Ten

THE LAST TRUCE

1.

Some were nevertheless persuaded, or at least made an effort to persuade themselves. Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs went to the president to tell him that Clay’s proposals were the only alternative to disunion. Daniel Webster wrote to a worried friend that “there will be no disunion, or disruption. Things will cool off. California will come in. New Mexico will be postponed. No bones will be broken—& in a month, all this will be more apparent.”

The senior senator from South Carolina, however, took a darker view. Too ill to attend Clay’s two-day oration, Calhoun had doubtless read it, or at least heard it summarized. It did not dissuade him from his growing conviction that North and South could never be reconciled. One of Calhoun’s close associates, referring to a recent essay by Henry Ward Beecher arguing that “there are two incompatible and mutually destructive principles wrought together in the government of this land,” reported Calhoun’s clipped response. “Mr. Clay,” he said, “should read that article.”

In the previous year, Herman Melville, following political developments from his home in western Massachusetts, had published an allegorical novel, Mardi, and a Voyage Thither, in which there appears a character modeled on Calhoun. Referring to the nullification dispute of twenty years earlier, Melville called this character Nulli—a “cadaverous, ghost-like man; with a low ridge of forehead; hair, steel-gray, and wondrous eyes” that burned with fierce intelligence despite his evident decline toward death. It was a timely portrait. When, a few minutes past noon on March 4, 1850, Calhoun entered the Senate chamber, everyone could see that he was dying.

Supported by South Carolinian James Hamilton, he walked slowly to his desk, from which he thanked the Senate for its courtesy in allowing a colleague to read his remarks. He had hoped that his fellow Carolinian Andrew Butler would be the one to read the speech, but Butler, pleading poor vision, asked the sponsor of the fugitive slave bill, James Mason (whom Calhoun’s friend Joseph Scoville later described as a “small potato” unfit for the task), to do it. As Mason rose, Calhoun sank into his seat to listen to his own words.

As if tracking his descent, Melville undertook another portrait of Calhoun that spring in a new novel, Moby-Dick, about a whale ship commanded by a “monomaniac” captain who looks “like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them.”*

There was, indeed, little left of Calhoun, at least in body. Among those who saw him from the gallery on the Senate floor was the future Civil War general William T. Sherman, who judged that “he was evidently approaching his end, for he was pale and feeble in the extreme.” But, like Clay, Calhoun had not entirely lost his gift for political theater. As a young man, he had combed his hair straight up to make himself seem even taller than his six feet two inches. Now, in an attempt to hide his emaciation, he wrapped himself in a long bulky cloak.

Some who knew him reported that he had once shared Jefferson’s view of slavery as a temporary evil that would someday pass away. “Mr. Calhoun, in his earlier days,” according to the legal scholar Francis Lieber, a contemporary who taught at the University of South Carolina before moving to Columbia College in New York, “called slavery a scaffolding erected to rear the mansion of civilization, which must be taken down when the fabric is finished.” But by mid-century, there was no one in the country more zealous for slavery than Calhoun.

John C. Calhoun c. 1849

Speaking to the Senate in 1837, he had called slavery a “positive good”—a phrase that became permanently attached to the burgeoning view among the slaveholding classes that the founding fathers had been wrong to proclaim human equality as a norm or aspiration. Calhoun was convinced that “there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not . . . live on the labor of the other.” He believed that those in the bottom rank are better off assigned by law to dependency on their betters than set loose to fend for themselves. “There is, and always has been . . . a conflict between labor and capital,” but the southern form of slavery “exempts us from the disorders and dangers resulting from this conflict.” A stable society requires a docile underclass, and only slavery, if imperfectly, delivers it.

This was the view that became known as the “mud-sill” theory, so named by Calhoun’s disciple James Hammond in an infamous speech delivered to the U.S. Senate not long before the Civil War:

In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand.

Hammond was incalculably smug and vulgar by comparison to his mentor. He was a sexual predator whose abuse of young girls, despite his avid preference for the white race in all other matters, did not stop at the color line. Preying not only on his own teenage nieces but on at least one of his female slaves as well as her twelve-year-old daughter, he was shameless. When his wife asked him to sell his two slave mistresses, he declined on the grounds that “I am averse” to sending them away, because to do so would “involve injustice and cruelty to others.”

In temperament, personal behavior, and force of intellect, there was a world of difference between Hammond and Calhoun. But Calhoun, too, extolled slavery as a boon not only for slave owners but for working whites, whether or not they owned slaves. Slavery, he believed, insulated them from the degradation suffered by wage laborers at the bottom rung of “free” society, who were treated as cogs in the industrial machine—to be thrown away and replaced when they wore out. The existence of a permanent black underclass—well cared for, in Calhoun’s view, by slave masters for reasons of both benevolence and self-interest—made possible a stable, hierarchical society in which poor whites enjoyed what one historian calls “caste pride” by comparison to the dependent laborers below them.

There was nothing eccentric about these ideas. By the early 1850s, especially in the Deep South, it had become commonplace to assert that “no social state, without slavery as its basis, can permanently maintain a republican form of government.” Nor was it a new idea. It had been identified years before by a perceptive Englishman, the diplomat Sir Augustus John Foster, as the key to understanding the American South, where white liberty was thought to depend on black slavery. “Virginians,” Foster wrote in 1812, “can profess an unbounded love of liberty and of democracy in consequence of the mass of the people, who in other countries might become mobs, being there nearly altogether composed of their own Negro slaves.” Calhoun concurred and approved.

But he also blended the slaveholder’s argument from self-interest with a professed concern for the welfare of the slaves. In 1844, writing to the British foreign minister, Lord Pakenham, he reported that blacks in the North suffered from much higher rates of insanity (today it would be called depression) than did slaves in the South. Without the sheltering embrace of their masters, blacks were helpless when left to the mercy of white predators in the North, whether those preying on them were wage laborers who hated them for working for a pittance, or captains of industry who would enslave them in all but name.

Calhoun was no stranger to the North. Under the tutelage of Jonathan Edwards’s grandson Timothy Dwight he had been educated at Yale, from which he went on to Tapping Reeve’s renowned School of Law in Litchfield, Connecticut. In those New England years, he acquired—or perhaps had always possessed—an almost Calvinistic view of history. Human events were driven by ineluctable forces, while human beings were inclined by nature to despoil the rights of others and were constrained only by self-interest. Slavery, to his mind, mitigated these hard facts. It was a system by which the high and the low could live in harmony sustained by mutual dependency.

Calhoun thought like a theological casuist—the kind of philosopher who judges particular cases of behavior not by their practical consequences but by whether they accord with some grand theory or doctrine. He believed, for example, in the fundamental right of constituents to petition their representatives in Congress. Yet he supported the gag rule on the grounds that the refusal by Congress to debate the petitions did not curtail the right of citizens to submit them. He was appalled by abolitionists, but he nevertheless refused to support legislation prohibiting the federal government from delivering abolitionist pamphlets through the U.S. Postal Service. To give the federal government the power of censorship, he believed, would be to give it “the most odious and dangerous” power “that can be conceived.” Yet he had no problem with alternative congressional legislation (never passed) that would have required the post office to observe state laws against distributing abolitionist publications in states where such laws were in force. He was nothing if not a resourceful thinker.

For Calhoun, a well-ordered society was one that encouraged willing acquiescence from the ruled and responsible authority from the rulers—a standard from which he seems rarely to have departed in his personal conduct toward his own slaves. “I never heard of his using the lash,” recalled one of his nieces, “even a slap or any species of violence,” though she seems to have forgotten at least one occasion when he ordered a runaway lashed upon being caught away from his plantation. Still, seeing himself “in the double capacity of master and guardian,” he did not fit the mold of the plantation master fanned by day on the veranda and prowling the slave quarters by night. His chilly rectitude kept him aloof from the bons vivants of his own caste even in the queen city of his own state, where “the place of a Charleston gentleman was considered to be under the table”—the last place where Calhoun was likely to be found.

Although he died more than ten years before the Confederacy was born, he became, and remains, its most detested symbol. His social and racial ideas are anathema today,* but in his own time his candor earned him respect from some who reviled his views yet saw in them a reverse reflection of their own conviction that slavery was a sin. Even John Quincy Adams, in the 1820s, judged him a man “of fair and candid mind, of honorable principles, enlarged philosophical views,” and “ardent patriotism.” Few doubted his exceptional intellect, evident in his luminous “eyes, bright as coals, [which] move in jumps, as if he thought in electric leaps from one idea to another.”

In its annual report for 1849, the Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society acknowledged Calhoun as “the very incarnation of the Slaveholding idea. He stands for an idea as no other statesman at Washington does. . . . He will leave his stamp upon his age as no other public man of his day will do. It will be a ‘bad eminence,’ indeed, that history will assign him, but it will be a conspicuous and enduring one.” “Bad eminence” was a reference to the throne from which Milton’s Satan—a figure both evil and charismatic—addressed his own parliament of fellow demons in Paradise Lost. At the 1849 meeting of the Anti-slavery Society Garrison himself introduced a resolution commending Calhoun as

incomparably to be preferred to those Northern time-servers and dough-faces, who professedly look upon Slavery with abhorrence, and yet are found ever ready to compromise the sacred principles of liberty, to betray the rights of the people of the North, and on bended knee to worship the Slave power of the South.

The resolution was unanimously approved.

The following year the society praised him again at the expense of “such men as Mr. Clay and Mr. Benton, at the South, and of their admirers at the North,” who bobbed and ducked, unwilling to stand firm one way or the other on the slavery question—unlike the “marked, decided, understandable, unmistakeable . . . Mr. Calhoun,” who does not shrink from defending “an actual, tangible Idea, however wicked it may be . . . an Idea that stands up by itself, in its own natural proportions, instead of being razeed down to regulation dimensions.”*

By contrast to the weasel compromisers, Calhoun struck his adversaries as a mirror image of themselves—someone who shared with them an uncompromising vision of human affairs in which ideas “absolutely right and absolutely wrong” were locked in epic struggle. “Even the sight of Satan himself,” the American Anti-slavery Society report continued, “would be a welcome refreshment in the Limbo of Vanity, or Paradise of Fools,” where most of his congressional colleagues could be found. “Even the Idea of the Absolute Excellence of Slavery though it may be much worse, is much less disgusting than the abortive monstrosities which try to unite theoretical abhorrence of Slavery with a daily practical support of it. It is for this reason that we like to see Mr. Calhoun stand up before the Nation, and boldly give utterance to the Idea with which he is possessed.”

By early March, his health broken, Calhoun could not stand up for long, but the speech read by Mason did indeed give bold utterance to “the Idea with which he is possessed.” Once again he defended slavery and all but said that due to the insufferable self-righteousness of the North the Republic was beyond saving. Northern animosity toward the “social organization” of the South had become fatal to the nation. Thinking of Clay’s encomiums to the Union, and doubtless of his own dire condition, he told his colleagues that the Union “cannot . . . be saved by eulogies on the Union, however splendid or numerous. The cry of ‘Union, Union, the glorious Union!’ can no more prevent disunion than the cry of ‘Health, health, glorious health!’ on the part of the physician can save a patient lying dangerously ill.”

Well before Emerson and other antislavery northerners reached the same conclusion, Calhoun was convinced that the United States had become two distinct nations. Lost was the “perfect equilibrium” of the early republic, when the total population (around four million in 1790) had been almost evenly divided between the sections, and ever since the free-state population had swelled until it now accounted for more than ten million of the nation’s seventeen million persons. The proportionate consequence was “to give the northern section a predominance in every part of the Government.”

Even worse, the government had “changed . . . from a Federal Republic into a great national consolidated Democracy,” by which Calhoun meant a government controlled by a majority contemptuous of the rights of the minority. It had reached a state “as absolute as that of the Autocrat of Russia, and as despotic in its tendency as any absolute Government that ever existed.” No major political figure before or since has come as close as Calhoun to saying that “what they call the Nation” is a sham. By restricting slavery, by subjecting “the great exporting portion of the Union” to onerous taxes, and by distributing the revenue disproportionately to the North, the national government was leaving one section to atrophy while the other prospered. The American experiment in federalism had failed.

This description of the United States in 1850 as two nations made a certain sense. Visitors from abroad were struck that North and South seemed to have almost nothing in common except a shared (more or less) language. Fewer than one in thirty southerners was foreign-born, while in the North the corresponding figure was one in seven. In Calhoun’s South Carolina, the enslaved black population was approaching 400,000, more than the total population (around 300,000) of Webster’s native New Hampshire, where free blacks numbered barely 500. In the North, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Albany, as well as newer settlements such as Buffalo, Milwaukee, and Chicago, had become true cities with populations in the scores or hundreds of thousands. In the South, with the exceptions of Baltimore, Richmond, and New Orleans, urban growth was negligible. On the eve of the Civil War, South Carolina had only three towns with more than 2,500 inhabitants.

Beyond such measurable differences, there were less quantifiable contrasts in the character of social life. Northern white women were beginning to venture out to engage public issues through “networks, bonds, voluntary associations, mothers’ clubs”—entities that barely existed in the South, where women were still largely confined to private lives within the household. Among men, southern culture “honored violence as a sign of manhood,” while men in the North—at least self-styled gentlemen—were expected to express “anger verbally instead of violently.” Public education was developing rapidly in the North, only fitfully in the South. Rates of literacy and social mobility diverged sharply too.

So in one sense, Calhoun’s view of the South under siege was confirmed by the facts. But in another sense, the facts made a farce of his indignant devotion to a society that not only crushed hope for blacks but curtailed the prospects of most whites. Writing a few years later, the North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper made the case that the real reason for stagnation in the South was the very institution Calhoun was hell-bent on defending. In his 1857 tract, The Impending Crisis of the South, Helper charged that slavery had

depopulated and impoverished our cities by forcing the more industrious and enterprising natives of the soil to emigrate to the free states; brought our domain under a spare and inert population by preventing foreign immigration; made us tributary to the North, and reduced us to the humiliating condition of mere provincial subjects in fact if not in name.

Yet even if Helper was right, and even if one could somehow eject from Calhoun’s thought the particulars of antebellum American life and politics—the tariff question, the problem of territorial jurisdiction, the fact and fate of slavery itself—there would still be something substantive left: his fear that majoritarian government, without curbs on its power, tends to devolve into tyranny. During the tariff crisis, he had written that “no government, based on the naked principle that the majority ought to govern, however true the maxim in its proper sense, and under proper restrictions, can preserve its liberty even for a single generation.” To doubt this truth was to prove that the doubter “knows nothing of the human heart.”

It may seem bewildering that this champion of slavery has been posthumously recognized as a cogent thinker (“the last American statesman,” according to the historian Richard Hofstadter, “to do any primary political thinking”) committed to the defense of minority rights. The minority Calhoun had in mind was, of course, his own slaveholding class, and he gave little thought—beyond asserting that slavery was good for slaves—to the rights of the racial minority on whom that class built its power and wealth. And yet his warning that majorities will always endanger the rights of minorities resonates today for anyone, on the left or right, wary of vesting unrestrained power in any government, popularly elected or not.

To Calhoun, American history had become a plot against the South—a plot so nefarious and so advanced that the South now faced an existential choice between submission and revolt. Goaded by abolitionists, the black and white races were being driven toward open warfare (a view shared by some northern conservatives) and the South toward desolation.

In this apocalyptic mood, Calhoun denounced President Taylor for issuing an “Executive Proviso” that was every bit as bad as the Wilmot Proviso. By tacitly approving the constitution adopted at Monterey, the president had usurped the authority of Congress to rule on what basis California would come into the Union. And because the Constitution assigned territorial governance to Congress, and—in Calhoun’s view—guaranteed the right of all citizens to carry their property anywhere within the nation, it followed logically that slaves could no more be barred from California by executive fiat than by legislative action. Addressing the Senate on June 27, 1848, Calhoun had insisted that “we of the South have contributed our full share of funds, and shed our full share of blood for the acquisition of our territories. Can you, then, on any principle of equity or justice, deprive us of our full share in their benefit and advantage?” Now he reminded his colleagues that “it was the United States who conquered California,” not some gang of volunteers or mercenaries from the North. The future of California must be “vested” in the whole United States. In short, the president, by accepting the proposition of a free California, had betrayed not only his native South but also the Constitution that he had sworn to defend.

Most of Calhoun’s speech was in this vein—a catalog of injuries inflicted on the South. The closest thing to a remedial idea was a vague proposal, further developed in his posthumously published Disquisition on Government, that equilibrium between the sections could only be restored by a constitutional amendment dividing the office of the president into two co-equal halves, each with veto power. Thomas Hart Benton, who loathed him, later recalled that “Mr. Calhoun, intent upon extending slavery; and holding the Union to be lost except by a remedy of his own,” proposed the idea, “which he ambiguously shadowed forth—a dual executive—two Presidents: one for the North, one for the South: which was itself disunion if accomplished.” There is no reason to think that Calhoun thought such a scheme would actually work. He was shouting into the wind, and he knew it.

As for the fugitive slave question, two years earlier he had called it the “most vital of all questions” facing the Republic. Less than a year after that, addressing a group of slave-state representatives, he devoted several pages to the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution and to the “sophistry and subterfuges” by which it “had been evaded, and, in effect, annulled” by the northern states—an evasion amounting to “one of the most fatal blows ever received by the South and the Union.”

Now, however, he wasted scarcely any breath on it. He remarked only in passing, as if in deference to the man reading his speech, that “the North must do her duty by causing the stipulations relative to fugitive slaves to be faithfully fulfilled.” His expectations for Mason’s proposed law were vanishingly low. The whole fugitive slave problem was no longer—if it ever had been—a problem for which there existed a solution in his mind, at least not within the current political structure. Instead, it had become a useful provocation for pushing reluctant southerners to make the right and only choice: disunion.

Calhoun’s farewell speech was less a sermon than a funeral oration, explicitly for the nation, implicitly for himself. By the end of March, he was dead. “The cast-iron man who looked as if he had never been born and could never be extinguished” was gone. Tributes—some lavish, some grudging—poured in, including from many who regarded his ideas with opprobrium. One who declined to join the effusion of praise was Benton, who told Webster, “He is not dead. There may be no vitality in his body, but there is in his doctrines.”

2.

Two days before Calhoun’s speech, Webster had gone to see him in his sickroom. Like Clay, Webster had been surprised upon his return to Washington by the “excitement & inflammation,” but he continued to believe that “all this agitation . . . will subside without serious result.” As winter settled in, his confidence flagged. On February 24, he wrote to his son, “I am nearly broken down with labor and anxiety. I know not how to meet the present emergency, or with what weapons to beat down the Northern and the Southern follies, now raging in equal extremes. . . . I have poor spirits, and little courage.” No one knows what passed between Webster and Calhoun during their conference on March 2, but there is no reason to think that Calhoun was evasive about what he planned to say.

As for what Webster would say when his turn came to speak in the Senate, he probably did not know until just before he said it. Rumors flew that he would propose extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific and breaking California into two states—one open to slavery, the other free. “I mean to make an honest, truth-telling speech; and a Union speech,” he wrote to a friend on March 1, “but I have no hope of acquitting myself with more than merely tolerable ability.”

Nearly twenty years earlier, in response to secessionist threats during the tariff crisis, Webster had made his name throughout the land with a ringing phrase: “Liberty and Union, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable!” As for slavery, he now wrote to the abolitionist William Henry Furness, “from my earliest youth, I have regarded slavery as a great moral & political evil. I think it unjust, repugnant to the natural equality of mankind, founded only in superior power, a standing & permanent conquest by the stronger over the weaker . . . [and] opposed to the whole spirit of the Gospel & to the teachings of Jesus Christ.”

But how to reconcile the two—the evil of slavery and the good of union? In a letter of January 9, Furness had implored him to “give yourself utterly to the Right,” by which he meant to beg Webster to condemn the fugitive slave bill and the whole accommodation to the Slave Power of which it formed an essential part. On February 15, Webster replied that he was “a good deal moved” by Furness’s letter but could not “co-operate in breaking up social & political systems, on the warmth (rather than the strength) of a hope that in such convulsion, the hope of emancipation may be promoted.”

Perhaps this was indifference cloaked in realism. Maybe it was sheer temporizing. Or it could have been genuine horror at the prospect of unleashing the dogs of war for uncertain ends. There was no such thing, Webster believed, as “peaceable secession.” Moreover, “confusion, conflict, and embittered controversy, violence, bloodshed, & civil war would only rivet the chains of slavery more strongly.”

This was not an implausible prediction in 1850. If the nascent secession movement had seized the popular will in the South, there was small reason to assume that there would have been sufficient will in the North to force seceded states back into the Union, much less to make war on slavery itself. “I am for the abolition of slavery,” Garrison wrote on January 13 to the abolitionist Samuel J. May, “and therefore for the dissolution of the Union.” Many shared his view that those two convictions were one.

Nor was it clear, if secession had come in 1850, that it would have been met by military force. Even if an attempt had been made to compel seceded states to return to the Union, it was doubtful before the North had “attained the preponderance of strength, or the technological sinews, or the conviction of national unity which enabled it to win the war that finally came in 1861,” that such an attempt would have succeeded.

War in 1850 might just as well have released the Slave Power to pursue its dreams. It might have emboldened the expansionist faction in Texas, which was already threatening to take up arms to pursue its territorial ambitions in New Mexico. It might have encouraged slave owners, “dreaming of a new empire which would make the Gulf of Mexico a western Mediterranean,” to drive into Cuba, the Caribbean, or farther into Mexico than Polk and Taylor had been willing to go. The whole unstable structure of the Union—which had served to constrain the Slave Power, if not as tightly as Calhoun believed—might have collapsed.

Such hypotheticals may sound fanciful, but perhaps less so if one bears in mind that when the “secession war” (Whitman’s phrase) finally came a decade later, only very slowly did it become an antislavery war. For more than two years, its outcome was in grave doubt, a strong peace movement in the North arose with the objective of ending the bloodshed and returning to the status quo ante, and only the improbable combination of inspired leadership (Lincoln and, after many failed generals, Sherman and Grant), contingent battlefield events, the surging pace of slave escapes, and a grueling war of attrition that eventually wore down public resistance to the idea of black enlistment allowed the North to prevail and to destroy slavery at last.

This is a case where the historian’s resistance to counterfactual speculation should be resisted. Only by imagining what might have happened if compromise had failed can we begin to understand those, like Webster, who acted in the present based on their best guess of what would happen in the future.

When, on March 7, Webster rose to speak, he was unaware of Calhoun’s presence in the room. Referring to “an honorable member, whose health does not allow him to be here today,” he was corrected by another senator who called out, “He is here!”—to which Webster responded with “may he long be here, and in the enjoyment of health to serve his country!” Then, having paid his respects, he proceeded to dispute Calhoun’s claim that the federal government had pursued a systematic policy of choking the South. He pointed out that Congress had approved statehood for Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Florida, and most recently Texas—hardly the record of a government dominated by antislavery interests.

In Webster’s alternative history lesson, the war against Mexico had been waged expressly in order to acquire new lands “south of the line of the United States, in warm climates and countries,” which southerners expected to develop with slave labor. But because “events have not turned out as was expected,” the South had experienced “disappointment and surprise.”

After that remark—no doubt heard by Calhoun and his allies as a taunt in the guise of an understatement—Webster launched into a history of slavery from ancient Israel, Greece, Rome, and medieval Christendom, all the way up to the early American republic. He noted the regret with which the founders, southern as well as northern, viewed the presence of slavery in the new republic, and he traced the fateful growth of pro-slavery conviction as a result of “emergent and exigent interests”—namely, the astounding rise of the cotton industry to dominance in the world economy. All this was to be lamented, but one must “view things as they are” rather than pine for how they once were or might have been.

The fulcrum of Webster’s speech—the point at which he turned from scolding the South toward sympathizing with it—came when he arrived at the subject of the abolitionists, whom he decried for rejecting any “compromises or modifications . . . in consideration of difference of opinion or in deference to other men’s judgment.” They believe, he said, “that human duties may be ascertained with the exactness of mathematics,” and they “do not see how too eager a pursuit of one duty may involve them in the violation of others.” In preliminary notes for the speech, he had described them as “fault finders with the sun,” people with a pathological hunger for perfection. Now, in the speech as delivered, he expanded the trope, condemning them as absolutists who, if they “detect a spot on the face of the sun, they think that a good reason why the sun should be struck down from heaven.”*

All this was an overture to what everyone was waiting for—Webster’s verdict on the fugitive slave bill.* With a long sentence that winds its way through six clauses while staying true to the dubious tradition of talking about slavery without calling it by name, he gave himself a drumroll:

I will allude to other complaints of the South, and especially to one which has in my opinion just foundation; and that is, that there has been found at the North, among individuals and among legislators, a disinclination to perform fully their constitutional duties in regard to the return of persons bound to service who have escaped into the free states.

Then, at last, he came to the point:

In that respect, the South, in my judgment, is right, and the North is wrong. Every member of every Northern legislature is bound by oath, like every other officer in the country, to support the Constitution of the United States; and the article of the Constitution which says to these States that they shall deliver up fugitives from service is as binding in honor and conscience as any other article.

The moment when Daniel Webster said “the South is right . . . and the North is wrong” might have been the moment that saved the nation from secession or, at least for a decade, staved it off.*

Others thought, and think, that Webster deserved not praise but recrimination. His speech of March 7 made him the key figure in what has been ever since a fierce debate over the moral status of the emerging compromise and of the fugitive slave law at its center. Listening from the ladies’ gallery that day, Frances Seward, the wife of New York’s senator Seward, felt something close to nausea and declared that the sound of the word “compromise” had become “hateful” to her.

For anyone alert to slavery as an actuality rather than an abstraction, Webster’s speech was, and is, hard to take—a speech filled with platitudes about the prudence of the new law but silent about its effect on those whose hopes for freedom it would crush. With that speech, he sealed his reputation as the spokesman—some would say the tool—of northern bankers and merchants alarmed by what might happen if the nation should fracture, by the prospect of disturbance of the textile industry, volatility in commodity prices, disruption of credit markets for producers of cotton, rice, and sugar, and the attendant risk of financial panic. Still other commentators, then and since, have argued that the secession threat was a bluff and that Webster was making a big show of snuffing out a feeble flame that would have burned out on its own soon enough.

Silhouette of Daniel Webster, 1844

For anyone inclined to distrust him—and there were many—Webster did little to help himself. However much he might have been inwardly conflicted, his outward demeanor was one of cold certitude—haughty, confident, bombastic, and without Calhoun’s intellectual ferocity or Clay’s personal charm. The magnitude of his ego seemed equal to his girth. Seen in bulbous profile, belly thrust out, weight planted on disproportionately dainty feet, he was the very archetype of pomposity.

And yet some who heard his words sensed that he did not have his heart in them. General Sherman, who had been struck by Calhoun’s deathly pallor, found Webster’s speech “heavy in the extreme, and I confess that I was disappointed and tired long before it was finished. No doubt the speech was full of fact and argument, but it had none of the fire of oratory, or intensity of feeling, that marked all of Mr. Clay’s efforts.”

Before committing the speech to print, Webster tinkered with it, trying to adjust the balance between conciliation and condemnation in his remarks about the South. He added a protest against the widespread practice of jailing black sailors while northern ships were moored in southern ports. As for his attacks on what he later called the “wandering and vagrant philanthropy” of the abolitionists, he deleted a passage in which he had said that if all the funds raised for antislavery societies could be pooled, the money would be enough to buy freedom for every slave in Maryland.

In some respects, the speech was a triumph. It had a “tranquillizing effect” on the markets, helping to reverse a decline in U.S. bond prices. In the South, Webster was hailed as a man of prudence and moderation. In Boston, a letter of commendation was published over the signatures of eight hundred eminences, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., the former president of Harvard Josiah Quincy, and its current president, Jared Sparks. Personal benefits accrued too. A Washington banker canceled Webster’s debt. New York friends sent him a gold watch.

But appreciations were met with equally fervid bursts of contempt. In antislavery circles, he was regarded as a feckless windbag. Speculation was rife that southern Whigs had offered him their support to replace Taylor as president in the next election. Having once been lionized for his paean to “Liberty and Union, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable,” he became the object of foaming mockery from none other than Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote in his journal, “‘Liberty! liberty!’ Pho! Let Mr. Webster for decency’s sake shut his lips once and forever on this word. The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtezan.” A year later, now speaking in public, Emerson finished him off with a urinary metaphor. “All the arguments of Mr. Webster,” he said, “are the spray of a child’s squirt against a granite wall.”

Echoing Milton’s account of Satan’s fall in Paradise Lost, Whittier responded more decorously but to the same effect:

So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn

Which once he wore!

The glory from his gray hairs gone

Forevermore!

Henry Ward Beecher, from his pulpit at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, accused Webster of “fatal apostasy.” A thousand miles away, the city council of Chicago declared him fit to keep company with Benedict Arnold and Judas Iscariot.

A particularly scorching attack came from Horace Mann, who, in the Boston Atlas of May 3, excoriated Webster for failing to support an amendment offered by Seward mandating a jury trial for fugitives in the state where they were apprehended. “Webster’s intellectual life,” Mann wrote privately to his wife, “has been one great epic, and now he has given a vile catastrophe to its closing pages.”

On May 31, Webster counterattacked. In a letter to the Boston Daily Advertiser, he traced the history of the fugitive slave problem back through the 1793 law, to the Constitution, the Northwest Ordinance, and all the way to seventeenth-century extradition agreements between the British colonies of New England and their Dutch counterparts in New Netherland. He rattled off blue-blooded New England names—Cabot, Ames, Sedgwick, among others—who had supported through the centuries the principle of rendition for fugitives from service. He lamented that the case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania had been used by northern states as authority for establishing personal liberty laws that defied the Constitution.

As for Mann’s insistence on jury trials for accused fugitives, he dismissed that demand on legalistic grounds, pointing out that rendition disputes were neither criminal cases nor civil lawsuits and therefore the constitutional right to trial by jury did not apply. Whatever the merits of this argument, the fact that Webster resorted to it revealed his failure to grasp that among his own constituents the fugitive slave question had become much more a matter of morality and conscience than of law.

So which side had him right? Was he a statesman or a sellout? Many writers, popular and scholarly, have debated this question for what is now approaching 175 years. One late nineteenth-century writer said of him that “enthusiasm for self killed his enthusiasm for humanity.” In the twentieth century, he was grouped with such historical villains as the Nazi collaborator Quisling and the weak-willed Neville Chamberlain, who failed to see Nazism for what it was. Others, with equal conviction, defend him for standing his ground in the political storm. One of his successors in representing Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate, John F. Kennedy, portrayed him in a book called Profiles in Courage (1956) as a man of conscience who, by supporting a law unpopular among his constituents, accepted “political crucifixion” for the sake of saving his country.

The pendulum continues to swing. Some hear in the March 7 speech abject appeasement. On this view, if Webster were to appear again in a composite biography, he would be better served by the title Profiles in Cowardice. For others, he was an agonistic figure struggling within the limits of American constitutionalism to avert a catastrophe that would set back the slow advance of freedom. Still others hear in Webster’s words “the calm and cruel confidence which belongs to those who are in step with time” because “time, he knew, had been, and would be, with the North.”

In the end, there is no umpiring this dispute. He was sometimes bold, sometimes timorous. More often, as surely most people would have been, he was an unstable combination of the two.

3.

Four days later, the Senate was the scene of another long oration, delivered by New York’s former governor and freshman senator, William H. Seward. The March 11 speech was Seward’s first address to the Senate, expectations were low, and much of what he said amounted to the familiar (among antislavery Whigs) argument that the founders would not have tolerated slavery beyond the limits of where it existed at the time of the founding.

On the proposed fugitive slave bill, which he was later to characterize as a malicious attempt “to enforce upon the free States of this Union the domestic and social economy of the slave states,” Seward remarked that with respect to fugitives, “the Constitution contains only a compact, which rests for its execution upon the states.” By seeking to impose federal penalties for noncompliance, the proposed bill was doomed to fail. “Has any government ever succeeded in changing the moral convictions of its subjects by force?” In short, you may pass this law, but it won’t work.

Seward also went out of his way to agree with Calhoun—who was still present in the chamber when Seward spoke on March 11—that indeed the North had developed faster and further than the South. Yes, year after year, the North grew more populous, while southern development stalled. But shall we therefore “alter the Constitution so as to convert the government from a national democracy, operating by a constitutional majority of voices, into a federal alliance, in which the minority shall have a veto against the majority”?

Toward the end of his speech, Seward uttered a phrase—already in circulation in antislavery circles—that caught the attention not only of his colleagues but of the press and the public: “There is a higher law than the Constitution.” By these words, he did not mean to make an appeal above and beyond the Constitution, but rather to say that its authors had followed the law of God and nature in writing it. True, at the time of the founding, slavery still prevailed in some states, and through the “full faith and credit” clause the Constitution provided the slave states with a temporary reprieve pending the final triumph of freedom. But by design of the founders, the Constitution recognized no such concept as human property. There was therefore no constitutional basis for permitting slavery to expand onto a single acre of federal territory while time withered it away until it died.

Despite these unsurprising assertions from a northern antislavery man, Seward’s speech caused consternation even among his friends, who feared—justifiably, it turned out—that the phrase “higher law” would make him sound like a raging abolitionist and could expose him to the charge of claiming personal communion with God. Nothing enraged southerners more than a sanctimonious northerner condemning their way of life as ungodly. Yet even though Seward denounced “all legislative compromises” as “radically wrong and essentially vicious,” he had no impact on the prospects for a compromise deal. Within five months, the deal was sealed.

All through the spring, the select Committee of Thirteen—six Whigs and six Democrats, plus Clay as chair—worked and reworked a single “omnibus” bill containing essentially all of Clay’s original proposals. Deliberations were in full swing when, on July 9, President Taylor, having consumed large quantities of iced milk and strawberries on a blistering Independence Day, died of what is generally called, for lack of a better diagnosis, acute gastroenteritis. His death was met with pro forma lamentation, but in fact it lifted the congressional mood and, by removing the threat of a presidential veto with the ascension of the pliable Millard Fillmore, seemed to clear the way toward agreement. In fact, when the omnibus bill finally came to the floor at the end of July, it was rudely received, amended to death, and, after half a year’s effort, Clay’s wizardry was suddenly spent.

In the meantime, Stephen Douglas, who had doubted all along that the votes were there for the omnibus, had been working a parallel track as chair of the Committee on Territories. His strategy was to break the compromise into separate bills, each of which had a better chance to attract coalitions of support. The three lions of the Senate—Clay, Calhoun, and Webster—were now gone. Calhoun had died in March, Clay retreated to Newport after his bill went down, and Webster, appointed by Fillmore, assumed the office of secretary of state just a week before the decisive vote. By mid-August, the irrepressible Douglas, wheeling and dealing with consummate skill, had garnered enough support for the separate provisions to pass by comfortable margins on separate votes, though it took him until mid-September to push through the abolition of the slave trade in the city where the senators lived and worked.

As for the fugitive slave bill, it had been buffeted all spring and summer by a barrage of conflicting amendments; some designed to toughen it, others to weaken it. From Mason himself, under pressure from colleagues in the Deep South, came an amendment applying the thousand-dollar fine not only to anyone actively colluding with a runaway slave but to anyone “obstructing” enforcement in any way. A second amendment ruled out testimony by the accused in any rendition hearing. These changes eventually became part of the final bill.

Another amendment, introduced by Jefferson Davis—who remained suspicious of the bill as a dangerous precedent for extending federal authority into state affairs—provided for civil suit by slave owners against anyone interfering with the rendition process. Another, proposed by the Maryland senator Thomas Pratt (opposed by Davis), would have granted slave owners the right to file suit against the U.S. government to recover monetary damages if a slave duly identified and located was not returned to him.* These amendments failed.

Northern and upper-South moderates offered amendments of their own, intended to soften the bill. From Clay’s select committee came a proposal to require a tribunal in the runaway’s home state to furnish a record “adjudicating the facts of elopement and slavery, with a general description of the fugitive.” Another amendment would give fugitives the right to a jury trial in the state from which they had fled. In January, Seward moved an amendment guaranteeing jury trial and the right of habeas corpus to the accused. This was a nonstarter because southern senators regarded jury trial in a state where antislavery sentiment ran high as tantamount to gutting the bill.* As late as June, Webster—seeking to redeem himself in the eyes of his antislavery constituents, and perhaps to his own conscience—had offered a similar amendment but hedged it with admonitory language providing for trial by jury if “the fugitive shall deny that he owes service to the claimant under the laws of the State where he was held, and after being duly cautioned as to the solemnities and consequences of an oath, shall swear to the same.” These amendments, too, went nowhere.

On August 24, Senate Bill No. 23 was approved, with support exceeding opposition by more than two to one. The final version of the fugitive slave bill was little changed from James Mason’s original draft. It was reported to the House and passed without alteration on September 12, thus joining the series of measures that came to be known collectively as the Compromise of 1850. On September 18, after consulting his attorney general on the question of its constitutionality, President Fillmore signed the fugitive slave bill into law.

How strong the so-called compromise really was may be judged by the fact that only four senators voted for all the bills that composed it. How durable it was may be judged by the fact that it lasted barely ten years.

From one point of view, it was a defensible armistice, a means of buying time as the antislavery movement gathered force for the great conflict to come. “Looked on merely as a truce between the two sections,” one pro-Union historian wrote some fifty years after the fact, “what a victory for the North it turned out to be!” From another point of view, it was a cynical sacrifice by white politicians of black hopes in what was arguably the most corrupt bargain in American history.

Early in the process, three days after Webster’s tide-turning speech and three weeks before he died, Calhoun wrote to his friend Thomas Clemson that if Webster “should be sustained by his constituents, and New England generally, it is not improbable . . . that the question may be adjusted or patched up, for the present, to break out again in a few years. Indeed, it is difficult to see how two peoples so different and hostile can exist together in one common Union.” Of the many prognostications of what was to come, this was the most prescient.