The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (69 page)

After two months of shouting that threatened to rend all comity forever, a troop of wrinkled old men rode into the breach. On the night of January 21, 1850, Henry Clay had visited Daniel Webster at his lodgings in Washington to confirm that his
fellow old Whig would back his play. On the 29th, the Kentuckian rose in the well of the Senate Chamber, where he had spent much of the last four decades. Clay presented eight resolutions that set off advantages for one section with those granted to the other, and he offered them all together, a pill to swallow, all-or-nothing. Historians often say that the Compromise of 1850, which these resolutions
initiated, provided the North with
a crucial decade in which to become strong enough to defeat the South when war eventually came. Whether that is true or not, Clay himself came close to scuttling his own union-protecting efforts. He insisted that the unitary nature of his proposals forced the warring sides to commit to all the bargains at once, but opponents accused him of egotistical motives—pointing
out that a single large proposal identified the compromise with its author. Moreover, while a real compromise is a win-win solution, in which each side can claim victory, it is also possible for parties in conflict to view a bundle of alternating surrenders as a lose-lose solution. Such an outcome might be not the end of conflict but the fertile source of new ones.
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So what did Clay propose,
in order to achieve what became called, ominously, a “final resolution” of the territorial conflict? First, he said, admit California as a free state. Second, New Mexico and the rest of the new southwest would be organized as territories “without respect to slavery”—that is, the choice on slavery would be deferred until a territory’s actual population could choose. The hope here was that southern
partisans would accept this plan as nonexclusion of slavery by Congress. Clay and others denied that slavery could prosper in New Mexico and Utah. Many assumed that this expedient would allow the territories themselves to ask quietly for admission as free states.

Although the loss of California was going to be a hard pill for southerners to swallow, Clay had some goodies for them as well. The
United States would fund the outstanding debts of the Republic of Texas. This would make New Orleans investors happy, fourteen unpaid years after they had financed the enslavers’ war against Santa Anna. Clay did suggest something that abolitionists had desired for years: a ban on the slave trade inside the District of Columbia. But he paired that with a resolution stating that Congress had no power
to obstruct the internal slave trade between states. And one final resolution might also make northern partisans likely to think that they had “lost” the compromise. This was a call for an ironclad, watertight fugitive slave bill like the one recently introduced by James Mason. Enslavers complained that their territorial concessions left them hemmed in by free states that would drain the slave
population by a kind of unchecked osmosis. A fugitive slave act would put teeth into
Prigg
, making the federal government the servant of enslavers by helping them to control their property in human beings, as if Calhoun’s substantive-due-process interpretation of the Fifth Amendment was the legitimate one.

Clay had thus built his proposed compromise on the backs of African Americans, whom he
condemned to an endless future of slavery—the
expansion of which would be limited, but which would still continue. And by bundling together the issues, Clay pre-twisted northern votes for compromise into legitimation of extreme southern viewpoints, making a free-state congressional majority normalize ideas that to many northerners seemed antithetical to the Constitution. Debate on his bill was
in consequence long and bitter. Taylor demanded California’s immediate admission, without slavery. Southerners demanded half of California, all of New Mexico, and more territory for Texas. Jefferson Davis, Henry Foote, James Mason, and a host of southerners, preaching a proslavery Constitution, paraded the full array of substantive-due-process claims through the House and the Senate. The climax of
their drama came when Calhoun, dying of tuberculosis, was carried into the Senate chamber on a stretcher. The South Carolinian shivered under blankets as Mason read his final speech for him. This one laid out no arguments about due process, instead warning in emotional terms that the long conflict over slavery and its expansion was snapping the cords of union that bound southern and northern whites.
Religious, intellectual, and now political associations were fracturing along the lines of slave and free labor. (He did not add financial associations, which were being repaired.) The gist of the speech was this: the hardest of hard-core southerners were ready to accept a fugitive slave bill, to be sure, but little else of Clay’s compromise.

A few days later, William Seward, a New York senator,
delivered a speech insisting that constitutional guarantees or not, a “higher law”—the law of God—impelled antislavery northerners to block the expansion of the institution. Still more galling to enslavers was Seward’s air of arrogance about the other “higher law” that had supposedly given greater power to the free states: the laws of political economy. The free labor system, he stated, had enabled
New York, “by her own enterprise, [to secure] to herself the commerce of the continent, and is steadily advancing to command the commerce of the world.” It was as if New Yorkers had never bought or sold a bale of cotton.
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Yet southerners in Congress and at home were unsure about how far to go. In the states where expansion mattered most, the debate over whether or not to send delegates to the
Nashville Convention—and which delegates to send—ran white hot during early 1850. At the same time, pro-compromise meetings sprang up across the South. Many southern whites weren’t ready for secession, which was what the extremists suggested. When the Nashville Convention gathered on June 3, far fewer delegates were present than radicals had anticipated. None came from Louisiana, and only one from
Texas. Clay’s compromise would pay off Texas debts, many of them held by Louisiana-based creditors.
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There was still hope for a Washington compromise. Months of debate had passed with little change in positions, but time moved the pieces on the board all the same. Calhoun, exhausted, died on March 31, depriving the southern radicals of the one figure who could have welded them into a weapon.
Clay’s increasingly bitter confrontation with Taylor, whose “treachery” to southern enslavers had helped fire up radicalism in Congress and in the southern press, ended on July 5, when the president suddenly died. Vice President Millard Fillmore, an upstate New Yorker with close ties to Clay, succeeded the maverick Taylor. The Whigs still could not unite behind Clay’s bill, however, and the Senate
defeated it at the end of July. The Nashville Convention delegates, sitting by the telegraph, had nothing to reject.

To judge from his letters to his wife, Clay had spent all spring basking in premonitory adulation. Now he gave up on compromise and fled north to Newport, Rhode Island, his favorite resort town, where the spent old man could play cards, bet the ponies, and flirt. Back in Washington,
a new force, Illinois Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas, appointed himself the floor general of compromise. Separating the omnibus into its constituent parts, he deftly assembled a series of coalitions—southerners and a few northerners for the pro-southern aspects, the opposite for elements like the admission of California as a state—and pushed the compromise through the Senate as multiple
bills. At the beginning of September, he drove the Senate bills through the House, from whence they were sent back to the Senate for reconciliation. On September 20, almost ten months after the Thirty-First Congress had first been seated, Fillmore signed the compromise bills into law. Cannons boomed in Washington, DC. Crowds outside of boardinghouses and hotels serenaded the congressional leaders,
who were inside drinking themselves into stupors of relief.
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In communities like Springfield, Illinois, newspapers called for “national jubilation.” The New Orleans
Picayune
said the territorial question was “definitely settled.” In December, in his message to Congress as it opened a new session, President Fillmore referred to the Compromise of 1850 as “in its character final and irrevocable.”
Around the country, both northerners and southerners seemed to be cooling down and accepting the results. In the South, organizers quietly canceled state secessionist conventions. The white southern electorate was obviously relieved not to have to consider armed resistance to the Wilmot Proviso, although that, of course, did not stop Democratic congressional candidates in Mississippi, Alabama,
Georgia, and South Carolina from doing well that fall by running against the Compromise.
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Still, the questions provoked by the Mexican War and northerners’ more persistent opposition to the expansion of slavery had not been solved, despite four years of devoting the entire political process to solving them. The newly confident North, angered by Texas and all the other issues that men like John
Palfrey had branded with the label “Slave Power,” had stumbled upon the Wilmot Proviso as a line to draw, and then united behind it. The proviso promised to corral slavery, leaving it to decay, and end enslavers’ attempts to dominate the North and the nation. The slave South, battered by depression and demographic sluggishness, had seen a moment of great danger. It codified the mode by which it
would defeat danger and then regain lost relative power: the federal government itself would be made to guard enslavers’ property rights, which were protected (southerners argued) by the Constitution, especially in new territories.

What hung on the political question of whether slavery would expand as a legally defined institution into new territories, first and foremost, were the futures of
3 million enslaved people. Neither side had succeeded in imposing its solution on them and on their futures. And both sides were still well-armed and primed, not only with adrenaline, but with literal powder. During one of the 1850 debates, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, an old Potterite brawler, bull-rushed Henry Foote as the Mississippian gave a speech. Foote pulled out a pistol, but fellow
legislators dragged the two men apart. But loaded weapons were planted everywhere in the Compromise. One of its least-discussed but most important elements was the “organization” of the New Mexico and Utah territories. Taylor’s attempt to establish New Mexico as a free state had provoked southern outrage, so Clay suggested these territories be organized without protections for or restrictions on
slavery. Most textbooks speak of the final outcome as if Clay’s proposal prevailed: New Mexico and Utah were to be testbeds for a demographic contest between slave and free-soil settlers. Yet while the committee that hammered out the New Mexico and Utah acts gave territorial legislatures power to legislate on slavery, proslavery and free-soil committee members cooperated to bake something else into
the law. Their clause stated that if someone brought a lawsuit challenging the territory’s slavery laws—perchance a disgruntled enslaver whose property ownership was not protected by a territory that had enacted laws denying him the “right” to own slaves—the lawsuit would be fast-tracked straight to the Supreme Court. And then the Court would decide whether slave ownership and its expansion were
protected by the Fifth Amendment, or the Fifth actually protected people’s ownership of themselves.
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Both sides in the debate thus gambled that their particular constitutional interpretation would prevail in the courts. Calhoun’s ghost would have placed his side’s bet with confidence. The Supreme Court had recently stated that the Constitution’s framers had insisted on protecting enslavers’
property outside of their home states. Now Congress, with the Fugitive Slave Act, had concurred. Due process of law might not, after all, permit the legislative emancipations that northern politicians like Palfrey believed would keep the Slave Power from capturing New Mexico. Moreover, a series of southern and southern-sympathizing Democrats had appointed the members of the Court. What would a reasonable
person expect them to decide? And then, how would the increasingly confident North react? The New Mexico and Utah provisions of the Compromise of 1850 were in no way final. Instead, they built a platform for future rounds of conflict. Nor, as it turned out, was much else final about the Compromise.

10

ARMS

1850–1861

F
OR THE REST OF
his life, which was far longer and more successful than anyone would have predicted when he was a boy, Richard Slaughter insisted that this story was true. It starts with Richard and his cousin Ben on the James River, thirty miles upstream from the place where American slavery began. The year was about 1850; Ben was ten and Richard eight. In a Virginia
devoted to raising cotton-pickers, not cotton, enslaved boys were a little older than their Alabama counterparts when they began their careers as full-time laborers. So that day they wandered, “catching tadpoles, minnows.” Down by the caved-in clay riverbank, Richard saw “a big moccasin snake,” a poisonous cottonmouth, “hanging in a sumac bush just a-swinging his head back and forth.” Like generations
of other southern boys, Richard and Ben loved to hunt snakes, so they began to beat it with sticks. It opened its mouth as if to strike, but instead, “a catfish as long as my arm jumped out, just a-flopping.” “The catfish had a big belly too,” so they pounded on the fish. “He opened his mouth and out come one of those women’s snapper pocketbooks,” clenched like a slavemaster’s heart. They
twisted open the snap. “Guess what in it? Two big copper pennies.” “Now you mayn’t believe it,” said Slaughter to his interviewer, eighty years later, “but it’s true.”