“It is a great mistake,” warned John Calhoun in 1850, “to suppose that disunion can be effected by a single blow. The cords which bind these States together in one common Union are far too numerous and powerful for that. Disunion must be the work of time. It is only through a long process…that the cords can be snapped until the whole fabric falls asunder. Already the agitation of the slavery question has snapped some of the most important.” If these common cords continue to rupture, he predicted, “nothing will be left to hold the States together except force.”
The spiritual cords of union—the great religious denominations—had already been fractured along sectional lines. The national political parties, the political cords of union, would be next, splintered in the struggle between those who wished to extend slavery and those who resisted its expansion. Early in the decade the national Whig Party, hopelessly divided on slavery, would begin to diminish and then disappear as a national force. The national Democratic Party, beset by defections from Free Soil Democrats, would steadily lose ground, fragmenting beyond repair by the end of the decade.
The ties that bound the Union were not simply institutions but a less tangible sense of nationhood—shared pride in the achievements of the reolutionary generation, a sense of mutual interests and common aspirations for the future. The chronicle of the 1850s is, at bottom, a narrative of the increasing strain placed upon these cords, their gradual fraying, and their final rupture. Abraham Lincoln would correctly prophesy that a house divided against itself could not stand. By the end of the decade, as Calhoun had warned, only force would be left to sustain the Union.
Was this outcome inevitable? It is not a question that can be answered in the abstract. We must begin with the historical realities and ask if the same actors with the same convictions, emotions, and passions could have behaved differently. Possibly, but all we can know for certain is that they felt what they felt, believed as they believed, and did as they would do. And so they moved the country inexorably toward Civil War.
AS THE 31ST CONGRESS OPENED, the rancorous discord boiled to the surface. All eyes turned to the seventy-three-year-old Henry Clay, who, Lincoln later said, was “regarded by all, as the man for a crisis.” Henry Clay had saved the Union once before. Now, thirty years after the Missouri Compromise, the Congress and nation looked to him once again. Already Clay suffered from the tuberculosis that would take his life two years later. He could not even manage the stairs leading up to the Senate chamber. Nonetheless, when he took the floor to introduce the cluster of resolutions that would become known as the Compromise of 1850, he mustered, the New York Tribune marveled, “the spirit and the fire of youth.”
He began by admitting he had never been “so anxious” facing his colleagues, for he believed the country stood “at the edge of the precipice.” He beseeched his colleagues to halt “before the fearful and disastrous leap is taken in the yawning abyss below, which will inevitably lead to certain and irretrievable destruction.” He prophesied that dissolution would bring a war “so furious, so bloody, so implacable and so exterminating” that it would be marked forever in the pages of history. To avoid catastrophe, a compromise must be reached.
His first resolution called for admitting the state of California immediately, leaving the decision regarding the status of slavery within its borders to California’s new state legislature. As it was widely known that a majority of Californians wished to prohibit slavery entirely, this resolution favored the North. He then proposed dividing the remainder of the Mexican accession into two territories, New Mexico and Utah, with no restrictions on slavery—a provision that favored the South. He called for an end to the slave trade within the boundaries of the national capital, but called on Congress to strengthen the old Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 to facilitate the recapture of runaway slaves. Fugitives would be denied a jury trial, commissioners would adjudicate claims, and federal marshals would be empowered to draft citizens to hunt down escapees.
Clay recognized that the compromise resolutions demanded far greater concessions from the North than he had asked from the slave states, but he appealed to the North to sustain the Union. Northern objections to slavery were based on ideology and sentiment, rather than on the Southern concerns with property, social intercourse, habit, safety, and life itself. The North had nothing tangible to lose. Finally, he implored God that “if the direful and sad event of the dissolution of the Union shall happen, I may not survive to behold the sad and heart-rending spectacle.” This prayer was answered. He died two years later, nearly a decade before the Civil War began.
Frances Seward was in the overcrowded gallery on February 5, 1850, when Henry Clay rose from his desk to speak. She had come to Washington to help her husband get settled in a spacious three-story brick house on the north side of F Street. “He is a charming orator,” Frances confessed to her sister. “I have never heard but one more impressive speaker—and that is our Henry (don’t say this to anybody).” But Clay was mistaken, she claimed, if he believed the wound between North and South could be sutured by his persuasive charm. Though he might make “doughfaces out of half the Congress,” his arguments had not convinced her. Most upsetting was Clay’s claim that “Northern men were only activated by policy and party spirits. Now if Henry Clay has lived to be 70 years old and still thinks slavery is opposed only from such motives I can only say he knows much less of human nature than I supposed.”
Four weeks later, the galleries were once again filled to hear South Carolina’s John Calhoun speak. Although unsteady in his walk and enveloped in flannels to ward off the chill of pneumonia that had plagued him all winter, the sixty-seven-year-old arch defender of states’ rights appeared in the Senate with the text of the speech he intended to deliver. He rose with great difficulty from his chair and then, recognizing that he was too weak to speak, handed his remarks to his friend Senator James Mason of Virginia to read.
The speech was an uncompromising diatribe against the North. Calhoun warned that secession was the sole option unless the North conceded the Southern right to bring slavery into every section of the new territories, stopped agitating the slave question, and consented to a constitutional provision restoring the balance of power between the two regions. Making much the same argument he had utilized in the early debates surrounding the Wilmot Proviso, he warned that additional free states would tilt the power in the Senate, as well as in the House of Representatives, and destroy “the equilibrium between the two sections in the Government, as it stood when the constitution was ratified.” This final address to the Senate concluded, Calhoun retired to his boardinghouse, where he would die before the month was out.
Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, the third of the “great triumvirate”(as Clay, Calhoun, and Webster were called), was scheduled to speak on the 7th of March. The Senate chamber was “crammed” with more men and women, a Washington newspaper reported, than on any previous occasion. Anticipation soared with the rumor that Webster had decided, against the fervent hopes of his overwhelmingly antislavery constituents, to support Clay’s Southern-leaning compromise. Frances Seward was watching when the senator rose.
“I wish to speak to-day, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a northern man, but as an American,” Webster began. “I speak to-day for the preservation of the Union. ‘Hear me for my cause.’” He proceeded to stun many in the North by castigating abolitionists, vowing never to support the Wilmot Proviso, and coming out in favor of every one of Clay’s resolutions—including the provision to strengthen the hateful Fugitive Slave Law. Many in New England found Webster’s new stand particularly abhorrent. “Mr Webster has deliberately taken out his name from all the files of honour,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. “He has undone all that he spent his years in doing.”
Frances found the speech greatly disappointing. The word “compromise,” she told her sister, “is becoming hateful to me.” Acknowledging that Webster was “a forcible speaker,” particularly when he extolled the Union, she found him “muc
h less eloquent than Henry Clay because his heart is decidedly colder—people must have feeling themselves to touch others.” Despite such criticisms, the speech won nationwide approval from moderates who desperately wanted a peaceful settlement of the situation. A few antislavery Whigs expressed a fear that Seward might hesitate when the time came to deliver his own speech, scheduled three days later. “How little they know his nature,” Frances wrote. “Every concession of Mr. Webster to Southern principles only makes Henry advocate more strongly the cause which he thinks just.”
Frances was right. Antislavery advocates had no need to worry about her husband. For weeks, Seward had been working hard on his maiden address to the Senate, delivered on March 11, 1850. He had talked at length with Weed and rehearsed various drafts before Frances. The Capitol of the 1850s offered no private office space, so Seward wrote at home, rising early in the morning and working long past the midnight hour.
As he began his Senate oration, Seward spoke somewhat hesitantly. Reading from his manuscript without dramatic gestures, he quoted Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and the ancient philosophers in a voice so low that it seemed he was talking to himself rather than addressing the chamber and the galleries. His words were so powerful, however, that Webster was riveted; while John Calhoun, attending one of his final sessions in the chamber, was “restless at first” but “soon sat still.”
Seward began by maintaining flatly that he was opposed to compromise, “in any and all the forms in which it has been proposed.” He refused to strengthen the Fugitive Slave Law. “We are not slaveholders. We cannot…be either true Christians or real freemen,” he continued, “if we impose on another a chain that we defy all human power to fasten on ourselves.” He declared that a ban on the slave trade in the District was insufficient: slavery itself must be abolished in the capital. Finally, staunchly affirming the Wilmot Proviso, he refused to accept the introduction of slavery anywhere in the new territories.
As he moved into the second hour of his speech, his conviction gave him ease and confidence. Step by step, he laid the foundation for the “higher law” doctrine that would be forever associated with his name. Not only did the Constitution bind the American people to goals incompatible with slavery, he asserted, “but there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purposes. The territory is a part…of the common heritage of mankind, bestowed upon them by the Creator of the universe. We are his stewards.”
With this single speech, his first national address, Seward became the principal antislavery voice in the Senate. Tens of thousands of copies of the speech were printed and distributed throughout the North. The New York Tribune predicted that it would awaken the nation, that his words would “live longer, be read with a more hearty admiration, and exert a more potential and pervading influence on the National mind and character than any other speech of the Session.”
ARRIVING ON THE NATIONAL SCENE at this same dramatic moment, Chase expected to take a leading role in the fight. He, too, labored over his speech for weeks, poring through old statute books and exchanging ideas with fellow crusader Charles Sumner. The bond between Chase and Sumner would continue to grow through the years, providing both men with emotional support in the face of the condemnation they suffered due to their strong antislavery views. “I find no man so congenial to me as yourself,” Chase confided in Sumner. For his part, Sumner considered Chase “a tower of strength” whose election to the Senate would “confirm the irresolute, quicken the indolent and confound the trimmers.”
“I cannot disguise the deep interest with which I watch your movements,” Sumner wrote Chase shortly before he was to give his speech. “I count confidently upon an exposition of our cause which will toll throughout the country.” When Chase took the floor on March 26, for the first part of his five-hour address, however, Seward had already delivered the celebrated address that outlined most of the positions Chase intended to take and had instantly made the fiery New Yorker the foremost national voice among the antislavery forces.
Nor did Chase possess Seward’s compelling speaking style. If, over the years, constant practice had improved his range and delivery, he was unable to eradicate the slight lisp that remained from his boyhood days. Although his arguments were thoughtful and well reasoned, the chamber emptied long before he finished speaking. Writing home, he admitted great disappointment with the result, which was “infinitely below my own standards…and fell below those of my friends who expected much.”
“You know I am not a rousing speaker at best,” he conceded in a letter to a friend. He wanted it understood, however, that the speech was delivered “under very great disadvantages”: the first chapter of the celebrated Benton-Foote confrontation, “which so engaged the attention of everybody,” occurred on the very same day, so that “I had hardly any chance of attention, and in fact, received not much.”
Chase was referring to a dramatic argument that broke out on the Senate floor between Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri and Senator Henry Foote of Mississippi. Benton had called Foote a coward, leading Foote to recall an earlier histrionic incident when Benton himself had behaved in cowardly fashion. In response to this personal attack, Benton rose from his chair and rushed forward menacingly. Foote retreated behind a desk and then drew and cocked a pistol. “I disdain to carry arms!” Benton shouted. “Let him fire!…Stand out of the way, and let the assassin fire!” The melodrama was finally brought to a peaceful close when Foote was persuaded to hand over his pistol to a fellow senator and Benton returned to his chair.
Chase’s disappointment over his failure was compounded by Sumner’s praise for Seward’s compelling maiden effort, which, Sumner told Chase, had filled him with gratitude. “Seward is with us,” Sumner exulted. “You mistake when you say ‘Seward is with us,’” Chase replied, with a heat not unmixed with resentment. While Seward “holds many of our Anti Slavery opinions,” he continued, his loyalty to the Whig Party made him untrustworthy. “I have never been able to establish much sympathy between us,” he explained in a follow-up letter. “He is too much of a politician for me.”
Over the course of the previous decade, Seward and Chase had maintained a dialogue on the most effective methods to promote the antislavery cause. Despite their divergent views on whether or not to join a third party, Chase had always held Seward in the highest esteem and looked forward to working with him on antislavery issues in the Senate.
The alteration in his attitude was likely spurred by jealousy, an emotion the introspective Chase begrudged in others yet could never subdue in himself. “I made this resolution today,” he had confided in his diary when he was twenty-three years old. “I will try to excel in all things yet if I am excelled, without fault of mine, I will not be mortified. I will not withhold from any one the praise which I think his due; nor will I allow myself to envy another’s praise or to feel jealousy when I hear him praised. May God help me to keep it.” His best intentions, however, could not assuage the invidious envy that possessed him at the realization that, given an identical opportunity, Seward had emerged the acclaimed leader of the antislavery forces. A rift developed between the two men that would last long into the Lincoln administration, with far-reaching consequences for the country.
Even as Seward basked in the applause of the antislavery community, however, he found himself excoriated in both Southern editorials and conservative papers throughout the North. “Senator Seward is against all compromise,” the New York Herald observed, “so are the negroes of New York…. [His] views are those of the extreme fanatics of the North, looking forward to the utter destruction of the institutions of the South.” Seward was initially untroubled by such criticism from expected sources and remained convinced he had “spoken words that will tell when I am dead.” Frances had never been prouder of her husband. When she looked at him, she told her sister, she felt almost overwhelmed by her love and respect for him.
Such elation was s
oon tempered by a disquieting letter from Weed, who feared that Seward had overreached when enunciating a “higher law” than the Constitution. Though Weed had seen earlier versions, he had not read the final draft. “Your speech…sent me to bed with a heavy heart,” Weed confessed to Seward. “A restless night and an anxious day have not relieved my apprehensions.” Weed’s criticism distressed Seward, who recognized that his mentor’s political instincts were usually better than his own. Indeed, the implications of Weed’s critical letter left Seward sunk in “despondency…covered with sorrow and shame,” apprehensive that he had jeopardized not only his own career but that of his mentor as well.
Seward’s status was further shaken when President Zachary Taylor, who had admitted both Weed and Seward to his inner circle, developed a fatal gastronomical illness after attending Fourth of July festivities on the grounds of the unfinished Washington Monument. Taylor’s sudden death brought Seward’s conservative rival, Millard Fillmore, into the presidency. With Fillmore in the White House, the antislavery contingent had no prospect of stopping the Compromise. Under the skillful leadership of Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, Clay’s omnibus bill was broken up into a series of separate pieces of legislation, which passed in both the House and Senate in September.