Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  All free soilers—except perhaps some of the Van Burenites—concurred with the following set of propositions: free labor was more efficient than slave labor because it was motivated by the inducement of wages and the ambition for upward mobility rather than by the coercion of the lash; slavery undermined the dignity of manual work by associating it with servility and thereby degraded white labor wherever bondage existed; slavery inhibited education and social improvements and kept poor whites as well as slaves in ignorance; the institution therefore mired all southerners except the slaveowning gentry in poverty and repressed the development of a diversified economy; slavery must be kept out of all new territories so that free labor could flourish there.

  For some members of the two outer circles these propositions did not spring from a "squeamish sensitiveness . . . nor morbid sympathy for the slave," as David Wilmot put it. "The negro race already occupy enough of this fair continent. . . . I would preserve for free white labor a fair country . . . where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor." If slavery goes into the new territories, wrote free-soil editor and poet William Cullen Bryant, "the free labor of all the states will not." But if slavery is kept out, "the free labor of the states [will go] there . . . and in a few years the country will teem with an active and energetic population."19

  18. CWL, I, 74–75; II, 255; III, 92.

  19. CG, 29 Cong., 2 Sess., Appendix, 314–17; New York Evening Post, Nov. 10, 1847.

  Southerners bristled at these attacks on their social system. At one time a good many of them had shared the conviction that slavery was an evil—albeit a '"necessary" one for the time being because of the explosive racial consequences of emancipation. But the sense of evil had faded by 1830 as the growing world demand for cotton fastened the tentacles of a booming plantation economy on the South. Abolitionist attacks on slavery placed southerners on the defensive and goaded them into angry counterattacks. By 1840 slavery was no longer a necessary evil; it was "a great moral, social, and political blessing—a blessing to the slave, and a blessing to the master." It had civilized African savages and provided them with cradle-to-grave security that contrasted favorably with the miserable poverty of "free" labor in Britain and the North. By releasing whites from menial tasks it elevated white labor and protected it from degrading competition with free Negroes. Slavery eliminated the specter of class conflict that would eventually destroy free-labor societies, for it "promotes equality among the free by dispensing with grades and castes among them, and thereby preserves republican institutions."20 It also established the foundation for an upper class of gentlemen to cultivate the arts, literature, hospitality, and public service. It created a far superior society to that of the "vulgar, contemptible, counter-jumping" Yankees. Indeed, said Senator Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia, "there is not a respectable system of civilization known to history whose foundations were not laid in the institution of domestic slavery." "Instead of an evil," said John C. Calhoun in summing up the southern position, slavery was "a positive good . . . the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world."21

  Proponents of slavery naturally wished to offer the blessings of this institution to the new territories. Even those who did not expect bondage to flourish there resented the northern effort to exclude it as an insult to southern honor. The Wilmot Proviso pronounced "a degrading inequality" on the South, declared a Virginian. It "says in effect to the Southern man, Avaunt! you are not my equal, and hence are to be

  20. Senator Albert Gallatin Brown of Mississippi quoted in David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1960), 348; resolution of a Southern Rights convention in Montgomery, March 1852, quoted in J. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge, 1978), 206–7.

  21. Hunter quoted in Donald, Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 349; Calhoun in CG, 25 Cong., 2 Sess., Appendix, 61–62.

  excluded as carrying a moral taint." Having furnished most of the soldiers who conquered Mexican territory, the South was particularly outraged by the proposal to shut them out of its benefits. "When the warworn soldier returns to his home," asked an Alabamian, "is he to be told that he cannot carry his property to the country won by his blood?"22 "No true Southron," said scores of them, would submit to such "social and sectional degradation. . . . Death is preferable to acknowledged inferiority."23

  In addition to their sacred honor, slaveholders had "the lives and fortunes of ourselves and families" at stake. Enactment of the Wilmot Proviso would yield ten new free states, warned James Hammond of South Carolina. The North would then "ride over us rough shod" in Congress, "proclaim freedom or something equivalent to it to our slaves and reduce us to the condition of Hayti. . . . Our only safety is in equality of POWER. If we do not act now, we deliberately consign our children, not our posterity, but our children to the flames."24

  Southerners challenged the constitutionality of the Wilmot Proviso. Admittedly, precedent seemed to sanction congressional exclusion of slavery from territories. The first Congress under the Constitution had reaffirmed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banning the institution from the Northwest Territory. Subsequent Congresses re-enacted the ordinance for each territory carved out of the region. The Compromise of 1820 prohibited slavery north of 36° 30′ in the Louisiana Purchase. Southern congressmen had voted for these laws. But in February 1847 Senator John C. Calhoun introduced resolutions denying the right of Congress to exclude slave property from the territories. "Tall, careworn, with fevered brow, haggard cheek and eye, intensely gazing," as Henry Clay described him, Calhoun insisted that territories were the "common property" of sovereign states. Acting as the "joint agents" of these states, Congress could no more prevent a slaveowner from taking his human property to the territories than it could prevent him from taking his horses or hogs there. If the North insisted on ramming through the

  22. Both quotations from Chaplain W. Morrison, Democratic Politics and Sectionalism: The Wilmot Proviso Controversy (Chapel Hill, 1967), 65.

  23. Ibid.; Don E. Fehrenbacher, The South and Three Sectional Crises (Baton Rouge, 1980), 26; William J. Cooper, Jr., The South and the Politics of Slavery 1828–1856 (Baton Rouge, 1978), 239.

  24. William L. Barney, The Road to Secession: A New Perspective on the Old South (New York, 1972), 105–6.

  Wilmot Proviso, warned Calhoun in sepulchral tones, the result would be "political revolution, anarchy, civil war."25

  The Senate did not pass the Calhoun resolutions. As the presidential election of 1848 neared, both major parties sought to heal the sectional rifts within their ranks. One possible solution, hallowed by tradition, was to extend the Missouri Compromise line through the middle of the new territories to the Pacific. Polk and his cabinet endorsed this policy. Ailing and prematurely aged, the president did not seek renomination. Secretary of State James Buchanan made 36° 30′ the centerpiece of his drive for the nomination. Several times in 1847–48 the Senate passed a version of this proposal, with the backing of most southern senators, who yielded the principle of slavery in all the territories for the sake of securing its legality in some. But the northern majority in the House voted it down.

  Another idea emerged from the maelstrom of presidential politics. This one came to be known as popular sovereignty It was identified in 1848 mainly with Michigan's Senator Lewis Cass, Buchanan's main rival for the Democratic presidential nomination. Maintaining that settlers in territories were as capable of self-government as citizens of states, Cass proposed that they should decide for themselves whether to have slavery. This idea had the political charm of ambiguity, for Cass did not specify when voters might choose for or against slavery—during the territorial stage or only when adopting a state constitution. Most contemporaries presumed the former—including Calhoun, who therefore opposed popular sovereignty because it could violate the property rights of southern settlers.
But enough southerners saw merit in the approach to enable Cass to win the nomination—though significantly the platform did not endorse popular sovereignty. It did reject the Wilmot Proviso and the Calhoun resolutions, however. The Democratic party continued the tradition of trying to preserve intersectional unity by avoiding a firm position on slavery.

  So did the Whigs. Indeed they adopted no platform at all, and nominated the hero of a war that most of them had opposed. Nothing illustrated better the strange-bedfellow nature of American politics than Zachary Taylor's candidacy. A thick-set man with stubby legs and heavy brows contracted into a perpetual frown, careless in dress, a career army officer (but not a West Pointer) with no discernible political opinions,

  25. CG, 29 Cong., 2 Sess., 453–55. Clay's description of Calhoun is quoted in Nevins, Ordeal, I, 24.

  Taylor seemed unlikely presidential timber. The handsome, imposing General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, a dedicated professional with a fondness for dress uniforms, and an articulate Whig, looked like a better choice if the anti-war party felt compelled to mend its image by nominating a military candidate. But Scott had the defects of his virtues. His critics considered him pompous. He had a penchant for writing foot-in-mouth public letters which made him vulnerable to ridicule. His nickname—Old Fuss and Feathers—conveys the nature of his political liabilities. And Taylor had the virtues of his defects, as the image conveyed by his sobriquet of Rough and Ready illustrates. Many voters in this new age of (white) manhood suffrage seemed to prefer their candidates rough-hewn. As a war hero Taylor claimed first priority on public affection. Although Scott had planned and led the campaign of 1847 that captured Mexico City, Taylor's victories of 1846 along the Rio Grande and his extraordinary triumph against odds of three to one at Buena Vista in February 1847 had made his reputation before Scott got started.

  Buena Vista launched a Taylor bandwagon that proved unstoppable. Rough and Ready's main rival for the nomination (besides Scott) was Henry Clay. Urbane, witty, popular, the seventy-year-old Clay was Mr. Whig—a founder of the party and architect of its "American System" to promote economic growth by a protective tariff, a national bank, and federal aid to internal improvements. As a three-time loser in presidential contests, however, Clay carried the liabilities as well as assets of a long political career. Like a majority of his party he had opposed the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War.26 But the Whigs could not hope to win the election without carrying some states where annexation and the war had been popular. Taylor seemed to be the answer.

  The general was also a godsend to southern Whigs, who faced an erosion of strength at home because of the persistent support of northern Whigs for the Wilmot Proviso. (Most northern Democrats had abandoned Wilmot's Proviso for Cass's formula of popular sovereignty.) Southern Whig leaders, especially Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky and Congressman Alexander Stephens of Georgia, maneuvered the Taylor boom into a southern movement. Taylor's ownership of Louisiana and Mississippi plantations with more than a hundred slaves seemed to assure his safety on the issue of most importance to southerners.

  26. In a sad irony, one of Clay's sons was killed at Buena Vista. Another prominent Whig and opponent of the Mexican adventure, Daniel Webster, also lost a son in the war.

  "The truth is," declared Robert Toombs of Georgia, Clay "has sold himself body and soul to the Northern Anti-Slavery Whigs." Taylor, on the other hand, was a "Southern man, a slaveholder, a cotton planter" identified "from birth, association, and conviction . . . with the South."27 Southern delegates to the Whig convention provided the votes to deny Clay the nomination on the first ballot and then to award it to Taylor on the fourth.

  Taylor's candidacy brought to a head a long-festering schism in northern Whiggery. "Of course, we cannot & will not under any circumstances support General Taylor," wrote Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. "We cannot support any body who is not known to be against the extension of Slavery." Sumner spoke for a faction of the party known as "Conscience Whigs." They challenged a more conservative group labeled "Cotton Whigs" because of the prominence of textile magnates in their ranks. The Cotton faction had opposed the Mexican War and favored the Wilmot Proviso. But their position on these issues seemed lukewarm, and in 1848 they wished to join hands with southern Whigs in behalf of Taylor and victory. Unable to sanction this alliance of "lords of the loom" with "lords of the lash," Conscience Whigs bolted the party. Their purpose, in Sumner's words, was no less than "a new crystallization of parties, in which there shall be one grand Northern party of Freedom."28

  The time appeared ripe for such a movement. In New York the Van Buren faction of Democrats was ready for revolt. Dubbed "Barnburners" (after the legendary Dutch farmer who burned his barn to rid it of rats), this faction sent a separate delegation to the national Democratic convention. When the convention voted to seat both New York delegations, the Barnburners stomped out and held their own conclave to nominate Van Buren on a Wilmot Proviso platform. Antislavery Democrats and Whigs from other northern states cheered. The Barnburner

  27. Toombs to James Thomas, April 16, 1848, in Ulrich B. Phillips, ed., The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb, Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1911, vol. 2 (Washington, 1913), 103–4; New Orleans Bee and Charleston Mercury quoted in Joseph G. Rayback, Free Soil: The Election of 1848 (Lexington, Ky., 1970), 42, 43.

  28. Sumner to Salmon P. Chase, Feb. 7, 1848, Dec. 12, 1846, Chase Papers, Library of Congress. For the development of this split within the Whig party of Massachusetts, see Kinley J. Brauer, Cotton versus Conscience: Massachusetts Whig Politics and Southwestern Expansion, 1843–1848 (Lexington, Ky., 1967).

  convention provided the spark for an antislavery political blaze; the Liberty party offered itself as kindling.

  Founded in 1839 by simon-pure abolitionists, the Liberty party had thus far managed to win only 3 percent of the northern votes for its presidential candidate, in 1844. Since that election, party leaders had been debating future strategy. A radical faction wanted to proclaim a new doctrine that the Constitution empowered the government to abolish slavery in the states. But a more pragmatic majority under the leadership of Salmon P. Chase wanted to move in the other direction—toward a coalition with antislavery Whigs and Democrats. An astute lawyer who had defended fugitive slaves, Chase combined religious conviction and humorlessness with unquenchable ambition and shrewd political insight. Although Liberty men must continue to proclaim the goal of ending slavery everywhere, said Chase, they could best take the first step toward that goal by joining with those who believed in keeping it out of the territories—whatever else they believed. If such a coalition gained enough leverage in Ohio to elect Chase to the U. S. Senate, so much the better. Chase planted feelers with Conscience Whigs and Barnburner Democrats in the spring of 1848. These ripened into a Free Soil convention in August, after the major-party nominations of Cass and Taylor had propelled antislavery men out of their old allegiances.

  The Free Soil convention at Buffalo resembled nothing so much as a camp meeting. Fifteen thousand fervent "delegates" thronged into the sweltering city. Gathered under a huge canopy erected in the park, they cheered endless oratory damning the slave power while an executive committee of 465 met in the church to do the real work. This committee accomplished something of a miracle by fusing factions from three parties that held clashing opinions on banking, tariffs, and other economic issues. These questions, the staples of American politics for two decades, must give way to a more important one, said veteran Whig Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio: "Our political conflicts must be in future between slavery and freedom."29 The committee created its new fusion party by nominating a Barnburner for president and a Conscience Whig for vice president on a Liberty platform drafted mainly by Chase. The "mass convention" in the park roared its approval of the committee's work.

  Acceptance of Martin Van Buren as presidential nominee was not

  29. Maizlish, Triumph of Sectionali
sm, 89.

  easy for Liberty men and Conscience Whigs. As a proslavery Jacksonian, the Little Magician had earned the apparent undying enmity of abolitionists and Whigs in the 1830s. But a new age dawned in 1848. Van Buren now endorsed exclusion of slavery from the territories and abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. His Barnburner backers proclaimed bondage "a great moral, social, and political evil—a relic of barbarism which must necessarily be swept away in the progress of Christian civilization." Speaking to fellow Whigs, Sumner said that "it is not for the Van Buren of 1838 that we are to vote, but the Van Buren of to-day."30 With Charles Francis Adams as vice-presidential nominee, the ticket strengthened its Conscience image. Charles Francis inherited the antislavery mantle from his father John Quincy, who had died earlier in the year. Joshua Leavitt, a founder of the Liberty party and a co-worker with John Quincy Adams against the congressional gag rule on antislavery petitions, brought tears to many eyes at the Buffalo convention with an emotional speech recounting the courage of pioneer abolitionists. Leavitt then offered his blessing to the new Free Soil coalition. "The Liberty Party is not dead," he declaimed, "but translated." Vowing to "fight on, and fight ever" for "Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men," the delegates returned home to battle for the Lord.31