The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (75 page)

During March 1853, in Congress, Senator Atchison called the Missouri Compromise and the Northwest Ordinance the two greatest “errors committed in the political history of this country.” Together these outlawed slavery on three sides of his home state and made the Scotts’ freedom suit possible. It was radical enough to
call 1819’s compromise an error, for the Missouri Compromise was the central congressional bargain between North and South in the history of slavery. But by the end of the year, Atchison and his congressional allies perceived that they could use Douglas’s desire to build a railroad as the fulcrum on which to bend a lever that would overturn the Missouri Compromise. Atchison’s Washington allies included
his three “messmates,” senators with whom he shared a rented house on F Street: James Mason and Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia, and South Carolina’s Andrew Butler. The three southeasterners were ideologically committed disciples of Calhoun’s substantive-due-process doctrine—Mason, for instance, had written the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Together, the F Street messmates decided to fight like
Eliza Emerson for the protection of enslavers’ power, in Missouri and everywhere, by forcing the Illinois Democrat and his party to commit to the doctrine of slavery as a Fifth Amendment property right that must be imposed in all federal territories.
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The railroad was foremost on Douglas’s agenda when a new session of Congress opened at the beginning of December 1853, and he quickly drove a
new Nebraska Territory bill through committee. But sometime before January 4, 1854, Atchison told the Illinois senator that southern senators would not support the organization of a free territory. Douglas recognized immediately that the southerners had trapped him. He rewrote the bill and, on January 4, offered Congress one that now included, unlike the committee version, language used in 1850 for
New Mexico, saying that the Nebraska Territory’s slavery status would be that which “their constitution may prescribe at the time of their admission.” Again the southerners told Douglas that this was not enough. So then Douglas inserted a little notice in the January 10 edition of the
Washington Union
newspaper, claiming that “clerical error” had omitted another clause from the bill. This clause
was an offer of ransom for his kidnapped railroad. It stated that “all questions pertaining to slavery in the Territories . . . are to be left to the people residing in them.”
Douglas was still trying to do what he was compelled to do and no more, but the southerners shook their heads again. The bill still did not explicitly repeal the Missouri Compromise.

The next chance to speak on the territorial
bill was on January 16, and Archibald Dixon, a Whig Senator from Kentucky, got the floor. He proceeded to propose an amendment. The portions of the Missouri Act of 1820 that denied “the citizens of the several states and Territories” the “liberty to take and hold their slaves within any of the Territories of the United States, or of the States to be formed therefrom” shall now be invalidated
“as if the said act . . . had never been passed.” This was an explicit repeal of the Compromise. In fact, it implied that slavery should be protected by law in all territories and states formed from the Louisiana Purchase. Douglas consented to incorporate Dixon’s amendment, but warned, “It will raise a hell of a storm.”
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On Saturday, January 21, the Cabinet discussed Douglas’s bill. Not even
Attorney General Caleb Cushing, a Massachusetts Democrat long known for obsequious devotion to southern interests, could stomach it. He knew it would cost the Democrats dozens of northern constituencies, and perhaps their House majority as well. But the southerners, especially Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, loved the new bill. And they decided they wanted President Pierce, the Democratic Party’s
official leader, to commit himself to the bill. So the next day Mason, Atchison, Hunter, Douglas, and Davis piled into two carriages and drove to the White House to pay a call on President Pierce. They found him in his parlor, observing the Sabbath, and they laid out the situation.

At his inauguration, Pierce had expressed northern Democrats’ hopes when he said, “I fervently hope that the question
[of slavery’s expansion] is at rest, and that no sectional or fanatical excitement may again threaten the durability of our institutions or obscure the light of our prosperity.” Most white Americans, shaken by the capital’s constant struggle from 1846 to 1850, had agreed. Yet it only took an hour to persuade Pierce to saw into the republic’s most important load-bearing pillars. Pierce even took
out his pen and personally crafted the language that would doom him, his party, and the delicate political balances of the antebellum United States. The Missouri Compromise, he wrote, “had been superceded by the principles of the legislation of 1850”—in other words, the rest of the West would be something like New Mexico after the Compromise of 1850: open to slavery until either local elections
or court decisions decided otherwise. The president was all in. What remained was to convince enough northern Democratic congressmen to vote for the bill.
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The next day, Monday, January 23, Douglas formally introduced the bill under a new name, for he now proposed two territories. One, Kansas, stretched west from the Missouri border; the other, Nebraska, from the latitude of Iowa north to Canada.
Listeners took Douglas as implying that Kansas would be slave territory, and more northerly Nebraska free. Observers might also have mused that only a month before, they had assumed that Kansas was too far north to be a slave territory. Douglas and Pierce tried to make the bill seem palatable in the North by proclaiming to the press that the “great principle of the Nebraska bill” was not slavery
extension, but self-determination. But the same observers might also consider that everywhere that slavery was permitted to go since 1787, it had gone.
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Yet opponents of slavery also saw opportunity in the Kansas-Nebraska bill. A group of congressmen seized it by publishing a document they called the “Appeal of the Independent Democrats”—although its primary authors were not actually Democrats,
but Free Soil Ohioans Joshua Giddings and Salmon Chase. The “Appeal” deployed Free Soil arguments from the 1840s, backed now with proof in the form of Douglas’s craven treason. Legalized slavery in the Nebraska Territory—for the “Appeal” didn’t believe Kansas could contain it—would extend the slave lords’ domain all the way north to the Canadian border and box freedom in. Overturning once “sacred”
compromises, Douglas’s “enormous crime” would enable slavery to block wage laborers and independent farmers from new territories, for “labor cannot be respected when any class of laborers is held in bondage.” The “Independent Democrats” promised to fight Kansas-Nebraska to the end in Congress. And “if overcome in the impending struggle,” they wrote, “we shall not submit. We shall go home to our
constituents, erect anew the standard of freedom, and call on the people to come to the rescue of the country from the domination of slavery. We shall not despair, for the cause of human freedom is the cause of God.”
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The battle that followed the introduction and simultaneous denunciation of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was the most thunderous in the history of congressional debate over the expansion of slavery. All the great Senate lions roared: Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, William Seward of New York, and Chase against the bill; and in its favor Douglas, Douglas, and again Douglas. The southern supporters sat
back and let Douglas do his work. His squat, furious figure was on the floor almost every day, denouncing ministers who preached sermons against him, cursing the anti-slave-expansion
New York Tribune
, and recalling minute details of the Missouri Compromise debate in order to make his points. Eventually, on March 3, he forced a Senate vote
and won it, 37 to 14. Most of the no votes were northern
Whigs, while 14 northern Democrats joined 23 southerners in voting yes.
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The battle moved into the House. By now, “anti-Nebraska” mass meetings were being held across the North. “We went to bed one night, old-fashioned, conservative, compromise Union Whigs,” textile-mill heir and former Cotton Whig Amos Lawrence recalled, “and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.” In New York, merchants who had
fought for the Compromise of 1850 now organized public meetings against the 1854 bill. There were ominous rumors of a new political party.
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Northern Democrats strained against party-line pressure, but Douglas and the administration herded them relentlessly. Finally, Douglas’s floor managers broke a filibuster. On May 22, the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed the House, 113 to 100, with 44 northern Democrats
voting for and 42 against. After three bruising months, Douglas—his arms bound by his F Street captors—had repealed the Missouri Compromise.

The act destroyed the two-party system that had existed for the previous two decades. The Whig Party split along North-South lines and collapsed in the fall midterm elections. The new “Know-Nothing” Party, also known as the American Party, which captured
62 congressional districts, picked up many former Whigs with a “nativist,” or anti-immigrant, message. But 37 of the 44 northern Democratic congressmen who had supported Kansas-Nebraska fell, most of them before the scythe of another new party. This was the Republicans, who suddenly emerged in 1854, coalescing around the ideals of the “Appeal of the Independent Democrats” and winning 46 House seats.
Compared to their Free Soil or Liberty predecessors, Republicans appealed to a wider audience. They opposed the expansion of slavery both on moral grounds and because they believed the white man’s frontier should be unsullied by black slaves. They also espoused a pro-industry policy, and eventually they would incorporate many of the nativists.
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It soon became obvious that the Republican coalition
had the potential to win a commanding majority of northern voters. The Kansas-Nebraska Act destroyed not only the Missouri Compromise but also many of the other structures that had encouraged compromise on the question of the expansion of slavery. But the rise of the Republicans did not yet portend a new equilibrium between two national parties. Southern voters and politicians now believed more
than ever that they would be able to make the expansion of slavery normative. In the debates, Douglas had tried to highlight the allegedly democratic essence of “popular sovereignty,” insisting that Kansas citizens were free to choose against slavery. This was a smokescreen for what the act meant as both policy and politics. Salmon Chase insisted that
“Southern gentlemen” in Congress were now
claiming that “they could take their slaves into” Kansas and “hold them there by virtue of the Constitution,” no matter what the voters decided. Southern House members, in particular, agreed. They insisted that repeal of the Missouri Compromise meant the federal government’s acknowledgment of their substantive-due-process doctrine. They planned to get final confirmation of the right of enslavers to
take their “property” into federal territory by either victory in the demographic competition for control of the Kansas plains or success in getting the Supreme Court to overturn a territorial act forbidding slavery.
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Salmon Chase also insisted that those “southern gentlemen” did not speak for “the great majority” of white southerners. Yet the southern press, at least, agreed with the F Street
vision. It wanted the expansion of slavery. The
Nashville Union and American
said the Kansas-Nebraska Act “saved [the South] from unconstitutional proscription and insult by Congress,” while a Florida editor described it as a “mere act of justice,” an acknowledgment of all citizens’ “right to carry property” into the territories. For many southern whites, Kansas-Nebraska confirmed the substantive-due-process
doctrine as law, even if they knew not all northerners would agree. From 1854 forward, the right to expand slavery into the territories would be an article of faith in southern popular politics. And no wonder—many of them had already lived its essence, the use of enslaved African Americans as the tools of their entrepreneurial pursuits. Even to those who did not own slaves, the unlimited
use of enslaved African Americans as chattel property was associated with freedom, modernity, and liberal economic life.
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The southern white voting public was, however, uncertain about the best way to proceed: Was immediate enforcement of the ideas that John Calhoun had championed more important than remaining in the Union, or was more patience necessary for the ultimate extraction of one’s
natural right to transport slaves? One door had already closed. Kansas would not grow cotton, much less sugar, but Kansas-Nebraska’s passage destroyed any chance to get Cuba. The island, momentarily in Young America’s grasping reach, would have delivered enslavers tangible benefits. Southern enslavers would have exploited the island together with northern white allies, and Cuba would have become two
or three Democratic states. The remainder of the nineteenth century would then have proceeded very differently.

But while the Young America and Mississippi Valley supporters of Cuba acquisition had waited for the island to fall into US hands, by means diplomatic or not-so-diplomatic, the F Street mess and their allies had moved. Even before the hammer of the 1854 fall elections fell on the Democrats,
the
conflict over the Kansas-Nebraska bill had raised doubts about the possibility of acquiring Cuba during Pierce’s presidency. “No More Slave States,” proclaimed a New Jersey newspaper article. “There was a time when the North would have consented to annex Cuba, but the Nebraska wrong has rendered annexation forever impossible.” The Ostend Manifesto, written by Pierce’s ambassadors to the Old
World to push both Madrid and Washington to carry out the sale of Cuba, arrived on US shores right at the time of the northern Democrats’ stunning fall 1854 electoral defeat. The
New York Tribune
quickly leaked its contents. Northern reaction was scornful. The administration—though it had run on Cuba in 1852—quickly disowned the manifesto and seized the Cuban junta’s New York-based ship. Over
the next few years, other filibustering schemes would entice young male adventurers—such as William Walker, whose 1856 invasion of Nicaragua ended in his execution. But Cuba had been the real prize, and slave-owning expansionists had knocked it out of their own reach by forcing northern allies to risk all their political capital on the Kansas-Nebraska bill.
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