The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876

by Nester, William

  Slavocrats grew more extreme and zealous in defending their institution as the proportion of slaveholders diminished. While more than one of three, or 36 percent, of southern whites owned slaves in 1830, that ratio plummeted to only one of four, or 26 percent, in 1860. That the slavocrats led their region into secession, rebellion, and war against the United States in 1860 is at once ironic and understandable.22

  The thirteen years between the Mexican War’s end in 1848 and the Civil War’s beginning in 1861 differed in a crucial way from the Jacksonian era that preceded them.23 The most obvious was that a new generation of political leaders replaced the Great Triumvirate—Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John Calhoun—that had dominated the Age of Jackson. The halls of the Senate resounded with the heated and eloquent words of Stephen Douglas, William Seward, Jefferson Davis, and Charles Sumner. Although slavery remained the toxic core of American politics, the political center increasingly frayed toward its extremes—abolitionism and secessionism. A series of events radicalized more northerners and southerners, with the former angrily pointing to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, and 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, the latter to John Brown’s 1859 Harpers Ferry raid, and both to Bloody Kansas.

  When Zachary Taylor took the presidential oath on March 4, 1849, Americans celebrated him as a national hero but had no idea what he might do in the White House.24 He had been a professional soldier since he received a second lieutenant’s commission in 1808, had fought in the War of 1812, the Black Hawk War, and the Seminole War, and during the Mexican War commanded an army that won every battle—Resaca de la Palma, Palo Alto, Monterrey, and Buena Vista—that it fought. As a tactician, he preferred the massed bayonet charge straight at the enemy. He was renowned for his utter calm as bullets or arrows whizzed past. He was a soldier’s soldier who shared his men’s discomforts. He was anything but pretentious. As a general, he got away with wearing civilian work clothes and a straw hat rather than a uniform.

  What did Taylor believe in? Politics really did not interest him; he never voted in an election before 1848. His views and choices came from his gut and heart rather than his mind. Indeed, he was malleable to the point of being contradictory. He at once championed the Union and states’ rights. He was a Whig who mildly opposed a protective tariff, internal improvements, and a national bank. He was a slaveholder who opposed slavery’s expansion in the newly conquered territories. From the Whig Party’s perspective, these paradoxes along with his distinguished army career made him a winning candidate. For voters he was an ink-blot test upon which to project their own views. He was a down-to-earth man of the people who could be nearly all things to nearly all people.

  As president, Taylor was notable not for any enduring achievements but for a couple of “lasts”—he was the last slaveholder and Whig to live in the White House. Nonetheless he did advocate clear positions on issues that tended to split the difference between extremes. He favored the admission of California, Utah, and New Mexico as states, with their respective peoples to decide whether or not to permit slavery. He not only opposed but tried to stop filibustering expeditions launched from American soil. He backed a treaty whereby the United States and Britain agreed not to build a canal across Nicaragua without the other’s approval. He did not live long enough to realize these views. Taylor died painfully of acute gastroenteritis on July 9, 1850, after overindulging on a sweltering summer day with too much iced milk, cherries, and raw vegetables.

  Millard Fillmore took Taylor’s place in the White House. The Whigs had tapped him as vice president for two compelling reasons. He provided some of the intellectual and political ballast lacking in Taylor and, as a New Yorker, geographically balanced the southerner. Atop that, Fillmore enjoyed an impeccable reputation for integrity. He was born into a working-class family and as a young teen labored for a textile manufacturer. His intelligence won him admission to a private academy, then a law apprenticeship. He passed the bar and began practicing law in 1826. Two years later he won election as an Anti-Masonic Party candidate to New York’s state assembly, where he served three one-year terms. Like most Anti-Masons, he soon switched to the Whig Party. In 1832 he was elected to the House of Representatives, where he served until 1843. He stepped down to prepare himself for what became an unsuccessful run for New York’s governorship in 1844. After being elected the state’s comptroller in 1848, he achieved fame for reforming New York’s banking system. This gave him the buzz at the Whig convention that led to his selection as Taylor’s running mate.25

  Fillmore began his presidency shorn of any political baggage lingering from his predecessor. After taking the oath on July 9, he accepted the entire cabinet’s resignation, then filled those chairs with men that he trusted and respected. He would need all the unity and support he could get as the nation faced its latest political crisis.

  A dispute arose that threatened to tear the Whig Party apart. After the Mexican War, an array of contentious issues had built up over whether the newly won western territories along with the District of Columbia should be free or slave. The party’s liberal wing advocated a bill that would hold a plebiscite for the capital’s residents over whether to abolish slavery and let free black men vote along with qualified whites. Moderates sought to table this bill as too incendiary at the time. Then Daniel Gott, a New York representative, got a majority to endorse a resolution that slavery in Washington was “contrary to natural justice and the fundamental principles of our political system, . . . notoriously a reproach to our country through Christendom, and a serious hindrance to the progress of republican liberty among the nations of the earth.”26

  Abraham Lincoln was still in Congress when these measures arose. He voted against both, arguing that while he agreed that Congress was empowered to abolish slavery in Washington City, “that power ought not to be exercised unless at the request of the people of said District.”27 On January 10, 1849, he introduced an alternative to Gott’s resolution. He called for a referendum on slavery whereby only qualified white males could vote. If a majority struck down slavery then the federal government would compensate all owners who agreed to free their slaves with “full cash value,” while all children born to slave mothers after 1850 would be freed. Washington officials would remain bound to return any slaves who escaped to the District of Columbia.28 Radicals from both sides denounced Lincoln’s plan. Abolitionists condemned it for not going far enough, slavocrats because even a voluntary, compensated, gradual abolition was abhorrent to them. Lincoln backed off from this array of critics and never presented his proposal as a carefully drafted bill.

  Passions became so heated that slavocrat leaders warned that their states would secede if they did not get their way. On January 20, 1850, Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, who was a key player in resolving the crises of 1820 and 1833, proposed a compromise package of eight resolutions that he hoped would overcome the latest crisis. He paired the first six, with each couple offering a concession to each side. The first resolution admitted California as a free state, while the second organized two territories, New Mexico and Utah, without reference to slavery. The third resolution favored New Mexico in its boundary with Texas, but the fourth consoled irate Texans with the federal assumption of that state’s outstanding debts. The fifth resolution abolished slave auctions in the District of Colombia while the sixth upheld slavery’s legality there. The last two resolutions favored slavocrats, with the seventh forbidding Congress to restrict the interstate slave trade and the eighth calling for a tougher fugitive slave law. The Senate voted to establish a committee chaired by Clay to study these and any other proposals.

  Slavocrats and Free Soilers alike found plenty to dislike about Clay’s resolutions. Free Soilers objected that the bulk favored slavocrats. Slavocrats objected to any that favored Free Soilers. Together they forced Clay’s bundle of proposals to be unraveled and voted on separately on July 31. The result was that majorities voted down each proposal in turn.

  Stephen
Douglas of Illinois recognized that no package deal would ever pass since most senators and representatives would find far more to oppose than support. So he devised six separate bills that together constituted a grand compromise that would attract majorities on separate votes. That strategy was a resounding success. The first to be approved was a Texas boundary bill, passed on August 9, that gave that state far more land than Clay had proposed, yet drew its western boundary several hundred miles east of the Rio Grande claim. This passage provided momentum for the swift passage of five more: the admission of California as a free state, separate bills that put no restrictions on introducing slavery in the territories of New Mexico and Utah, the Fugitive Slave Act, and the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia. President Fillmore signed those bills into law on September 20.29

  The abolition of slave auctions in Washington City incensed most southerners. Georgia actually held a convention to debate whether or not to secede. In the end, unionists edged out secessionists, but the convention did call for all states to “resist . . . any action of Congress upon the subject of slavery in the District of Columbia or in places subject to the jurisdiction of Congress” that were “incompatible with the safety and domestic tranquility, the rights and honor of the slave-holding states, or any refusal to admit as a state any territory . . . because of the existence of slavery.”30

  Meanwhile the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act outraged not only abolitionists but also many northerners previously indifferent to the issue. The Constitution clearly let masters retrieve slaves who escaped to other states. The Supreme Court acknowledged that in its 1842 Prigg v. Pennsylvania decision, when the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act was challenged. This ruling, however, required only the federal government, not state and local officials, to cooperate with slave catchers. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act was designed to overcome what slavocrats believed were weaknesses in the 1793 version. The 1850 law empowered federal officials to deputize people from free states to assist any efforts by masters to recapture their slaves and imposed fines of up to $1,000 and six months in prison if they refused. The federal government rather than the masters paid any expenses involved in recapturing escaped slaves. The status of anyone accused of being an escaped slave was determined not by a jury but by federal commissioners, who were paid ten dollars if they certified and only five dollars if they denied a master’s accusation that a black person was an escapee.

  The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act was far more provocative than effective. In the decade leading up to the Civil War, enraged masters wielded its powers to capture and carry back into slavery only 332 blacks, or about one in twenty of those they pursued. Nonetheless, the courts almost invariably upheld this process; judges freed only eleven blacks who contested their masters’ claims.31

  Each case that made the news inspired more people to condemn slavery as evil even if they differed over just what to do about it. Yet, given the harsh penalties, few people were principled enough to resist the slave catchers. Virtually all witnesses looked on in grim silence. As might be expected, liberal Boston, Massachusetts, was the epicenter of resistance. Led by Theodore Parker and William Garrison, abolitionists protested so fiercely the extradition of first William and Ellen Craft in 1850, then Thomas Sims in 1851, and finally Antony Burns in 1854 that state officials never again cooperated with slave catchers. In doing so Massachusetts clearly violated not just federal law but the Constitution itself.

  The Supreme Court ruled in the 1851 Strader v. Graham case that slave states could determine whether any fugitive who reached a northern state was actually free under the slave state’s laws. That was a potentially revolutionary decision, as it empowered the slave states to violate with impunity the laws of free states. This was not the most tortured interpretation of the Constitution that Chief Justice Roger Taney made.

  Northerners noted the hypocrisy of those who so fervently insisted on states’ rights for themselves yet were so swift to deny it to others. Abolitionists had a more subtle way to defy the hated Fugitive Slave Act. The Underground Railroad was a system of safe houses that led escaped slaves to freedom in the northern United States and often all the way to Canada. How many slaves escaped will never be known, but estimates vary from about sixty thousand to one hundred thousand.32

  Northern protests and civil disobedience against the law in turn provoked the rage of southern fire-eaters, who called for secession. The secessionists, however, did not explain how breaking away from the United States would ease the process of recovering their escaped slaves.

  After leaving Congress, Abraham Lincoln spent the next four years developing a flourishing law practice with his partner, William Herndon, in Springfield and on the circuit.33 He became renowned across the state for the powerful reason and oratory with which he defended his clients in hundreds of cases. He took on virtually all those who requested his services, including masters who sought to regain their slaves and slaves who sought to escape their masters.

  The Lincolns suffered a tragedy on February 1, 1850, when their son Edward Baker, who had always been sickly, died of pulmonary tuberculosis. They rejoiced at the birth on April 4, 1853, of Thomas, nicknamed Tad, short for tadpole. After Edward’s death, Abraham and Mary cherished their children all the more, perhaps too much, since they pampered them. As with so many dimensions of his life, in his relationship with his sons Lincoln used his own father as a model for how not to be. When Lincoln was old enough he had fled his smothering father. This taught him a priceless lesson: “Love is the chain to lock a child to its parent.” He was devoted to creating a loving home for his children that made them “free, happy, and unrestrained by paternal tyranny.”34

  The Lincolns were immensely proud of their offspring and loved to show them off to visitors by dressing them up and having them sing, dance, quote poetry, and perform other feats. Lincoln enjoyed taking care of the boys even at work, to the point where neighbors gossiped that he was “henpecked.” Yet Lincoln at times got lost in his thoughts and did not notice what his sons were doing. One memorable time he was pulling them in a wagon around Springfield’s streets when a passerby hollered that one of the boys had fallen out.35

  Herndon was among many who disliked the Lincoln boys as spoiled brats. He wrote that “I wanted to wring their little necks and yet out of respect for Lincoln I kept my mouth shut.” He was just as venomous toward their mother, whom he had hated since Lincoln began to court her. He blistered her as “imperious, proud, aristocratic, insolent, witty, and bitter” and once compared the glide of her dancing technique to “the ease of a serpent.”36 Mary openly harbored a similar animus toward Herndon and never once invited him to dinner at their home. Herndon was hardly the only target of her wrath. She was spitefully jealous of any of her husband’s closest friends and associates.

  Even though he no longer held an elected office, Lincoln remained a Whig Party leader. In his search to expand the party, he saw a natural “union of the Whigs proper and such of the Liberty men who are Whigs in principle on all questions save only that of slavery.”37 On this issue the Whig Party opposed slavery’s extension to new territories while the Liberty Party sought its abolition everywhere. Lincoln insisted that it was “a paramount duty of us in the free States, due to the Union of the States, and perhaps to liberty itself (paradox though it may seem), to let the slavery of the other States alone, while, on the other hand, I hold it to be equally clear that we should never knowingly lend ourselves, directly or indirectly, to prevent . . . slavery from dying a natural death—to find new places for it to live in.”38

  The animosities stirred by the Compromise of 1850 animated the 1852 national election. The Democratic Party was more diverse than the Whig Party and thus took longer to reach a consensus on controversial issues. During their convention at Baltimore, the delegates were still deadlocked after forty-nine roll call votes among four Democratic heavyweights—Stephen Douglas, Lewis Cass, William Marcy, and James Buchanan. With each of them far from earning the needed two-thirds m
ajority, they finally turned to a compromise candidate.39

  Franklin Pierce was personable, easygoing, handsome, and very well connected.40 As a boy his wealthy and aloof father sent him to a series of elite boarding schools, culminating with Philips Exeter, then to Bowdoin College, where he got involved in political, debate, and literary clubs. These activities apparently distracted him from his studies—he graduated last in his class. But throughout his life Pierce compensated for his intellectual shortcomings with his engaging personality. He attracted patrons who eventually assisted his way to the White House. He studied law at a college in Northampton, Massachusetts, then apprenticed under that state’s Governor Levi Woodbury before returning to New Hampshire and stints under judges Samuel Howe and Edmund Parker. In 1827 he passed the bar and began practicing law in Concord, New Hampshire. The following year he won a seat as a Democrat in the state assembly’s lower house, where he was elected speaker in 1832. He moved on to national politics, serving in the House of Representatives from 1833 to 1837 and the Senate from 1837 to 1842. He then abruptly cut short his promising political career to appease his wife, who hated Washington. During the Mexican War, he pulled political strings in the Democratic Party first to be appointed a colonel, then a brigadier general. He served under Gen. Winfield Scott. With all this behind him, Pierce appeared to be an excellent nominee for the presidency.