‘America’s Great Debate
By RICHARD BROOKHISER
Published: June 29, 2012
Fergus M. Bordewich has written a lively, attractive
book about a fearsome and almost intractable crisis: the tangle of issues
involving expansion and slavery that confronted the political class of the
United States in 1850. Sectional passions ran so high then that there was a real
danger of secession, perhaps even civil war. But thanks to two senators — Henry
Clay and Stephen Douglas — and numerous bit players, Congress adopted a package
of compromises that allowed the country to stumble along in one piece for 11
more years.
AMERICA’S GREAT DEBATE
Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved
the Union
By Fergus M. Bordewich
The proximate cause of the crisis of 1850 was
America’s lopsided victory in the Mexican War (1846-48), which resulted in a
huge accession of land, from the Rio Grande to the Pacific. How would it be
parceled into territories and states? Would they admit slavery? Although slave
states and free states had maintained an edgy equilibrium since the Missouri
Compromise three decades earlier, quarrels over the new windfall threatened to
upset the sectional balance. Mexico, the loser whose land the United States had
ingested, had abolished slavery, but Texas, a slave state, claimed a vast
hinterland as far west as Santa Fe. Southerners wanted new territory open to
slavery, whether it belonged to Texas or not. The California gold rush made
resolving these questions all the more urgent as hordes of forty-niners
clamored for laws and representation.
The politicians trying to solve these problems back in
Washington made a gaudy cast of characters. The three most famous were aged
lords of the Senate. Henry Clay of Kentucky had lost three runs for the White
House, but he still knew how to win over a room. Bordewich quotes one rapt
listener: “He spoke to an audience very much as an ardent lover speaks to his
sweetheart.” Daniel Webster of Massachusetts matched Clay in oratorical gifts:
the same witness called his voice “resonant, mellow, sweet, with a thunder roll
in it which, when let out to its full power, was awe inspiring.” Clay and
Webster were Whigs and nationalists. The Democrat John C. Calhoun of South
Carolina, once a nationalist, had become an unyielding partisan of slavery who
was willing to take the South out of the Union to preserve it. When a young
woman worried that he was “too much excited” by politics, he replied that he was
“not excited, only intense.” These three jostled with younger Senate colleagues,
including Stephen Douglas, a rambunctious Illinois populist; the New York
abolitionist William Seward, short and mild-mannered, but capable of
inflammatory rhetoric (“There is a higher law than the Constitution,” he
declared); and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, Calhoun’s follower in the
Gadarene rush to secession.
The president was the Whig Zachary Taylor, elected in
1848, a Mexican War hero with no previous political experience. Despite being a
Louisiana plantation owner, he wanted to put California on a fast track to
statehood as a free state. He viewed Southern secessionists with wrath. “If they
attempted to carry out their schemes,” he told one senator, “they should be
dealt with by law as they deserved and executed.” Vice President Millard
Fillmore, a more accommodating man, presided over the mosh pit of the Senate.
There were two possible ways through the tangle. Clay
conceived of a great bargain that would weave together something for everyone:
admitting California as a free state, opening New Mexico to slavery and
shrinking Texas, while simultaneously abolishing the slave trade in the District
of Columbia and imposing a tough federal fugitive slave law. Douglas, by
contrast, favored voting on these issues piecemeal. Clay’s strategy was to
assemble a supercoalition of moderates and not-so-hard-liners from both
extremes; Douglas aimed to build different majorities on each question as it
came up. Clay moved first, introducing his grand compromise at the end of
January, and the Senate debated it exhaustively for the next six months.
The process was punishing. Single speeches could
stretch over days; Clay alone spoke dozens of times. The debate was interrupted
by death and farce. Calhoun expired at the end of March, predicting the Union
would last only 12 more years (close enough). In May 500 Southerners, organized
by the governor of Mississippi, mounted a freelance invasion of Cuba, hoping to
wrest it from Spain and make it a new slave state. They were easily repelled,
but the attempt showed the determination of Southern die-hards to expand slavery
wherever they could. In July, Taylor died of what was probably acute
gastroenteritis, brought on by eating contaminated food on the Fourth.
Clay’s grand compromise was finally voted down at the
end of July. The center had not held; abolitionists and secessionists alike
celebrated. Then Douglas went to work. His tactics, Bordewich writes, relied
“less on grandiloquence than on tireless, mostly unrecorded negotiations, which
were carried out as often as not over copious cups of wine” in a Senate snack
bar called the Hole-in-the-Wall. The elements of Clay’s plan, once they stood
alone, passed both the Senate and the House rapidly (the long months of prior
discussion, and everyone’s weariness, no doubt sped the process). By the middle
of September each compromise had passed. Douglas crowed: “We are united from
shore to shore, and while the mighty West remained as the connecting link
between the North and the South, there could be no disunion.”
Bordewich, the author of several books on American
history, is a good writer — he knows when to savor details, and when to move
things along — and a good quoter of others. “America’s Great Debate” describes
an event that is both an important episode in itself, and a prequel to the Civil
War: in 1854, Douglas’s golden legislative touch turned to poison when a bill he
sponsored, opening the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to slavery, reignited
the controversies he had helped quiet four years earlier.
My only quibble is with Bordewich’s introduction,
which strains for present relevance. There he holds up the debate of 1850 as an
example of “how much can be accomplished by the persuasive power of well-crafted
English.” But does his book bear him out? Some of Clay’s and Webster’s words
shine here, but many of them, preserved without the power of their delivery, lie
dull on the page. Their colleagues wallowed in fustian and threats: Henry Foote
of Mississippi drew a pistol on Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri on the Senate
floor; but after a full dose of Benton, who could blame him?
Bordewich also says the debate of 1850 can teach us
about “the nature of compromise.” It can, but the lessons are not all
encouraging. The compromise that Clay, Douglas and others hammered out bought
time for a new two-party system to emerge: the Republican Party would provide a
home for men like William Seward, who failed to win its presidential nomination
in 1860 but became the right-hand man of the victor, Abraham Lincoln. The
compromise of 1850 did not, however, resolve the underlying intransigence of
South and North. It did not even try, for the task could not be accomplished by
traditional horse-trading. The final resolution of the twin problems of slavery
and nationhood would not come until it was written in blood.
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