Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  6. THE 1848 ELECTION

  The United States did not much notice it, but 1848 was a year of revolution and tumult overseas, as the French and German and Italian worlds seethed. In what was called “the Springtime of Europe,” Clemens von Metternich, the Austrian chancellor and foreign minister for 39 years, was sent packing by the mobs in Vienna; Pope Pius IX, just launched into a pontificate of 32 years, was temporarily chased out of Rome by Italian reunificationists; the Orleans monarchy in Paris was driven out and replaced by the Second Republic, led by Napoleon’s nephew; and there were uprisings across Germany and in Poland, Hungary, Denmark, Switzerland, Belgium, and even Brazil. The departure of Metternich, “the Coachman of Europe” and convening genius of the Congress of Vienna, was particularly striking and presaged the rise of a united Germany as Austria’s replacement as the leading German-speaking power, while the upheavals in Italy foretold the unification of that country as well as of Germany.

  In America, the slavery issue flared again when Polk, in August 1848, sent the Congress a bill for the organization in Oregon of a territorial government free of slavery. The rising star of the congressional Democrats as the great triumvirs of Clay, Webster, and Calhoun moved through the autumn of their days, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, responded to southern complaints that the Congress had no power to restrict slavery in the states with a measure keeping Oregon laws in place unless and until its own legislature changed them. This led to a bill extending the Missouri Compromise line, 36°30, all the way to the Pacific, which would reestablish slavery in New Mexico and southern California, where Mexican law had abolished it. Inevitably, Calhoun was soon on his feet making his usual arguments with an acidulous tone made more mordant by the unimaginable idea that Mexican laws would govern in the United States. After seven months of debate, Oregon was set up as a non-slave territory, but all attempts to deal with other areas failed of adoption by one house or other of the Congress. In the last months of his term, Polk would be unable to secure the admission of California or New Mexico as slave-free territories.

  By the time this controversy subsided, the presidential campaign was well along. Polk, on his record, could easily have been reelected, but he was not well and declined renomination. (He died three months after the inauguration of his successor.) At the Democratic convention in (inevitably) Baltimore, the New York delegation split between the Van Buren “Barnburners,” who opposed the extension of slavery, and the “Hunkers” led by Marcy, who were doughface appeasers of the “slave power.” The Hunkers pledged their support to the nominees, but Van Buren’s Barnburners did not. Polk declined to exercise any influence, and Jackson was dead (in June 1845, aged 78). The Andrew Jackson of the North (to scale), General Lewis Cass, an expansionist and Anglophobe, was nominated on a platform that replicated that of 1844, denied the right of Congress to consider the status of slavery in the states, and criticized any attempt to bring the status of slavery before the Congress. General William O. Butler of Kentucky was chosen for vice president.

  The Whigs met at Philadelphia in June and Clay, Taylor, and Scott were the contenders. The generals had the advantage of lack of any political policy track record, and Taylor was nominated. He shared in the glory of victory in the Mexican War, but was an enemy of Polk, and thus enjoyed the best of both worlds for a Whig. And Senator Millard Fillmore of New York was nominated for vice president, the only one of the four main-party candidates for national office who was not a general, in the aftermath of this fine little war. (The nomination of high-ranking military officers for national office, as has been mentioned, was commonplace, but with two generals from the same party the Democrats were unique overachievers.) There was fear that Clay was too controversial—that though he was the father of the party and the greatest figure in the public life of the country, he was in the overwrought atmosphere not electable, as he had tried three times before unsuccessfully. Anti-slavery motions were voted down and Taylor ran on a thoroughly ambiguous platform. It was well-known that the Whigs were anti-slavery, but they dissembled altogether at this convention. The platform ignored the issues and praised Taylor for his martial and patriotic virtues.

  The Barnburners (named after a legendary Dutch New York farmer so stubborn he burned his own barn down to get rid of the rats in it) met at Utica and nominated Van Buren for president and Henry Dodge of Wisconsin for vice president. Anti-slavery militants from other states, especially New Englanders, held a convention at Buffalo later in June, of what was called the Free Soil Party, which effectively adopted the Wilmot Proviso of no extension of slavery. Charles Francis Adams, son of John Quincy Adams, was nominated for vice president. The new party attracted the support of anti-slavery lawyers Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Salmon P. Chase of Ohio. The Barnburners of Van Buren united with Free Soil, and the combined nominees were Van Buren and Adams (a memorial to the fluidity of political attachments, given Van Buren’s role in assisting Jackson against his running mate’s father). The party demanded full liberty to attack slavery, supported the Wilmot Proviso, favored federal internal improvements and free homesteads for settlers (to expand the country with free states and people), and took the slogan “Free soil, free speech, free labor and free men.” It was a complete affront to the Jackson settlement with the South, and was headed by Jackson’s then chief disciple, who had replaced Calhoun after he was purged as vice president. Van Buren had not taken his disembarkation at the hands of Polk and Jackson like a good sport.

  Taylor won the election with the tired Whig version of the Jackson formula, trying, within what were now very narrow parameters, to express some reservations about the expansion of slavery. Taylor received 1.36 million votes to 1.22 million for Cass to 291,000 for Van Buren; he won the popular vote by 47 percent to 43 percent, to 10 percent, with 163 electoral votes to 127 for Cass. Van Buren, whose motives were an indiscernible amalgam of sour grapes and, in the one seriously principled moment of his career, real reservations about slavery and the aggressivity of its advocates, flipped the election to Taylor by taking most of the Democratic vote in New York. He ran 121,000 to 114,000 ahead of Cass in that state and delivered it to Taylor. New York determined the election, as it had in 1844.

  As if slavery had not strained the comity of the nation enough, on January 22, 1849, 69 southern members of Congress, with Calhoun as their spokesman, presented an “Address” enumerating the “acts of aggression” of the North—principally exclusion of slavery from territories and making the return of fugitive slaves more difficult.

  Polk went into his brief retirement and came to his early death on June 15, 1849, aged only 53. He was far from charismatic and was never a great public figure. He was plucked almost from obscurity as a dark horse in a deadlocked convention, but was an extremely capable and successful president, an able leader of congressional opinion, and a fine war leader. He moved through difficult times and among looming shoals with great skill and agility. He was devious and duplicitous, was indistinct to the country, and was pushing the Jackson formula, the best solution but an inglorious one, so he was not a great president. But he was one of the country’s 10 or 12 ablest and most accomplished presidents. As a political, diplomatic, and war strategist, settling with Britain before dealing with Mexico, obscuring the expansion of slavery in patriotic jingo, conducting one of the most efficiently executed wars in American history, and extending the rather tawdry Jackson settlement (the only method to hand to preserve the Union) into the vast new territory he acquired, and into another decade, he earned more, and more grateful, recognition than he has received from posterity. In straight strategic terms, James K. Polk was as capable as any of the presidents who preceded him except Washington. But this was the last of the brilliant series of American strategic triumphs from the Seven Years’ War on, before the ghastly specter of slavery was finally confronted. There would now be a demeaning decade of mealy mouthed dissembling, shabby compromise, and gamecock provocation before the awful reckoning so long delayed and feared. America
and the world that was watching it held their breath.

  7. THE COMPROMISE OF 1850

  It was obvious that the issue of the organization of territorial governments and the admission of new states would be a battleground between the abolitionists, the less fervent dissenters from slavery, the accomplices of the slaveholders, and the defenders of slavery. Each time the issue arose, which was now over a wide range of questions involving the extent of federal authority and the nature of the Constitution, including, ominously, the indissolubility or otherwise of the Union, there was a rending debate, always resolved by an extension of the Jackson formula of the security of slavery in the South and Southwest, and the unacceptability of nullification or any secessionist movement. But the process was one of attrition of nerves, patience, and goodwill. The North tired of the South’s effort, usually through the recondite but lugubrious spokesmanship of Calhoun, to impose equality of influence between the regions despite the steadily swifter demographic and economic advance of the free states, and of the misplaced righteousness with which a clearly despicable and fallacious system was defended. The South was endlessly embarrassed and provoked by northern condescension toward a southern society that the southerners loved, was legitimized by the Constitution, and worked much better and more fairly, they believed, than the northerners, in their smug hypocrisy, acknowledged. And the large group that wasn’t overly excited about the issue, but endorsed the Jackson formula, wearied of the endless and increasingly vituperative circumlocution as the same points were bellowed back and forth ad nauseam.

  It would be a mistake to imagine that the majority of northerners were especially disconcerted by the moral implications of slavery. There were many abolitionists who found slavery repugnant, but the great majority of northern Americans had no notions of racial equality and did not consider it the business of the North to dictate to the South how their society was organized, as there were then very few African Americans in free states. Most northerners would have found slavery conceptually distasteful, but there is no evidence that a significant percentage of them wished to force the issue or risk the Union to be rid of slavery. A great mythos developed that the Union armies more than a decade later were trampling through the South prepared, as Julia Ward Howe wrote in the Battle Hymn of the Republic, “to die to make men free.” This was just another creation of the mighty American public relations system. But the frustration of the North, that slavery existed in the South but was not offensive enough to do anything about it, aggravated the ambiance of moral back-biting at every opportunity to rail ineffectually about slavery, until the South routinely threatened to secede.

  Henry Clay returned to the Senate in 1849 after an absence of seven years, and on January 29, 1850, he presented a series of resolutions designed to resolve the problem durably and replace the constant friction with a clean-cut and practical regime that would give all factions except the abolitionists and secessionists most of what they sought. His resolutions would admit California as a free state; organize the rest of the territory taken from Mexico without restriction on slavery; change the boundary between Texas and New Mexico; assume federally the debt accumulated by Texas, which would renounce any territorial claims on Mexico; abolish the slave trade in the District of Columbia while confirming the legitimacy of slavery itself there; tighten the pursuit and return of fugitive slaves; and proclaim the lack of congressional authority to intervene in the interstate slave trade. The ensuing debate continued for eight months and was the longest, most intense, and at times the most intellectually and oratorically distinguished in the history of the United States Congress, before or since. It marked the summit and the end of the reign of the Clay-Webster-Calhoun Triumvirate. Other great figures made their last great interventions, such as Thomas Hart Benton, and still others who would lead the nation into and through the coming turbulence, such as Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, William H. Seward of New York, and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi (named after a man all three triumvirs had known), shone brightly.

  Clay spoke on February 5 and 6 and emphasized that secession was not a justified or effective remedy for southern concerns, and that the preservation of the Union was in the interests of and the duty of all, and to that end, mutual concessions were needed and appropriate. Calhoun, gravely ill and on the verge of death, sat while his address opposing Clay was read for him by Senator Mason of Virginia, and he said, one last time, that the South had to have entrenched equality in the newly taken territories, in a constitutional amendment restoring the South’s equality and ability to protect herself, “before the equilibrium between the sections was destroyed by the actions of this [the federal] government.”

  Calhoun died a few weeks later, on March 31. By the last comment, as he explained posthumously in his Disquisition on Government, he meant that the Constitution had always intended a de facto dual ratification for any important initiative, and that this was being steadily eroded by what he declined to recognize as the forces of history. Webster followed on March 7 with another of his mighty addresses, supporting Clay’s resolutions, beginning that he was not speaking for his state or region but “as an American ... I speak today for the preservation of the Union. ‘Hear me for my cause.’” He said that matters of soil and climate excluded any recourse to the economics of slavery in the territories under discussion, and that the subject should not arise at all. Calhoun’s constitutional divinations were completely unrigorous; Washington, southern slaveholder though he was, spoke at all times of an indissoluble Union; Jefferson and Madison, though states’ rights advocates and rather quavering in their approach to slavery, recognized slavery’s moral frailty, and none of them ever hinted at an imposed equality between sections. Webster was close to the mark in implying that as states were admitted, as they would be, across the continent to the Pacific, there would be no economic rationale for slavery in them at all, quite apart from the moral concerns slavery raised, and that Calhoun’s notion of stopping history, even as the body of the nation was divided into a northern torso and southern tail, was nonsense at every level, the death-bed revisionism of a formidable but irrational apologist for a morally bankrupt, doomed regime.

  William H. Seward, a rising star of the anti-slavery Whigs, who would be a presidential contender and distinguished secretary of state, spoke on March 11 and opposed Clay’s resolutions because he wanted slavery contained as if by the Wilmot Proviso: no new slave states carved from the territories. He was one of the leaders of the emerging consensus in the North, that slavery could be tolerated where it was but there was no excuse for tolerating its expansion, and Seward declared legislative compromises in general to be “radically wrong and essentially vicious.” He didn’t dispute that the Constitution implicitly accepted the legitimacy of slavery, but spoke of a “higher law” that justified avoiding protection of it. He was morally very arguably correct, but this was a considerable liberty in the realm of constitutional law, as long-standing legal conditions cannot simply be dispensed with because a later generation finds moral problems with them. Jefferson Davis opposed Clay’s resolutions for the same general reasons as Calhoun, as did, to a large extent, Thomas Hart Benton. Chase opposed for reasons similar to Seward’s. Douglas, and the late presidential candidate General Lewis Cass of Michigan, supported the resolutions.

  The resolutions were sent to a select committee of 13 senators, chaired by Clay, which came back with an omnibus bill and a special bill abolishing the slave trade in the District of Columbia, on May 8. President Taylor, who opposed reorganizing the new territories, apart from California, into Utah in the north and New Mexico in the south, as was now the proposal, died on July 9 after over-strenuous July 4th celebrations. Vice President Fillmore succeeded him and was a less-ardent New York critic of slavery than his colleague Seward, and supported Clay’s resolutions. Though Taylor was a more substantial figure than Fillmore, Fillmore was better suited to achieve a compromise, and once again, Providence had assisted the United Stat
es. Taylor might not have been an insuperable obstacle as Tyler and Polk would have been, but he would not have been much help to Clay either. Clay and Douglas, now the Democratic leader in the Senate, though only 37, worked through the summer (though Clay had to retire from overstrained health, and did not play a leading role in the Senate again) to get those who put the Union ahead of opposition to, or militant and integral defense of, slavery together behind a reformulated compromise, which was enacted in five laws between September 9 and September 20. Most of the Unionists who favored a Wilmot restriction on the spread of slavery came over to Clay and Douglas, joining the softer disapprovers of slavery and the doughface northern appeasers of the South, and some southerners who were content with half a loaf. Only the outright abolitionists, the dogmatic Wilmotites like Seward, and the quasi-secessionist Calhounites were outside the compromise coalition when the new set of bills was voted.