Bound for Canaan (45 page)

The debate that began in February 1850 over the admission of California was among the most memorable ever to take place on the floor of the Senate. In the course of the next eight months, the fate of the nation
hinged on the ability of three aging statesmen—the Kentucky Whig Henry Clay, the consumptive South Carolinian John C. Calhoun, and the silver-tongued, profoundly conservative Massachusetts orator Daniel Webster—to strike a compromise between the sectional interests of the North and the South. But at the core of the crisis lay the question of whether Congress had the moral duty to extend freedom westward as the nation grew, or rather a duty to protect slavery there. Calhoun and his allies were threatening secession if slavery were not permitted everywhere in the vast territory that the United States had seized from Mexico. Antislavery Northerners wanted not only the admission of California, but an explicit prohibition of slavery in the new lands.

 

C
lay opened the debate on February 6. A slave owner himself, he professed distaste for slavery in principle, and regret for it in practice. His admirers flatteringly called him “the Great Pacificator” for his skill at winning the confidence of men who loathed each other's principles. Tall, stooped now with age, he ranged his sardonic eye across the panorama of his colleagues, their faces swollen with plugs of tobacco packed in their cheeks. He gazed at the other titans of his own generation, and at new men such as Jefferson Davis, master of one of the largest plantations in Mississippi, and William Seward, Lincoln's future secretary of state, who hid fugitive slaves in his home in Auburn, New York, and beyond them toward the nation itself, “so oppressed, so appalled, and so anxious.” To reassure Southerners of his true loyalties, Clay belittled the moral aspect of slavery: “In the one scale, then, we behold sentiment, sentiment, sentiment alone, and in the other, property, the social fabric, life, and all that makes life desirable and happy.” He then revealed his pragmatic intent. He bluntly told them that rash talk of secession made little sense. How would the South be better off if it seceded? Then there would be no remedy at all for the fugitive slave problem. Within the Union, the South at least had a means of redress. He warned that if the South became a separate nation, “There would be no right of extradition; no right to demand your slaves; no right to appeal to the courts of justice to demand your slaves which escape, or the penalties for decoying them. Where one slave escapes now, by running from his owner, hundreds and thousands would escape if the Union were severed in parts.” He asked Northerners to be
realistic, too. In practical terms, slavery would never flourish in the arid wastes of New Mexico, no matter what the letter of the law. Banning slavery in Washington, as the abolitionists asked, could not happen without the consent of Maryland and Virginia, and that would never be forthcoming. But the slave trade within the city itself was an embarrassment to all Americans. Ending it was possible, and would do no damage to slavery elsewhere. But this was to be a compromise, after all. In return, the fugitive slave law must be strengthened. Clay would go with “the furthest senator from the South to impose the heaviest sanctions on the recovery of fugitive slaves.”

On March 4, John C. Calhoun rose to speak, wrapped up in a black cloak, his face ashen, and his body corroded by the tuberculosis that would kill him less than three weeks later. Coughing uncontrollably, he passed his speech to a fire-eater of the younger generation, James Mason of Virginia, to read. But the tone was vintage Calhoun, seething with his passionate conviction that slavery was an ideal worth fighting for. The Union was endangered by nothing except “the many aggressions” which the North had perpetrated against the South, he asserted. The “equilibrium” between the two sections that was intended by the Founding Fathers had already been destroyed. The South and slavery had been unfairly shut out of the territories since the enactment of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787. Too much federal spending also went to the North, while import duties fell unjustly on the cotton-exporting states.

Calhoun's complaints were deeply felt, but disingenuous. The Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812, the protection of native manufactures and its later repeal, the annexation of Texas, the War with Mexico, the removal of Indians from the Deep South, all had served the interests of the South. Slave states chose 30 of the 62 members of the Senate, 90 of the 233 members of the House of Representatives, and 105 of the 295 electors of the president. Even these numbers understated Southern power, since Democratic and proslavery politics were virtually synonymous, and Democrats overwhelmingly controlled both houses of Congress. Seven of the eleven presidents, and similarly disproportionate numbers of senior cabinet officers, House speakers, and presidents of the Senate were Southerners. At the end of the 1840s, the chairmen of all the important committees of Congress were owners of slaves, while seven of the nine members of the Supreme Court were either slave owners or proslavery in
attitude. But Calhoun and every other Southerner could see that broader demographic trends favored the North, and that the North led the South in commerce, industry, railroad building, overall wealth, and population, while the South remained almost completely agricultural, with its planters cash-starved, and chronically in debt to Northern creditors. He foresaw five new states being developed, all of them aligned with the North, eventually giving the North an overwhelming majority of forty senators to the South's twenty-eight. It was imperative, he demanded, that the South be conceded “an equal right in the acquired territory,” and for the North to “do her duty” by enforcing fugitive slave laws. Unless “something decisive” was done to stop abolitionist agitation, it would snap every cord that bound the sections together.

Abolitionists had expected nothing different from Calhoun or Clay. But Daniel Webster's speech produced shock and disbelief. Although he was a thoroughgoing creature of the establishment, backed by the Boston and New York business elites, who had extensive investment in the South, he was still considered an antislavery man. Thirty years earlier, had he not stood upon the sacred altar of Plymouth Rock and evoked the spirit of his Puritan forefathers in a scathing denunciation of slavery as an “odious and abominable trade” that disgraced Christianity, and against which every feeling of humanity must revolt? But he too called for compromise. Many considered Webster the finest orator of the age, of whom it was ambiguously said that his “every sentence weighed a pound.” Craggy and “mastiff-mouthed,” priming his famous voice like a long-range cannon, he began to speak, and kept on for three hours, sweating like a gunner in battle, attacking abolitionism and secessionist sentiment with equal brio. Booming, “I speak for the preservation of the Union,” he attacked the abolitionist societies, which he said had “excited feelings,” and “whose operations for the last twenty years have produced nothing good or valuable.” He also agreed with Clay and Calhoun that the North had fallen short in its constitutional duty to restore runaway slaves to their masters. No public officials had a right to flout the law, he roared, “None at all; none at all.” Calling upon his fellow senators to enact a strong fugitive slave law that would give the South what it wanted, he cried, “Let us not be pigmies in a case that calls for men!”

The South loved Webster's speech. The opponents of slavery were appalled. William Lloyd Garrison likened Webster to Benedict Arnold,
while Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “The word
liberty
in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word
love
in the mouth of a courtezan.”

The debate continued through the summer. When the muggy heat became insupportable, the tobacco-stained red carpet was taken up, and the draperies removed from the chamber, in an ineffectual effort to cool the room. Members stretched their legs in the ninety-six-foot-high rotunda, ornamented by historical pictures painted by Trumbull, or sprawled back with their feet on their desks, cutting fresh plugs of tobacco with their penknives, and shooting the old ones from their mouths at spittoons placed strategically around the chamber. Meanwhile, as Congress discussed putting a stop to the local slave trade, sales in the area soared. “Scarcely a day passed that gangs of chained slaves did not pass through the city,” the underground agent William Chaplin gloomily observed.

Chaplin was busy that summer. Following the capture of the
Pearl
, he had actually increased his work with fugitives. Then, on August 9, as he was driving a closed carriage with two fugitive slaves north out of Washington, he was ambushed at the Maryland state line by a detachment of militia, who had been alerted in advance by a spy. Chaplin drew a pistol from his coat and fired at a man who tried to seize the reins. The fugitives, who were also armed, then began blazing away from inside the carriage. Twenty-seven shots were fired before the three men realized that they were trapped, and surrendered. The confrontation was no more than a skirmish, if measured by the numbers involved. But like the first shots fired at Concord Green in 1775, they signaled a fundamental sea change in the underground's willingness to fight back.

Chaplin was taken to the nearest jail, at Rockville, Maryland, not far from the farm where Josiah Henson had toiled for Isaac Riley a quarter of a century earlier. There he was charged with larceny and assault with intent to kill. (The two fugitives were returned to their owners, both Southern members of Congress, and quickly sold.) Gerrit Smith wrote reassuringly to his old friend to remind him that he was still endowed with “a freedom of soul, a freedom in Christ Jesus—which not men, nor Devils, can take from you.” More practically, he immediately dispatched a delegation of New York abolitionists to Washington to try to get Chaplin out of jail.

While Chaplin was awaiting trial, on August 21, abolitionists held an extraordinary two-day convention of fifty fugitive slaves and two thousand
white supporters in Cazenovia, New York, near Smith's Peterboro home. Frederick Douglass presided. In addition to Smith, of course, among those in attendance were the veteran abolitionist Samuel J. May, Charles M. Ray, the most active underground man in New York City, and Reverend Jermain Loguen, who as the slave Jarm Logue had escaped from slavery in an epic ride from Tennessee to Canada in 1834. (Logue had paid for his education at the interracial Oneida Institute by working as a hotel porter, and was now a minister famous throughout the Burned Over District for his fiery antislavery preaching.) A photograph taken at the convention shows a still youthful-looking Gerrit Smith, arm upraised with an oratorical flourish, standing between the teenaged Edmonson sisters, primly dressed in plain frocks and deep bonnets. They had been passengers on the
Pearl
and were bought out of slavery by Chaplin, on behalf of Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, who then “sold” them publicly in a mock auction to raise public consciousness about slavery, a charade that reportedly sent the titillated reverend into “extacies” of excitement. Following denunciations of the debate taking place in Washington, the convention provocatively nominated William Chaplin for president of the United States on the Liberty Party ticket, threatening “revolution” if he was not released. Another resolution, which sent shock waves through the South, openly urged slaves to escape from their masters, to carry arms when they did so, and to kill masters who pursued them. A Tennessee newspaper likened the convention to the witches' cauldron in
Macbeth
: “Can any scene be found more disgusting? Can any movement be found more alarming than this? Treason, murder, and robbery are openly proclaimed and advised. If patriots tremble for the safety of our glorious Union…let them look to the madness of these wild fanatics.” Rockville slaveholders, citing the proceedings of the convention, pressured the local magistrate to set Chaplin's bail at an astronomical nineteen thousand dollars. Gerrit Smith, brandishing his preferred weapon, the cashbox, pledged twelve thousand dollars. Freed on bond, Chaplin fled north with the help of his abolitionist friends, and never stood trial.

On August 26 the new Fugitive Slave Act was voted into law. It was comprehensive and draconian. Anyone who hindered a slave catcher, attempted the rescue of a recaptured fugitive, “directly or indirectly” assisted a fugitive to escape, or harbored a fugitive, was liable to a fine of up
to one thousand dollars and six months' imprisonment, plus damages of one thousand dollars to the owner of each slave that was lost. Commissioners were to be appointed by the federal circuit courts specifically to act on fugitive slave cases, and provided with financial incentives—“bribes,” abolitionists charged—to facilitate the recovery of runaways: the commissioner would receive a fee of ten dollars each time he remanded a fugitive to the claimant, but only five dollars if he found for the alleged slave. Commissioners could be fined one thousand dollars for refusing to issue a writ when requested, and they were personally liable for the value of any slave who escaped from their custody. Contravening new liberty laws in some Northern states, testimony by an accused slave was disallowed, and there was no right to trial by jury. The provision that outraged most Northerners, and not only abolitionists, gave commissioners the authority to compel any bystander, no matter what his beliefs, to help them seize any alleged fugitive. The Columbus, Ohio,
Standard
announced with disgust, “Now we are all slave catchers.”

Webster, with visions of himself in the White House, pronounced the compromise “a providential escape,” confidently adding, “Whatever party may prevail, hereafter, the Union stands firm.” Clay was also ecstatic. “I believe from the bottom of my soul that this measure is the reunion of this Union,” he bloviated. “I believe it is the dove of peace, which, taking its aerial flight from the dome of the Capitol, carries the glad tidings of…harmony to all the remotest extremities of this distracted land.”