America Aflame Read online

  CHAPTER 3

  REVOLUTIONS

  THE QUICK VICTORY IN THE MEXICAN WAR confirmed Americans’ view that they were unique in the world; that despite lurking dangers they had escaped history and were embarked on an inexorable progression to grace. Along the way, they would inspire other peoples by their example of Christian democracy. When Europe exploded in a series of popular uprisings beginning in February 1848, Americans took heart. Here was a sign of the universality of America’s experiment, confirmation that the Revolutionary legacy remained secure.1

  Americans rejoiced at the wonderful news from Paris. The French had forced Louis Philippe from the throne and had declared the Second Republic. Within a month, revolts against authoritarian regimes erupted all over the Continent. On March 3, the great Hungarian patriot Lajos Kossuth stood outside the Diet in Budapest and called for a representative government; two weeks later, revolution engulfed Vienna and Berlin, then the Papal States, including Milan and Venice. By spring, the revolutionary tide had swept the Hapsburg emperor from his throne and Pope Pius IX from the Vatican. The flames of representative government and nationalism had ignited all of Europe.

  The uprisings caught the ruling governments off guard, and initially they appeared to accede to the citizens’ demands for representative assemblies. Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia promised a liberal constitution and allowed the election of a Prussian legislature, while an all-German parliament convened in Frankfurt. With the tacit support of the Prussian monarch, republican newspapers appeared throughout the German states.

  The all-German parliament had such strong representation from the professoriate that locals called it the Gelehrtenparlament (parliament of scholars). As expected with such a composition, the body deliberated interminably and inconclusively from May to October 1848, giving the Prussian monarchy an opportunity to regain its balance and, ultimately, its power. Divisions between the moderate and more radical elements of the movement weakened the insurgency. By November 1848, Friedrich Wilhelm IV and his wealthy Prussian supporters, including future chancellor Otto von Bismarck, had sufficient military support to dissolve the Prussian legislature, thus ending the March Revolution.

  By then, the forces of reaction had snuffed out the fires of freedom across Europe. In July 1848, Austrian troops overwhelmed Milan and the Italian Piedmont, restoring the pope to the Vatican and sending the Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi into exile on Staten Island, New York, where he eked out a living as a candlemaker. The revolution in Paris had already collapsed. The coalition of workers and middle-class citizens that had toppled the monarchy split apart violently as the new bourgeois government, supported by the army, clashed with workers in the streets of Paris in June. The bloody “June Days” left more than fifteen hundred people killed in fighting, three thousand executed, and twelve thousand arrested. The disorder and violence sickened a good deal of France, and another Napoleon, Louis in this case, rode into Paris to rescue the country for the reactionaries.

  Initially, the European revolutions galvanized American public opinion. Occurring at the end of America’s successful war against an authoritarian Catholic regime, democratic movements across Europe seemed to vindicate the American experiment as an exportable model for all mankind. At a time when the slavery debate and persistent sectarian strife threatened that experiment, the European uprisings offered the hope that the good of self-government would overcome the evil of despotism and bigotry. It was a perspective on the future less grounded in history than in the faith that America had escaped history.

  News that French revolutionaries had declared the Second Republic produced a rare consensus in a divided Congress, which voted overwhelmingly to “congratulate” the French people on their new government. A few weeks later, President Polk officially recognized the new French republic. Walt Whitman expressed the excitement coursing through the streets of New York: “One’s blood races and grows hot within him the more he learns or thinks of this news from the continent of Europe!” The revolutions accomplished what the American political process could not: uniting both North and South in the common sentiment that the uprisings validated America’s experiment. The Richmond Enquirer proclaimed, “American principles are triumphant! What a sublime spectacle does Europe present to the American patriot!” The New York Tribune noted portentously that the outbreak of the French uprising began on George Washington’s birthday, and, carrying the democratic numerology further, the Baptist Banner of Louisville rejoiced that Italian nationalists had driven out Pope Pius IX on the anniversary of American independence. When Kossuth toured the United States to raise money and weapons for his cause, admirers created a huge traffic jam in Manhattan impounding his carriage for more than two hours and literally tearing the clothes off his back, so eager were they to see and touch the embodiment of American democratic principles in Europe.2

  As the revolutionaries’ success waned and violence overtook reform, public opinion in the United States shifted. The class divisions reflected in the differing revolutionary programs between moderates (mostly middle-class) and socialists (mostly working-class) concerned Americans who were at the beginning of a significant urban and industrial revolution of their own. Many Americans continued to believe that the interests of capital and labor were identical, that with education and hard work, workers could move up the social ladder. The European revolutions exposed both the inherent antagonism between capital and labor and the violent potential of that animosity. The failure of the revolutions also highlighted for many Americans the precious, precarious, and unique nature of their own democratic experiment.

  By December 1848, the failure of the revolutionary movements, especially in France and the German states, became evident. President Polk, in his annual message to Congress, ruminated about the differences between America and Europe: “While the people of other countries struggle to establish free institutions under which man may govern himself, we are in actual enjoyment of them—a rich inheritance from our fathers.”3

  In accounting for the disappointing European revolutions, some Americans argued that the despotic history of the continent inhibited the growth of democratic institutions. The long-standing reigns of authoritarian church and state regimes provoked radical responses splitting the liberal opposition and undermining the initial good intentions of the revolutions. As historian George Bancroft explained in a volume of his History of the United States published in 1852, unlike in Europe, “In America, the influences of the time were molded by the creative force of reason, sentiment and nature. Its political edifice rose in lovely proportions, as if to melodies of the lyre.… The American Revolution … was most radical in its character, yet achieved with such benign tranquility, that even conservatism hesitated to censure.”4

  Americans came to understand that theirs was a rare and lonely cause, that the flame of freedom could not burn in the stone-cold traditions of despotic Europe. The Mexican War had demonstrated the benefits of a proselytizing democracy. But one example was not enough. In the era of manifest destiny a more active role in spreading democratic institutions, not only over a continent but also around the world, would fulfill God’s plan for America. The collapse of the popular movements in Europe and the ensuing reactionary resurgence also underscored the fragility of democratic institutions, how easily a national consensus could shatter from within. The unfortunate turn in Europe remained fresh in the minds of Americans as they began to grapple with a new crisis of their own.

  California, its population swelled by gold rushers, clamored for statehood. The admission of California to the Union would push the number of free states to sixteen, while the slave state total remained at fifteen. Two decades earlier, southerners had slipped into the minority in the House of Representatives. They were about to lose the Senate. With two national parties interested in maintaining party discipline, perhaps political craftsmanship could overcome sectional tension. But Congress could not even organize itself to elect a Speaker, select committee chairs, and rat
ify basic rules, such was the contention in the chamber. Henry Clay stepped forward to mend the rent national unity. He had done so a generation earlier during the Missouri crisis, and he had dedicated his political life to promoting the Union above sectionalism.

  It was a different country Clay sought to bring together as debate opened on the California petition in January 1850. A democratic revolution had occurred in the intervening thirty years. As property qualifications for the franchise dropped away, as new immigrants entered the political process, as political campaigns took on aspects of revivals, military reviews, and carnival hi-jinks, the electoral process exploded. A proliferation of print media including the penny press, magazines, and party newspapers jostled for readers, adding to the cacophony.

  These changes were not contemplated by the Founding Fathers, who operated in a more exclusive and sedate environment. The California debate would bring together for the last time the great political lights of an earlier generation, Clay himself, Daniel Webster, the Whig senator from Massachusetts, and the ever-brilliant Calhoun. Within two years, they would all be dead, and the new men put into power by the new electorate would prove inadequate to saving the country.

  For southerners, the issue of California statehood would portend their future in a nation increasingly obsessed with economic development and opening new territories to migration and enterprise. As a soon-to-be permanent minority in Congress, they wondered about appropriations, appointments, the use of the mails, and, above all, the future of their heavy investment in land and slaves.

  Southerners wanted to participate in the national mission equally. It was irrelevant that slavery would not flourish in the arid Southwest, or that the laborers and farmers streaming westward from the East and Midwest would overwhelm any migration by slaveholders. Southerners were just as good as any other Americans, and they wanted to compete on an equal basis with everyone else. They were realistic enough to understand the long odds of extending slavery to some areas of the Mexican Cession. But it was the chance they were after, not the guarantee of success, at least not yet. Throughout the increasingly acrimonious debates of the 1850s, this was at the core of the South’s concerns: to be treated equally in a confederation of equals.

  Henry Clay offered a compromise bundling together a number of related issues hoping to banish slavery once and for all as a political issue. He proposed that Congress ratify the decision of California citizens to enter the Union as a free state as well as any future decisions made by residents of the other portions of the Mexican Cession, the Utah and New Mexico territories. Applying the popular sovereignty doctrine at the point of statehood, Clay believed, had the virtue of keeping the federal government out of the territories and leaving important constitutional decisions to the residents on the ground.5

  In all likelihood, Clay’s proposal would also keep slavery out of the Mexican Cession and deepen the South’s minority status in the federal government. To secure the support of southern lawmakers on the territorial issue, Clay offered to strengthen the constitutional provision that stated that a person “held to Service or Labor in one state … escaping into another … shall be delivered upon Claim of the party to whom such Service or Labor may be due” (Article IV, Section 2) with a strong fugitive slave law.

  Rounding out his compromise package, Clay would resolve a bitter border dispute between the state of Texas and New Mexico Territory to the latter’s benefit. As compensation, the federal government would assume Texas’s public debt. Clay next dealt with an issue that troubled many members of Congress, the presence of the slave trade in the District of Columbia. He proposed ending the slave trade outright, but also reaffirmed the right of slavery to exist as an institution in the District of Columbia unless the residents desired otherwise.

  Clay’s package had the benefit of addressing at one go several difficult issues related to the slavery question, each one of which could paralyze Congress. It also had the virtue of ignoring the Wilmot Proviso, which had become anathema to the South and destructive of party discipline. At the same time, the proposal probably guaranteed three additional free-soil states in California, New Mexico, and Utah. Clay’s compromise ensured Wilmot’s intentions without involving Congress in the territorial question.

  The compromise faced an uphill battle. President Taylor indicated that he expected Congress to admit California and New Mexico as free states. Period. He would not sign a fugitive slave bill, nor would he entertain any monetary or border claims from Texas. If Texas resisted New Mexico’s interpretation of where the appropriate border lay, he vowed, he would send in troops and lead them himself if necessary to force the Lone Star State’s compliance. This was not the way southerners expected a slaveholding president to act.

  Meanwhile, a great debate unfolded in the Senate. Since the late 1820s, Calhoun had attempted and failed to rally southern forces into a regional coalition that would rise above party. Fearing the consequences of the South’s decreasing presence in Congress, and pessimistic about mankind’s ability to transcend self-interest for the good of the whole, Calhoun devised a governance plan to address the problem of protecting minority rights in a system where the majority prevailed. He called it a “concurrent majority,” where the majority of every important group (or section of the country) would need to pass legislation before it became law. Each group would, in effect, have a veto. In practice, the system might lead to gridlock. But if, as Calhoun believed, the role of government was to protect against not only outside threats but also enemies within, a mechanism to blunt the power of the majority seemed well worth an experiment.

  The great interest Calhoun sought to protect from an aggressive majority was, of course, slavery. The battle over the extension of slavery into the territories had begun during the Missouri debates thirty years earlier. In Calhoun’s political lifetime, the institution had come under siege not only from fellow lawmakers but also from the press and the pulpit. The difficulty of organizing a Congress where neither Whigs nor Democrats comprised a majority of lawmakers, and Free Soilers held the balance, brought the enemy closer to power. He understood that slavery stood at the heart of southern society, and that without a mechanism to protect it for all time, the Union’s days were numbered. “I fix its probable [breakup] within twelve years or three presidential terms.… The probability is it will explode in a presidential election.”6

  On March 4, 1850, an ailing Calhoun entered the Senate chamber, helped to his chair by a colleague. He slumped down in his seat, a deathly pallor over his face, his hair hanging like wild strings from a head struggling to remain aloft. Too weak to deliver his speech, he passed it on to his South Carolina colleague, Andrew P. Butler, who, due to poor eyesight, handed it to Virginia’s James M. Mason, who read Calhoun’s words to a hushed chamber and packed gallery. Calhoun dismissed California statehood and the retrieval of runaway slaves as peripheral to the main issue of the North’s permanent majority and its threat to the South from an inevitable abuse of power. He denied that he advocated disunion; in fact, quite the opposite. He was offering a way to save the Union from destruction.7

  Not all southerners shared Calhoun’s perspective on their future in the Union. They recoiled from the threats of secession and disunion attributed to Calhoun and his allies. The New Orleans Bee declared that the evils of the proviso were “a thousandfold more endurable” than the “unnumbered” woes of disunion. Others simply dismissed Calhoun as someone who had outlived his time. North Carolina’s Whig senator George E. Badger thought that Calhoun “on anything concerning niggers [was] absolutely deranged.” Badger for one would not even contemplate leaving the Union for the “privilege of carrying slaves to California or keeping up private jails for slave dealers” in the District of Columbia. The Union still represented an indelible bond of common destiny for many southerners.8

  Daniel Webster took the Senate stage next. In declining health, but still a vigorous orator, the Whig senator from Massachusetts had stood down disunionists before. Ther
e was scarcely a person in the crammed galleries of the Senate chamber who did not recall his memorable speech during the Nullification Crisis of 1830: “When my eyes shall be turned to behold, for the last time, the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union.… Let their last feeble and lingering glance, rather, behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced.… Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”9

  This article of faith that the Union and liberty could not exist apart from each other propelled Daniel Webster to support Henry Clay’s compromise, fugitive slave bill included. While he acknowledged that many of his constituents viewed human bondage as a sin, he also recognized that many in the South saw slavery as a benevolent institution sanctioned by the Bible. In any case, there was no good way southerners could “relieve themselves from this relation” without descending into economic ruin and social chaos, a situation that would eventually threaten all Americans. The best solution, he argued, lay in Clay’s compromise: allow the people of the territory to solve the issue of slavery for themselves. Besides, it was unlikely that the new territories, by virtue of geography, climate, and soil, could support slavery.