CLAY REQUESTED THAT his colleagues refrain from comment on his package until they had a chance to weigh and balance its parts. In an earlier day and a different place, when he had been speaker of the House, he had been able to enforce such reticence. But the Senate brooked no constraints on freedom of speech, and Clay hadn’t sat down before Thomas Rusk of Texas bellowed that Clay aimed to deprive his state of half its territory and that he, Rusk, would never tolerate the theft. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi objected to surrendering California to the abolitionists. “I here assert that never will I take less than the Missouri compromise line extended to the Pacific Ocean, with the specific recognition of the right to hold slaves in the territory below that line,” Davis declared.
Clay had hoped to work the cloakrooms and corridors to enlist support for his compromise package, but the uproar that followed the mere unveiling of his resolutions persuaded him to mount a preemptive public defense. Over two days—February 5 and 6—he gave the speech of his life, the speech on which hung everything he had worked for since entering Congress four decades earlier. His consistent goal had been to hold the Union together. Until now he had succeeded. But if he failed at this point, all his previous work would be for nothing.
“Never on any former occasion have I risen under feelings of such deep solicitude,” he began. “I have witnessed many periods of great anxiety, of peril, and of danger even to the country. But I have never before risen to address any assembly so oppressed, so appalled, so anxious.” He might have blamed sectionalism, but he started with partisanship. “If I were to mention, to trace to their original source, the cause of all our present dangers and difficulties, I should ascribe them to the violence and intemperance of party spirit,” he said. “Parties, in their endeavors to obtain the one the ascendancy over the other, catch at every passing and floating plank in order to add strength and power to themselves.” Party spirit inflamed passion, which in turn aggravated partisanship. “It is passion, passion—party, party,” Clay said. “That is all I dread in the adjustment of the great questions which unhappily at this time divide our distracted country.”
To calm the passion and quell the partisanship had been his purpose in crafting his compromise, Clay said. Three principles had guided him. One was comprehensiveness: to resolve all the problems slavery raised for the sections and the country. “It seemed to me to be doing very little if we settled one question and left other disturbing questions unadjusted. It seemed to me to be doing but little if we stopped one leak only in the ship of state and left other leaks capable of producing danger, if not destruction, to the vessel.” The second principle was respect for fundamental beliefs. Clay said he asked neither side to surrender any core tenet; the accommodations he urged left basic principles intact. Clay’s third principle was reciprocation. Each side had to give something—“not of principle, not of principle at all,” Clay said, “but of feeling, of opinion in relation to the matters in controversy between them.” Mutual forbearance was critical to success.
Clay considered his eight resolutions in the order he had given them. To Southerners who complained that the admission of free California violated the spirit of the Missouri Compromise, he replied it did no such thing. The Missouri Compromise had not guaranteed slavery south of the 36° 30ʹ line; it merely allowed slavery in territories there, while forbidding it in territories north of the line. The assumption was always that new states formed from the territories would determine their own positions on slavery as they entered the Union. Slavery was being barred from California not by Congress but by the people of California themselves. Moreover, the vote in the constitutional convention in Monterey had been unanimous, with more than a dozen delegates from slaveholding states voting against slavery in California. California was doing what every other state had a right to do. If Virginia tomorrow voted to abolish slavery, neither Congress nor the other states could prevent its doing so. For that matter, if Ohio or another state created from the territory of the old Northwest, from which slavery had been barred by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, voted tomorrow in favor of slavery, Congress and the other states would be equally impotent to prevent the action. On the issue of slavery, the states were sovereign. Clay’s broader point was that the admission of California as a free state was no concession to the North; it was merely an acknowledgment of the inherent right of states to chart their own destinies.
Clay’s second resolution, not to decide for or against slavery in New Mexico, had indeed provoked Northern backers of the Wilmot proviso, as he had anticipated. They wasted their breath, he said. Slavery was barred from New Mexico by a higher law than any that Congress could craft: the law of nature. Every report from New Mexico revealed that it was even more unsuited to slavery than California, whose unfitness for slavery the slaveholders there had themselves acknowledged. “You have got what is worth more than a thousand Wilmot provisos,” Clay told the Northerners. “You have nature on your side.” To the Southerners who sought a statement affirming the role of slavery in the new lands of the West, he said they were wasting their breath, too. “If nature has pronounced the doom of slavery in these territories—if she has declared, by her immutable laws, that slavery cannot and shall not be introduced there—whom can you reproach but nature and nature’s God? Congress you cannot.”
Clay’s third and fourth resolutions, involving the borders of Texas and the assumption of its debt, engaged no broad principles of national interest. Some Northerners, and some Southerners too, queried the appropriateness of the assumption of a state’s debts by the national government. Clay pointed out that Texas had incurred its debts at a time when, as a republic, it controlled its import duties. On annexation to the United States, it surrendered those duties to the federal government. Justice suggested compensating Texas, which was what Clay proposed to do.
Clay’s fifth and sixth resolutions, preserving slavery in the District of Columbia but ending the slave trade there, were touchy in theory but relatively uncontroversial in practice, which was why he had worded them the way he had. Even abolitionists considered the practice of slavery in the district, where most slaves were household servants, workers in shops or assistants in offices, innocuous compared with the gang slavery of cotton, rice and tobacco plantations. As to the slave trade in the district, it was such a small part of the overall commerce in slaves that even zealous advocates of slavery saw little reason to defend it. The slave markets in Maryland and especially in the Virginia towns across the Potomac gave the traffickers all the scope and space they required.
Yet Clay, by characterizing as “inexpedient” the termination of slavery in the district, implicitly granted Congress the authority to abolish slavery there if notions of expedience changed. Southerners were decreasingly willing to concede that Congress had the authority to abolish slavery anywhere—not in the states, certainly; not in the federal territories; and not in the federal district. Clay summoned his skills as a lawyer and a statesman to defend his position. Clay the lawyer read the Constitution and observed that it granted Congress the power “to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever” in the federal district. This certainly included slavery. But Clay the statesman refrained from wielding the conferred power in a way as to offend the South unnecessarily.
Of Clay’s seventh and eight resolutions, on the return of fugitive slaves and the traffic in slaves between slave states, the latter was easily dealt with, because it left the status quo in place. Abolitionists had formerly sought to apply the leverage of the commerce clause of the Constitution against this domestic trade, but the thrust of their efforts had moved on to the larger agenda of killing slavery itself.
The seventh resolution, on the fugitive slaves, was quite different, for it involved issues deeply held by both sides. Southerners furiously believed that the North was flouting the Constitution by harboring fugitives, against the explicit language of Article IV, which required that a person bound to service or labor in one state and having fled to another be “delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.” Northerners who opposed the return of slaves sometimes tried to explain away the fugitive slave clause, but mostly they appealed to higher laws of liberty and justice. Neither side would yield without a fight.
Clay took the part of the South. And he did so with deliberate vigor. “This clause in the Constitution is not amongst the enumerated powers granted to Congress, where, if it had been placed, it might have been argued that Congress alone can legislate and carry it into effect,” he said. “It is one of the general powers, or one of the general rights secured by this constitution or instrument, and it addresses itself to all who are bound by the Constitution of the United States.” Antislavery sheriffs and judges in free states had sometimes asserted that the clause did not bind them, because they were not federal officers. Clay said they were wrong and remiss. Antislavery individuals, too, acted as though the Constitution didn’t constrain them. They were equally misguided, he said. “All state officers are required by the Constitution to take an oath to support it, and all men who love their country, and are obedient to its laws, are bound to assist in the execution of those laws.” The personal liberty laws of the free states had to yield.
Clay professed hope that the free states would recognize their error and bring their laws and practices into conformance with the Constitution, and thereby restore comity between the sections. But Congress must act in any event. “Whether they do it or not, it is our duty to do it. It is our duty to make the laws more effective; and I will go with the furthest senator from the South in this body to make penal laws, to impose the heaviest sanctions upon the recovery of fugitive slaves and the restoration of them to their owners.”
Clay was well into his second day of speaking on his compromise package, and he seemed prepared to go on to a third. A fellow senator, worried about Clay’s strength, moved to adjourn until the morrow. Clay waved his hand and said he was almost done. “I begin to see land. I shall pretty soon arrive at the end.”
He prayed that a spirit of forbearance and compromise would infuse the discussions of his resolutions. He said others might improve on what he had offered. But the spirit was the thing, and it could carry the country through the present crisis, as it had carried the country through crises past. “Adopt these or similar measures and I venture to predict that, instead of the distractions and anxieties which now prevail, we shall have peace and quiet for thirty years hereafter, such as followed the disposition of the same exciting and unhappy subject after the Missouri compromise,” Clay said. In thirty years, he supposed, the changes that had rendered slavery unprofitable in the North would do the same in the South, and the problem would resolve itself.
A lack of forbearance, an unwillingness to compromise, an insistence on an immediate trial of principles, would lead to ruin, he said. Speaking to the North, Clay pleaded that the South not be pushed to the wall, lest it secede and the Union be destroyed. Liberty, for which the Northern abolitionists expressed such concern, would be dealt a mortal blow, for the Union was liberty’s surest protector. Speaking to the South, Clay warned against secession. Secession would aggravate the very problems against which the South currently complained. If the Ohio River became the boundary not between states but between countries, fugitive slaves would never be returned. Grievances of the South against the North that were now adjudicated in courts of law or the chambers of politics would be resolved on the field of battle.
Clay wished his listeners to be in no doubt as to the results of secession. “War and the dissolution of the Union are identical and inseparable,” he said. Even supposing the Northern states didn’t forcibly resist Southern secession, war would come, and soon. “If possibly we were to separate by mutual agreement and by a given line, in less than sixty days after such an agreement had been executed, war would break out,” Clay said. “Yes, sir, sixty days. In less time than sixty days, I believe, our slaves from Kentucky would be fleeing over in numbers to the other side of the river, would be pursued by their owners, and the excitable and ardent spirits who would engage in the pursuit would be restrained by no sense of the rights which appertain to the independence of the other side of the river, supposing it, then, to be the line of separation. They would pursue their slaves; they would be repelled, and war would break out. In less than sixty days, war would be blazing forth in every part of this now happy and peaceable land.”
But in fact the North would never agree to separation, Clay said. Look only at the Mississippi Valley. “My life upon it, sir; that vast population that has already concentrated, and will concentrate, upon the headwaters and tributaries of the Mississippi will never consent that the mouth of that river shall be held subject to the power of any foreign state whatever.”
Clay asserted as strongly as he could that there was no right of secession. “The Constitution of the thirteen states was made not merely for the generation which then existed but for posterity—undefined, unlimited, permanent and perpetual.” He likened the Union to a marriage. Marriages had their troubles; the Union had its troubles. But good marriages lasted, and so could the Union. “Let us say what man and wife say to each other: We have mutual faults; nothing in the form of human beings can be perfect; let us, then, be kind to each other, forbearing, conceding; let us live in happiness and peace.”
The alternative was almost too horrible to contemplate. “Dissolution of the Union and war are identical and inseparable,” Clay repeated. “Such a war, too, as that would be, following the dissolution of the Union! Sir, we may search the pages of history, and none so furious, so bloody, so implacable, so exterminating, from the wars of Greece down, including those of the Commonwealth of England, and the revolution of France—none, none of them raged with such violence, or was ever conducted with such bloodshed and enormities as will that war which shall follow that disastrous event—if that ever happens—of dissolution.”
Clay cast his gaze across the Senate chamber. “I conjure gentlemen, whether from the South or the North, by all they hold dear in this world, by all their love of liberty, by all their veneration for their ancestors, by all their regard for posterity, by all their gratitude to Him who has bestowed upon them such unnumbered blessings, by all the duties which they owe to mankind and all the duties they owe to themselves; by all these considerations I implore them to pause, solemnly to pause, at the edge of the precipice, before the fearful and disastrous leap is taken into the yawning abyss below, which will inevitably lead to certain and irretrievable destruction.”
He shook his head. “And finally, Mr. President, I implore, as the best blessing which Heaven can bestow upon me upon earth, 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.”