What Hath God Wrought (76 page)

However, most petitions in those days went to the House of Representatives, because it was the people’s chamber, senators being chosen by state legislators. The House scheduled a considerable amount of time for members to present petitions and had rules governing the process. With its larger, more disparate and disorderly membership, elected directly and every two years, the House could not resolve the petition issue as readily as the Senate.

The House Democratic leaders of 1836 refused to let the pariah Calhoun seize credit with southerners for resolving this issue. They picked up on a rival version of the gag, suggested by another South Carolinian, Henry Pinckney. Pinckney’s rule resembled the Senate’s practice. It would allow antislavery petitions to be received but then immediately “table” them—that is, lay them aside with no discussion. This process still effectively insulated Congress from the petitioners’ opinions, while not raising the awkward constitutional questions of the Calhounite approach. The southern followers of Hugh Lawson White, originally attracted by the Hammond-Calhoun proposal, climbed on board Pinckney’s bandwagon. The House adopted Pinckney’s version of the rule on May 26, 1836, 117 to 68, with most southerners and northern Democrats voting for the gag over the opposition of northern Whigs. With a presidential election pending, the Van Buren and White campaigns had together successfully preempted Calhoun’s little band as protectors of slavery.
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The instigators of the gag had reckoned without John Quincy Adams. The elder statesman of the House persistently criticized, evaded, subverted, and undermined the gag rule. He presented himself as defending, not the substance of the abolitionists’ views, but their constitutional right of petition. (He himself supported gradual emancipation, not the immediate abolition of slavery, and introduced a constitutional amendment to that effect, knowing, of course, that it had no chance of passage.) As great a master of parliamentary procedure as any member of Congress in history, Adams invented innumerable devices for getting around the gag. He introduced petitions at the start of each session before the rules had been officially adopted, then would challenge the continuation of the gag and force a vote on it. He would inquire of the Speaker whether a certain petition was permissible and then read from it. He would ask if a petition could be referred to a committee instructed to explain why it could not be granted. People sent him petitions not only from his constituency but from all over the country, cleverly worded so as not quite to fall under the ban. Many of the petitions now asked for the repeal of the gag rule. It was he, of course, who named it “the gag.” In his dogged battle, Old Man Eloquent earned the respect of his bitterest foes. The Virginia state-righter Henry Wise called him “the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed.”
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Although Adams did not share the abolitionists’ belief in immediate, uncompensated emancipation, his efforts proved of incalculable benefit to them. They responded by circulating more petitions than ever. Many of their petitions were signed by people who could not otherwise participate in the political process: women and free blacks from states where they could not vote. Southern members expressed contempt for women signatories, but the son of Abigail Adams defended them. Why should women be “fitted for nothing but the cares of domestic life?” he demanded. “Women are not only justified, but exhibit the most exalted virtue when they do depart from the domestic circle, and enter on the concerns of their country, of humanity, and of their God.” He cited biblical heroines like Esther and Deborah. Adams contrived to present petitions from white women and—though it caused consternation—from free black women. Then, on February 6, 1837, he came into the House with “a petition from twenty-two persons, declaring themselves to be slaves,” provoking a huge uproar, even though the document purported to endorse slavery. (It was probably a hoax perpetrated by racists to embarrass Adams, but he turned it to good account.) The House promptly passed a new rule: “
Resolved
, that slaves do not possess the right of petition secured to the people of the United States by the constitution.”
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The attempt to gag abolition petitions proved massively counterproductive. The debates over the gag rule and Adams’s tactics to get around it made much more news than abolitionist petitions left to themselves ever would. The press covered it all in greatest detail, newspapers often printing in full the speeches in Congress. Frustrated in his attempt to shape government policies, Adams now bid to influence public opinion and scored a success.
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The constitutional right of white people to petition aroused more widespread interest and sympathy among the northern public than did the hope of black slaves for emancipation. Aided by all this publicity, the number of petitions coming to the House ballooned. Historians have tried to count the antislavery petitions remaining in the congressional archives from this period, though their efforts are still fragmentary. The House of Representatives, for the four-month session during the winter of 1838–39, had 1,496 petitions relating to antislavery on file, bearing 163,845 signatures from 101,850 different people. As the abolitionists became more adept at circulating them, the number of signatories per petition increased; between 1836 and 1840 the average rose from 32 per petition to 107. An all-female petition from Massachusetts against slavery in the District of Columbia set a record in 1836–37 with the signatures of 21,000 women.
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The petition drive represented a remarkable achievement for the abolition movement and, thanks to Adams, an embarrassment to the slave power.

VII

Van Buren sealed his white supremacist policy by carrying out Jackson’s Indian Removal. The notorious forced march of the Cherokees along the Trail of Tears occurred on Van Buren’s watch. In trying to implement Removal, Van Buren also renewed Jackson’s conflict with the Seminoles and wound up fighting the Second Florida War, the longest and most costly of all the army’s Indian Wars. The issues Jackson had faced, the Seminoles’ independence and the refuge they offered to fugitive black slaves, persisted. Whites said the Seminoles kept the runaways as slaves of their own; this would facilitate reenslaving the blacks while sending the Native Americans off to Oklahoma. In reality, however, the African Americans lived in separate villages with their own farms and animals as tenants, paying a portion of their crop to the local Seminole chief. Only a minority of them were slaves of the Indians in any sense, and even they were permitted to live largely autonomously. Sometimes the African Americans intermarried with the Seminoles, and some of them achieved positions of high influence, particularly linguists who could interpret among English, Spanish, and Muskogee.
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So few were the Seminoles in number (some five thousand men, women, and children, plus perhaps a thousand blacks), and so remote and inhospitable their lands, that the government could well have ignored their refusal to remove to Oklahoma. That it did not do so was mostly owing to pressure from slaveholders who resented the refuge available to runaways. As General Thomas Jesup accurately declared, “This, you may be assured is a negro and not an Indian war.”
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Once begun, the war dragged on through seven years (1835–42) and six army commanders; repeated promises of victory in sight proved premature. Early in the conflict the Seminoles raided plantations, where they recruited slaves to join their cause; later, however, they waged a defensive guerrilla war. The army—with help from the navy along Florida’s coasts, rivers, and swamps—ended up waging economic warfare against the Natives’ villages, farms, and herds. The soldiers’ morale became a major problem, not only because of disease, insects, and the dangerous sawgrass, but also because many of them agreed with Major Ethan Allen Hitchcock, who wrote in his diary that the treaty the government was trying to impose constituted “a fraud on the Indians: They never approved of it or signed it. They are right in defending their homes and we ought to let them alone.”
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A significant turning point in the war came with the capture of Osceola, leader of a combined Indian and black band and an irreconcilable opponent of Removal, along with ninety-four other Seminoles on October 22, 1837. When the American public learned that the capture had been effected by treachery under a flag of truce, there was an outcry leading to a debate on the floor of Congress. Far from letting this reaction deter him, General Jesup violated a flag of truce again the following spring to seize over five hundred more Seminoles, 151 of them warriors. Osceola did not survive long in the dungeon at Fort Moultrie, Charleston; he died there of malaria in January 1838. Admired by friend and foe alike, Osceola is honored today in the names of twenty towns, three counties, two townships, one borough, two lakes, two mountains, a state park, and a national forest.
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In August 1842, the federal government granted the army’s request to announce that the war had been won and leave Florida, although about 600 irreconcilable Seminoles remained at large with no peace treaty.
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The black Seminoles succeeded in getting the government to promise that they would not be reenslaved by the whites but would remove to freedom in Oklahoma. In the event some five hundred did so, though others—perhaps as many as four hundred—found themselves enslaved.
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The war had cost between $30 million and $40 million (half to three-quarters of a billion in our terms) as well as the lives of 1,466 servicemen, three quarters of whom died of disease. Other war deaths included fifty-five militiamen, more than one hundred white civilians, and at least several hundred Seminoles.
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Van Buren encountered difficulties not only along the southern but also along the northern frontier, although the problems there were quite different in origin. Chastened by the experience of the Seminole War and the embarrassment it brought his administration, the president decided against pressuring the Iroquois to leave New York.
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Even so, his home state gave him plenty of trouble. This arose in 1837 from abortive rebellions against British rule in Canada. In Quebec (then called Lower Canada), the rebellion fed upon long-standing French–Canadian grievances, but in Ontario (Upper Canada), the rebels were often migrants from the United States who wanted the Canadian government to be more like the American; some even nursed hopes of American annexation. Their Scottish-born leader, William Mackenzie, admired Andrew Jackson and blamed the Panic of 1837 (from which Canada suffered too) on the bankers. Invoking memories of the American Revolution, the rebels called themselves “Patriots.” When pro-British Canadians quickly put down their uprising, some of the Upper Canada rebels found refuge and sympathy across the border in the United States. In Buffalo, Mackenzie won over followers for his cause, many of them laborers thrown out of work by the panic, promising them homesteads in Ontario after his victory. Led by an upper-class demagogue named Rensselaer Van Rensselaer, hundreds of would-be liberators of Canada occupied an island on the Canadian side of the Niagara River about a mile above the Falls, from which they threatened to renew the rebellion. On December 29, 1837, an American steamboat, the
Caroline,
carried reinforcements and supplies to the island; that night fifty Canadian militiamen came over to the U.S. side, drove off the
Caroline
’s crew, killed a bystander, set fire to the ship, and sank her in the middle of the river. This constituted a major international incident, and passions ran high on both sides of the border.
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Six days later, news of the
Caroline
reached the White House, intruding on a dinner party the hospitable president was giving for his Whig congressional opponents. Van Buren resolved to continue Jackson’s policy of good relations with Britain rather than go to the aid of Canada’s rebellious Jacksonians. He conferred then and there with Henry Clay to ensure bipartisan support for a conciliatory policy. Statesmanlike, he declined to exploit the strain of Anglophobia in American public opinion, particularly strong among Democratic voters; instead he drew upon the British goodwill he had cultivated while minister in London. The president sent the commander of the army, General Winfield Scott, to Buffalo to enforce “peace with honor” (Van Buren’s term). Scott had no military force at his disposal, since the small U.S. Army was tied down in Florida, and it did not appear that New York state militia would be reliable. By sheer energy and willpower Scott calmed the public and persuaded Van Rensselaer to evacuate his island bastion, though at one point the general had to face down an angry American crowd by drawing a line and telling them that they would cross it only over his dead body. It was one of the era’s few triumphs of law and order over mob action. But the militant Patriot sympathizers on the U.S. side of the border went underground into secret societies (called “Hunting Lodges”) to pursue the overthrow of British authority in Canada. “Filibustering”—private armed interventions in other nations—was common in the antebellum United States, usually directed against Latin American countries, but in this case aimed to the north.
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In May 1838, a party of American “Hunters” got revenge for the
Caroline
by burning a Canadian vessel, the
Sir Robert Peel
, while it was in U.S. waters. In November and December of that year, two filibustering expeditions invaded Ontario with about fourteen hundred armed Patriots. Canadian militia and a few British regulars overpowered the attackers, leaving at least twenty-five of them dead and virtually all the rest captured. Of the prisoners, seventeen were executed and seventy-eight transported to the British penal colony in Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania); the rest were released back into the United States.
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It became clear that Canada had a stable government able to defend itself, and the Hunter movement began to lose its appeal. American authorities jailed Mackenzie for violations of U.S. neutrality laws; Van Buren released him after he had served ten months of an eighteen-month sentence. Eventually popular passions subsided somewhat, with full diplomatic resolution of outstanding issues (notably the
Caroline
) wisely left for high-level discussions after the presidential election of 1840. In surmounting the Canadian crisis, Van Buren gave a more creditable performance than he generally managed in domestic affairs, though at some political cost to the New York Democratic Party. The Americans forgot about Canada (as they usually do), but north of the border the episode reinforced memories of U.S. invasions in 1776 and 1812 and nurtured the fear of American imperialism. In 1849, William Mackenzie was allowed to return home to Upper Canada and reenter political life there.
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