into a success. In the course of two years of debate over the fate of the conquered territory, southerners, anxious to protect their future access to political leverage and entrepreneurial possibilities, had moved toward arguing that a slave West was the price of union. Meanwhile, northerners, convinced that southern enslavers were treating them the way they treated their slaves,
had already destabilized electoral calculations. The political system had depended since the bank war on the stability created by
two party alliances, each one balancing regional interests. Those coalitions might not survive the election chaos coming in the fall. Even if they did, it was unclear that the parties could persuade enough southerners or enough northerners to accept compromise and resolve
the question of organizing the new territories.

In fact, 1848 was putting immense pressure on political arrangements on both sides of the Atlantic. Parisians barricaded the streets and fought the French army. When the smoke cleared, the terrified bourgeoisie was welcoming a second Napoleon, the first one’s nephew, as the leader of a new republic that would soon become an empire. Across the Rhine,
people rose up against the rulers of various German states, demanding a liberal, unified nation in some cases, and more radical outcomes in others. When the revolutions collapsed, political refugees fled the European mainland, including one named Karl Marx. He landed in London and spent the rest of his life holed up in British libraries, but many “Forty-Eighters” came to the United States. Meanwhile,
in July, in the little Erie Canal town of Seneca Falls, several hundred reformers gathered for an impromptu “Woman’s Rights Convention.” Among the organizers was Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Frederick Douglass, escapee from slavery and one of the most effective conduits of enslaved people’s critiques of white power, was in attendance. The convention drafted a “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments,”
a document that claimed for women the right to vote.

The Seneca Falls gathering helped launch a movement for women’s rights in the United States. This development would have long-term effects on politics that would be as radical as anything done in Europe in 1848. At the time, few male politicians took the Seneca Falls gathering seriously. The revolutionary ferment in Europe was more widely discussed,
yet it seemed far away. Far more pressing, judging from the obsessive interest of newspapers and the inflammatory rhetoric of politicians both inside and outside the Capitol dome, was the still unresolved question of the Mexican territories and its potential effect on the fall presidential election. National party leaders, seeking to contain destabilizing confrontations, tried to nominate
centrists who could appeal to both sections. The Whig convention chose Zachary Taylor, one of the Mexican War’s victorious generals. Virginia-born, first cousin to James Madison, Taylor was a southwestern planter who owned more than one hundred people in Louisiana, and he had the useful virtue of possessing no political biography. The Democrats did something similar. Brushing off a convention walkout
by southern extremist William Lowndes Yancey, they nominated Lewis Cass of Michigan.
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Cass’s campaign circulated region-specific campaign biographies—one for the North and another for the South, with predictably targeted emphasis. But the new Free Soil Party still won 10 percent of the national popular vote, showing that pressure initiated by the Wilmot Proviso had opened seams in the party
system. Ironically, Free Soil votes helped put a slaveholder in the White House: in New York, Van Buren and the Barnburners pulled enough ballots from the Empire State’s Democrats to allow Taylor to collect all thirty-six of the state’s electoral votes. The general also swept most of the South. Southern whites assumed that the president-elect would support slavery’s expansion into the Mexican Cession.

Yet Calhoun did not trust either Taylor or the party system. In January 1849, he and four other southerners in Congress issued a printed “Address”: it warned that if the North’s anti-southern attitudes continued to grow, and the South did not respond, slavery’s expansion—and slavery itself—would end. A Congress dominated by the likes of John Palfrey the younger would ban the interstate slave trade.
Then there would be no injections of new capital, and no stick to hold over enslaved people’s heads. An expanding black population would demographically drown whites, and forced emancipation would follow. After that, interfering northern whites would demand for ex-slaves “the right of voting and holding public office,” resulting in “the prostration of the white race”—political servility and
forced interracial marriage—“a degradation greater than has ever yet fallen to the lot of a free and enlightened people.”
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The only way to avoid this disastrous future was for southern whites to unite in demanding equal access to the territories. As Calhoun argued in a southern caucus called to discuss the address, “the South could take their slaves into California and New Mexico. . . . Congress
was bound . . . to put it [slavery] on the same footing with other property. It required no law of Congress to authorize slavery there.” A united southern front behind this substantive-due-process interpretation would force the North to a “calculation of consequences.” Inevitably, the North would back down, and the expansion of slavery would be implanted permanently in the nation’s constitutional
landscape, even as new territories became slave states. Most of all, political victory would compensate enslavers for the economic losses they had suffered since the late 1830s, which had lost them control over the economic rudder of the United States, since new slave-state recruits in the halls of Congress would block all future antislavery measures.
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One might be tempted to view pro-slavery-expansion
zealots as extremists who were more interested in intellectual abstractions than in actually
expanding slavery. But in little more than a decade, these people would launch a war to achieve a redefinition of the United States in which the national government made an explicit and perpetual commitment to defend and spread slavery. They were serious. And they were inking these ideas about slavery
as a fundamental property right protected by the Constitution, with all that implied, into the common assumptions of southern politics. In 1849, the propagandizing so far by advocates of substantive due process as a southern right was already working. The “Address” drew widespread support in the southern press. Editors reminded common whites that the struggle to keep slavery’s borders open was their
fight, too. If the slave frontier closed, the risk of a repeat of the Haitian Revolution would increase. Even without a massive rebellion, poor whites would be taxed to compensate enslavers for mandated emancipation. Afterward, the rich man could use wealth “to maintain his position,” but the common white man would lose “that native, free-born, and independent spirit which he now possesses.” Constituents
responded to this kind of talk, and Mississippi state politicians organized a “Slaveholders’ Convention” for October 1849. Senator Henry Foote, Calhoun’s Mississippi ally, began to organize an 1850 region-wide convention—an implied threat, a gathering that could be repurposed into a body ready to deliberate on nation-un-making.
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In Congress, meanwhile, southern Democrats maneuvered to commit
the federal government to new guarantees of expansive definitions of slaveholders’ property rights. They started with the recovery of fugitive slaves. Justice Story had conceded in
Prigg
that the South had constitutional leverage on this question. Proslavery Democrats were determined to make the federal government take ownership of enforcing the Constitution’s fugitive clause. If they operationalized
the federal government’s commitment to protecting enslavers’ ownership of property when said property ran away into another state, Congress would also find it hard to deny enslavers the right to move property into federal territory. Senator James Mason offered a bill that would eliminate the trial of accused fugitives by northern local juries, a bill that potentially would allow white southerners
to accuse anyone of escaping from slavery, with little proof of ownership, and haul them south.
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Southern enslavers were coalescing around key principles, raising their demands, and increasing the pressure to find a solution to the territorial issue. Meanwhile, news from California made it clear that gold veins first struck in 1848 would dramatically enhance the US financial system’s ability
to promote growth. But the fevered migration of more than 80,000 American “49ers” to California in 1849 increased the tension of the territorial debates. The
majority of the migrants were northerners, yet southern whites who came often brought slaves to work the mines. Mexico had abolished slavery in California some twenty years prior, but enslavers saw no reason why California had to be a free
state. It even could be two states: north and south; free and slave. Yet Congress couldn’t create a territorial government until it resolved its ongoing impasse, so for now lawless uncertainty reigned in California.
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The Congress elected in November 1848 would not be officially seated until December 1849. But shortly after his March 1849 inauguration, President Taylor secretly encouraged some California and New Mexico settlers, mostly northerners, to hold conventions. The state constitutions they’d write would ban slavery. When southern Whigs, who would soon face their own very southern constituents, found
out, they rushed to condemn Taylor’s betrayal. Back home, politicians and editors began to plan an all-South convention, scheduled for Nashville in July 1850. As the thirty-first Congress finally convened in December, many wondered if this would be the last gathering of all the states’ representatives in Washington. Party alliances showed little sign of cohering again. The House took sixty-four ballots
to name a Speaker, finally changing its rules so that a Georgia Democrat won. Relieved, it turned to the business of hiring an official “door-keeper”—an employee position similar to sergeant-at-arms. But then northern and southern representatives turned that, too, into a fight: Should they hire a proslavery or antislavery man? Then, in his official Presidential Message, Taylor boldly asked the
gathered representatives and senators to admit California and New Mexico under constitutions that banned slavery. Congress collapsed into a chaos of roiling, seething rhetoric: threats of disunion (the southerners); proclamations of joy at the prospect of slave rebellion (a few Free Soil men); insistent claims that northerners would not be bullied (Democrats and Whigs from the free states); shrieks
of “bad faith” and “cheating”; and complaints of insults and dishonorable exclusion from territories won by southern blood (the southerners again).
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