6

Images in Conflict

SOCIETY, ECONOMY, AND GENDER

Congressional critiques of the social and economic foundations of northern and southern society were central to the debates of 1850. During the course of the session, each section developed deeply antagonistic images of the other, often by creating portraits that were the opposite of what they wished to believe about themselves. As part of their critiques, senators and representatives on many occasions employed commonly held assumptions about gender. Concerns about gender and the authenticity of one’s gender credentials dominated both sections and therefore played an important role in the conflicting images northerners and southerners created of each other’s society. The development of these opposing images, including their gendered aspects, was a preliminary stage in a process of national separation. In order to imagine a new nation, or a reinvented one, it was first necessary for each section to claim that it constituted a distinctive society. Whether or not this work of differentiation would ever reach completion with the establishment of two separate countries was, in 1850, yet to be determined, but the process moved forward dramatically in the debates over the Compromise.1

The most effective way for northerners and southerners to develop a separate sense of their own societies was to picture the opposing section as having differing, problematic values. But what is striking about this effort at negative image-building is that it was carried out by sections that, in fact, shared common goals and common beliefs about economic advancement and political liberty. Although the methods each section employed to achieve its objectives differed fundamentally, northern and southern definitions of a successful society were, in many ways, quite similar. By disparaging the other’s society, northern and southern congressmen were attempting to show how much more effectively their own societies could achieve the goals that the sections held in common. Much of the debate between northerners and southerners in 1850 was over whose section had best realized the American vision of economic success and political equality, whose system of labor could most effectively secure these valued objectives, and, therefore, whose system was most worthy of expanding into the newly acquired national domain.

The easiest way for southerners to define the North as different and foreign was to claim that it was a land of strange, radical movements bent on the destruction of key societal values, including the commitment to private property. The North, argued South Carolina Democratic representative John McQueen, was descending into the “deepest depths of agrarianism and confusion,” characterized by “thousands of societies and associations,” including ones focused on anti-Sabbath, anti-marriage, anti-rent, and other causes. This, concluded McQueen, was an age of northern “monstrosities.” William McWillie, Democratic representative from Mississippi, believed that some northerners had decided that slavery competed with northern free labor and so had to be abolished. “This is agrarianism,” he declared. “It is confiscating the estates of one half of the people of this Union for the benefit of the other half.” Agrarianism along with abolitionism, both of which southerners believed entailed an attack on property, clearly led the list of “-isms,” all of which seemed to embody the image many southern representatives and senators held of an alien North. To make this very point, Isaac Morse, Democratic representative from Louisiana, suggested an amendment to a bill that copied the phrasing of the Wilmot Proviso, but instead of barring slavery from the West, the amendment stated “that neither Abolitionism, anti-rentism, agrarianism, Fourierism, Socialism, shall exist in the said State or Territory.” If the North could ask for the South’s defining institution to be banned from the territories, surely the South could do the same for what southerners believed to be the North’s controlling movements.2

Southerners not only charged the North with being dominated by “socialism and agrarianism,” as well as other “-isms”; they also claimed the North was somehow, at the exact same time, consumed with the goal of achieving monetary gain. However glaringly contradictory these two images of the North were, they both described a section that was radically different from what southerners wanted to believe their own section to be. Both images coexisted and thrived because both served the common purpose of differentiating the North from the South’s own self-image.³

So obsessed were northerners with profit, claimed Louisiana Democratic senator Solomon Downs, that they would never dare go to war with the South. “The New England people,” speaking of those thought to embody the essence of the North, “are a wise, a trading people; and, I venture to say, they will never go into such a fight.” They would “consider the cost” and “find that there is not much inducement to fight—not much to be made by fighting.” It was all a result of nature and climate, explained South Carolina’s Democratic representative John McQueen. Northerners could not produce many of the staples necessary for life and so “must live by their genius and wits.” This image of a society constantly scheming to gain a profit was so pervasive that it even entered into southern discussions of northern political objectives. Abraham Venable, Democratic representative from North Carolina, argued that his state would never submit to the “manufacturers at the North” or count “sixpences with them on the issue of political equality and guarantees of the Constitution.” The North was counting costs even when it was debating the abstract question of equality under the Constitution.4

The consequence of this northern focus on profit was clear to southerners. “Pauperism and crime in your great cities,” charged Alabama senator Jeremiah Clemens, “bands of juvenile vagrants ‘pilfering whenever opportunity offers, and begging when they cannot steal.’ … Parents driving their children forth, the sons to commit felonies, and the daughters to prostitution.” This was what northern society offered, and it was, southerners were anxious to point out, a sharp contrast to their own society and to the benefits of what they claimed was their own caring system of labor. The goal of such southern descriptions of the North was to establish that their neighboring section was itself an exploitative society whose attacks on southern slavery could therefore have no credibility. Numerous southern senators and representatives offered critiques of the North in order to undermine northern charges of southern immorality. “The miserable plea that you are actuated by a desire to improve the morals of the South,” Clemens told his northern colleagues, “will soon be forgotten, or remembered only as evidence of the deep hypocrisy of which human nature is sometimes capable.” Northerners had no right to send petitions to Congress asking to abolish slavery when their factory system was “offensive to the moral sense of the South.”⁵

Alabama Democratic representative David Hubbard agreed. He charged manufacturers with engaging in “despotism over hired labor” and the city of New York with “a greater amount of depravity, immorality and crime in a single city in one year, than has been charged in all of the southern States together against black and white for ten years.” You in the North, he asserted, “neither feed as well, clothe as well, nor treat as kindly your hired laborer, as we do the one we own.” Virginia Democratic representative Thomas Averett went further and claimed, “even our most rebellious slaves would prefer to serve their southern masters, rather than be placed under the control of northern task-masters, under the pretense of any mere theoretical freedom.” “Our northern philanthropists,” he concluded, “have their ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water.’” “Take care, gentlemen!” he warned. “Remember that it is dangerous for those who ‘live in glass houses to throw stones.’” Northerners should not criticize the South when they had their own problems to worry about.6

Southerners believed the problems that northern society faced were more than just material. In all societies where there were laws of property, Virginia Democratic representative Richard Meade explained, the few who are rich make slaves, “in a certain sense,” of those who are poor and are forced to do menial labor. This weighs more heavily on white laborers than black since the “African slave feels a natural inferiority, and is contented to abide the decree of nature.” But the white laborer feels his equality and so believes he is wronged when placed in an inferior position. As the North’s laboring population increases, Meade warned his northern colleagues, “your day of trouble will come. Capital and labor with us are united, with you it is separate with antagonistical feelings.” Turning to a more graphic description of the coming difficulties, Meade explained, “The black horse that we are riding is a docile and willing animal—the white one that you have saddled is restive and impatient. Ours will keep us above the mud, yours may drag you into it—beware.” A future of social unrest awaited the North.⁷

Southern society, predicted Meade, would avoid all of these “political and moral deformities which beset northern society,” because “negro slavery elevates the white man” rather than driving him down. “In truth,” insisted Meade, “there is more equality among the whites of the South than exists anywhere else.” Slavery, he concluded, “has made us all aristocrats, so we may be called a ‘democratic aristocracy.’” The basis for this equality was race. “With us it is color and race which gives distinction; with you it is wealth,” explained David Hubbard, Democratic representative from Alabama. “With you it is … service, which degrades, and wealth that exalts, in public estimation; and it is this which makes you so love money and shift so to get it.” But our poor and rich white citizens make “lasting friendships” based on race. “All enjoy political equality who are white.” Jefferson Davis emphatically agreed. Stating the fundamental social creed of southern society, he declared that “slave labor forms the substratum on which white labor is elevated.” The future president of the Confederacy lectured his northern Senate colleagues that “he who seeks for that portion of our country where, in fact, as in theory, political equality does exist, must be pointed to the slaveholding States.” Equality not only coexisted with slavery; it was based upon it. Only in the slave South could the shared ideals of American liberty be realized.⁸

Southerners regularly emphasized the benefits of their system of labor over that of the North, but the southern defense of slavery was never simple or free of ambiguity. At the same time that southerners hailed the benefits of slavery to southern society, they blamed the North for imposing that beneficial institution on them. Contradictory as these arguments were, they were held together by a consistent focus on northern greed. That greed not only led northerners to exploit their own labor, but, southerners contended, it also had led them to impose slavery on the South in order to gain profit for themselves. By focusing on northern greed, southerners could be critical of the North for forcing on them the institution they claimed to value so highly.

The belief that southern slavery was a product of northern “avarice” was widely held by southerners. Northern seamen brought Africans to America and “forced” slavery on the South, claimed South Carolina Democratic representative John McQueen. Northerners built their industry and commerce on the profits of the slave trade and only gave up slavery themselves when the institution was no longer advantageous to them. Northerners, argued Feyette McMullen, Democratic representative from Virginia, were now preaching “their christian philanthropy” and protecting the “negro in preference to your brother, the white man!” But that section had owned 90 percent of the vessels engaged in the African slave trade and made “fortunes” on it.9

Critiques of what southerners viewed as northern self-righteous attacks on an institution they helped establish was a major theme of southern congressional speeches. Alabama Whig representative William Alston claimed that at a public meeting in Boston, abolitionist Wendell Phillips was cheered by the sons of those who had profited from the African slave trade and “put the price in their pockets.” They “reproach us with injustice to the slave, while they still retain the profits of that traffic.” What right have northerners to “denounce” slavery, asked Louisiana Democratic senator Pierre Soulé, when they “implanted it and nourished it.” Now they “still dance on the silk carpets and look out from the gilt balconies that were paid for with the profits of the accursed trade.” Still more outrageous to southerners, these northern profiteers were insisting on limiting the expansion of the same institution from which they themselves had originally profited. The “North,” complained Jefferson Davis, “claimed that the South should be restricted from future growth—that around her should be drawn, as it were, a sanitary cordon to prevent the extension of a moral leprosy.” However, the slaves they wished to restrict were the “descendants of those who were mainly purchased from the people of the North.” Even more galling to Kentucky Democratic representative George Caldwell, northern slave merchants had expanded the slave population until the only recourse they left the southern states was either “our present system of slavery” or “social and political equality and amalgamation with the blacks.” Faced with those choices, imposed on them by the North, there was no possible alternative to slavery. The institution was therefore the responsibility of northerners. They had created what they now condemned.10

Southerners blamed the North for slavery, but they were not ready to abandon what they claimed the North had forced upon them. Rather, they sought to have it both ways. They criticized the North for imposing the institution on the South but then insisted that the southern society that institution created was economically superior to the free-labor society of the North. In this way, southerners could free themselves from responsibility for an institution they knew was widely condemned while at the same time enjoy and celebrate the benefits that same institution offered.

Southern goals of economic prosperity were the same as the North’s, only their means of achieving them differed. And their means, the institution of slavery, southerners insisted, treated labor with greater sensitivity, created a more humane society, provided a better guarantee of democratic government, and generated less greed than the free-labor system of the North. Furthermore, its benefits profited the entire nation. “I doubt,” declared Tennessee Whig senator John Bell, “whether the power and resources of the country would have attained more than half their present extraordinary proportions, but for this so much reviled institution of slavery.” Slavery was the engine of national growth. Its sins were the product of northern greed, but its benefits stemmed from southern efforts and the Union was the better for its existence.¹¹

Northern wealth, southerners argued, was particularly dependent on southern slavery. John Bell reminded northerners that “your rich and varied commerce … your ample revenues; the public credit; your manufactures; your rich, populous, and splendid cities—all, all may trace to this institution.” Southerners, argued Louisiana Democratic senator Solomon Downs, were the “mere superintendents of … plantations for the northern interests.” The “North,” he maintained, “derives at least as much, if not more advantage from the products of our slave labor than those who employ it.” David Kaufman, Democratic representative from Texas, claimed that the North’s cotton mills and every other manufacturing interest “are fed from slave labor. Indeed, while the South has all the responsibilities of slavery, the North reaps by far the greatest advantages from it.” The North might praise their own system of free labor, but they were dependent on slave labor for their profits.¹²

Southerners never missed an opportunity to highlight northern hypocrisy, and northern dependence on the products of slavery proved an inviting target. Kentucky Whig representative Daniel Breck asked if slavery “is so odious in their eyes, and the existence and continuance of it are regarded as a moral wrong, as a sin, why encourage it, and grow rich upon it?” Breck suggested northerners could reject the products of slave labor as “contaminated articles” and throw them overboard, as the revolutionaries had done with British tea. By “receiving and using the cotton and sugar, and rice, and tobacco,” northerners “give countenance and are accessories to the alleged injustice and sin, as the receiver or purchaser of stolen goods is of the theft.” But the North, southerners argued, was too dependent on slavery to boycott its products. “To destroy slavery is to destroy production,” explained South Carolina Democratic representative Isaac Holmes, “that very production which employs so much of northern capital.” Tropical regions, concluded Holmes, “require coerced labor.” The free-labor system of the North could never succeed in the tropical South.13

For some southerners, it was precisely the northern dependence on slavery that explained the North’s opposition to the expansion of the institution. The anti-extension movement was part of a conspiracy to grow northern profits. Free soil, claimed Isaac Holmes, was nothing more than a “disguise” to further this plan “under the mask of philanthropy.” If slaves were confined and denied new work in the gold-mining regions of the West, then more cotton would be produced in the South and the increase in supply would benefit the cotton-consuming North. Virginia Democratic senator R. M. T. Hunter also saw the profit motive behind northern opposition to slavery expansion, but his focus was on political power. The “northern capitalist,” explained Hunter, “has shown himself hostile to every increase of political weight in the Confederacy on the part of the South.” Southern opposition to “banks, tariffs, and … all the schemes by which Government is invoked to give capital an indirect advantage over labor” caused the North to block southern expansion, fearing it would increase southern political power. Northern economic interest favored a weak South along with an abundance of cotton.¹⁴

The North might try and limit the South to service its “capitalist interest,” but its dependence on the South also made it vulnerable. The North required southern help in order to fight the northern “-isms.” Florida Whig representative Edward Cabell told northerners that the “conservatism of slavery may be necessary to save you from the thousand destructive isms infecting the social organization of your section.” Cabell listed “Socialism, Agrarianism, Fanny Wrightism, Radicalism, Dorrism” as well as “Abolitionism” as threats to the North. Abolition, Senator Hunter of Virginia explained, is a menace to “all inequality in property.… Your socialist is the true abolitionist, and … it is well that we should consider where these abolition doctrines will lead us.” Northern capital and southern slavery had more in common, southerners were arguing, than many northerners realized.15

Southerners were not hesitant to point out that specific northern interests would be at risk without southern support. Conservative Georgia Whig senator John Berrien warned that if the South was denied the right of “equal participation in the public domain,” the two national parties would dissolve and be replaced by sectional parties. The North, divided between capital and labor, would then no longer have the support of the South and, Berrien predicted, would be left “without the protection which is essential to their prosperity.” North Carolina Whig senator George Badger concurred, suggesting that southern legislators would no longer be willing to give northern manufacturers and working men relief when they needed it. Kentucky Whig representative Finis McLean was more direct. “We cannot and will not continue to vote protection to northern industry, to sustain northern interests and build up northern power,” he declared, “if that power is to be used to prejudice our interests and overwhelm our institutions.” Daniel Webster heard the South’s warning. He cautioned a correspondent that Whig senators from the South would not give a single vote for the tariff as long as slavery agitation continued and “until this Slavery business is settled.” Webster understood the danger, minimized the evils of slavery and its chance of expansion, and worked for compromise.¹⁶

The risk to the northern economy without the backing of the South, southerners believed, would be severe enough. But if the Union itself would come to an end, the consequences for the North would be unendurable. “In the loss of the Union,” argued South Carolina Democratic representative Isaac Holmes, northerners would “lose the very sources of their prosperity.” If the Union dissolved, “Where, then, will be the national expenditures? … Where will be the sale of those manufactures now flooding the South under a discriminating tariff? They will have passed like a vision of the night.” Without the Union, he maintained, the North “must depend upon the mercy of the South, or revert back to the rocks from which she came.”¹⁷

Many southern descriptions of the impact on the North of the South’s economic abandonment were equally graphic. Alabama Whig representative William Alston threatened the North by declaring that if it ended slavery, the export of cotton would end. With that, “your factories must fail, your commerce must languish; commercial distress will seize on your cities; and with rapid strides advance into the country.” Other predictions were even more dire. Jefferson Davis declared that “grass will grow on the pavements now worn by the constant tread of the human throng which waits on commerce.” Coming closer still to the populist rhetoric of a generation later, Mississippi Democratic representative William McWillie told his northern colleagues, “Without the Union your factories will rot down and grass grow in your streets.” So convinced were southerners of the North’s dependency that they could not imagine their neighboring section surviving without their support.18

Some southerners were confident that northerners were so reliant on the South and the commerce of the Union that they would avoid any direct attack on slavery. North Carolina Democratic representative John Daniel believed that northerners understood that disunion would hurt their interests, so he did not expect them to press an antislavery agenda too far. Neither did Georgia’s John Berrien, who concluded that, although northerners called slavery a sin, they were too dependent on its products to call it anything other than the South’s sin and so would not believe it was their problem as long as it remained in the states where it already existed. These two southerners were joined by southern advocate and future president James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, who also predicted that the North would back down from its antislavery position. “The Codfish Aristocracy,” he explained, referring to the northeastern economic elite, “for the sake of philanthropic abstractions will not cast away the best market for their manufactures and the best freight for their navigation.” Georgia Whig representative and future Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens agreed. Following the adjournment of Congress, he wrote to his brother that the North was now beginning to count the cost, and so “I shall not yet despair of the Republic.” As 1850 came to a close, Stephens’s image of a northern society motivated by greed gave him confidence in the permanence of a union tied together by commerce.¹⁹

The South may have pictured the North as a weak society ready to collapse without southern support, but that was not the image the North had of itself. Northerners believed that they had a superior system of labor and a stronger society than the South with none of the vulnerabilities described by southerners. Rather, it was the South that had a stunted, stagnant society, the South that was failing to achieve the commonly held goal of economic growth. Indiana Democratic representative Cyrus Dunham explained that northerners not only believed slavery to be “wrong”; they also maintained that it was “detrimental to the prosperity of any country where it exists.” Pennsylvania Whig representative Jesse Dickey expanded on Dunham’s focus on economic prosperity and insisted that where slavery did not exist, the “people are much more prosperous, in a civil, moral, and political point of view, than they are in the slave States.” For William Sackett, Whig representative from New York, the case was clear. “A high state of civilization, slavery, and prosperity are utterly incompatible,” he declared. The position of northerners was unequivocal. Slave systems were not conducive to either economic well-being or civilized society.20

Neither did slave societies encourage intellectual growth. Ohio Whig representative Lewis Campbell noted that North Carolina’s Thomas Clingman had claimed that more civilization and happiness existed in the slave states than in the free. That was true, countered Campbell, only if by comfort one meant animal comfort. In the Northwest, he argued, there was a greater advancement of “public morals” and the “cultivation of the intellect” than in the South. Ohio had more schoolchildren per capita and more schools per capita than the South, and a better literacy rate as well. “Knowledge is better than strength,” declared New York Whig representative Charles Clarke. The limited spread of education in the South had created a backward society. “You are amazed,” observed Clarke incredulously, “that a country where all are free, all educated, all emulous and enterprising, all stimulated by the highest hopes, and often cheered on by the highest rewards, should outstrip a nation where the laborer is a slave!” Clarke reminded the South that the inventions from which they benefited were overwhelmingly northern in origin. Robert Fulton’s steamboat, Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod, and Eli Whitney’s cotton gin were all products of northern society and a system of free labor and educational advancement.²¹

The problem with slave societies, northerners contended, was that they stifled individual initiative. New York representative John Thurman claimed that “slavery dwarfs the energy and retards the growth and prosperity of a people,” while a correspondent of New York Whig representative John King condemned slavery’s “enervating effects which the institution has on all that makes our nation great & glorious.” What slavery did, explained Pennsylvania Whig representative Thaddeus Stevens, was produce classes that do not work or contribute to the strength and wealth of the country. In addition, for those who do labor, the “lash is the only stimulant.” Men who “receive none of the wages of their labor do not care to multiply its fruits. Sloth, negligence, improvidence, are the consequence.” Free labor, argued Connecticut Whig senator Truman Smith, “is always more prompt and energetic.” The incentives of a free-labor society guaranteed greater prosperity for all than a society that made the avoidance of punishment the only reason to work.²²

Northern representatives, senators, and their correspondents went to great lengths to demonstrate the superior productivity of their free-labor society. A correspondent of New Hampshire Free Soil senator John Hale claimed the products of the free states were worth twice those of the slave states. Orin Fowler, Whig representative from Massachusetts, calculated that cotton could be cultivated by free labor for 25 percent less than the cost of slave labor. Virginia, argued New York Whig representative Elbridge Spaulding, “has a good soil, genial climate … but so long as slavery exists there, she can never expect to compete successfully with the free labor and enterprise of the free States.” Thaddeus Stevens agreed. Virginia, he insisted, had stagnated under slavery. “Her land, cultivated by unwilling hands, is unproductive.” Northerners simply could not conceive of a productive labor force that did not work of its own free will and for its own benefit.23

Virginia was the focus of northerners in Congress who sought to demonstrate that the South’s slave society could not ever be prosperous, but they did not use Virginia alone to make their point. They compared its progress with that of northern states to show the deficiencies in a slave-based economy. Thomas Butler, Whig representative from Connecticut, compared Virginia to Pennsylvania in order to demonstrate that urban growth in Virginia was stunted by slavery. New York Whig representative Charles Clarke compared Virginia to New York to illustrate the slave state’s backwardness. Whig senator William Dayton of New Jersey made a different comparison but came to the same conclusion. He paired Kentucky with Ohio, claiming that Ohio was the more prosperous and productive. Kentucky, he concluded, “had been paralyzed in her efforts by the crushing influence of one institution.” Southerners disputed these comparisons in great statistical detail. They too measured the worth of a society by its economic progress. But northerners continued to insist that slavery, whether in Virginia, in the border state of Kentucky, or anywhere else in the South blocked economic development.²⁴

Northerners believed that their section’s free labor–based economy would allow the North to grow and dominate the nation. Elbridge Gerry, Democratic representative from Maine, told his southern colleagues that the equilibrium between the sections they hoped for could never be. “The laborers are the producers,” he explained, “and just in proportion as a freeman rises higher than a slave, so will a country, whose laborers are free, transcend another … whose laborers are slaves.” New York Whig representative Elbridge Spaulding stated the case directly. “Slave soil,” he argued, “cannot keep pace with the free soil in population, agriculture, manufactures, and the arts.” And southerners should not think that a constitutional amendment would “save them from the evils of slavery.” Slave labor, Spaulding warned, can never “compete successfully with the free labor.” You cannot stop the “progress of freedom,” declared New York Whig representative Henry Bennett. You cannot “arrest the law of nature herself, and make the whole world go backwards.” Free labor would always lead to stronger economic development than was possible under slavery, and that would lead, inevitably, to political dominance.25

A dominant society, however, was not necessarily a harsh society. Northerners claimed they did not have the poverty or crime that southerners described as widespread in their image of the North. “The people of the North,” declared New York’s Charles Clarke, “are as virtuous, as free from pauperism and crime, as any people on the face of the globe.” Responding specifically to Alabama Democratic senator Jeremiah Clemens’s charge that laborers in the North were treated worse than southern slaves, New Hampshire Free Soil senator John Hale answered that the one thousand female workers in his own town were of high intellect and pure “moral deportment.” Both they and northern male laborers compared well with southern masters, let alone southern slaves, the senator insisted. Fellow Free Soiler, Indiana representative George Julian, challenged North Carolina Whig representative Thomas Clingman’s claims about northern society as had Ohio’s Lewis Campbell before him. Julian denied Clingman’s contention that there was less crime and poverty in the South than in the North by reminding his southern colleague of the crime of slavery that turns “three million people into savages, and prevents them from becoming paupers by converting them into brutes.” A society that brutalized its black population was hardly in a position to judge the humanity of the free North.²⁶

To northerners, a society based on slavery was not just unproductive and criminal; it was degrading and dishonorable. For northerners, honor required a commitment to principle, and one of the key principles they were committed to was free labor. The southern system of labor, northerners believed, was the enemy of free labor. “Slavery,” declared Thaddeus Stevens, “always degrades labor.” Stevens’s fellow Pennsylvania Whig representative Jesse Dickey explained that slavery “has the effect to bring into disrepute, and render dishonorable, manual labor.” Furthermore, he argued, free labor “cannot compete with slave labor.”²⁷

Dickey was not alone in this contention. It was common for northerners to assume that free white laborers would never receive sufficient compensation if they worked in communities where slavery existed. But their discomfort with the proximity of slave labor did not just stem from economic concerns. Slave labor meant black labor, and many northerners agreed with Democratic representative Lucius Peck of Vermont that “labor by the side of the slave is degrading.” Michigan Democratic antislavery representative Kinsley Bingham shared Peck’s concern, explaining that with slavery, “Labor once honorable, has become degraded, for who would be the yoke-fellow of the slave?” Racial prejudice combined with principled opposition and economic interest to make slave labor anathema in the North, especially when it threatened to occupy land in the West that northerners hoped to claim for themselves.28

Northerners believed their free-labor society was more prosperous, energetic, creative, honorable, and better educated than the slave society of the South. Yet at the same time as they celebrated their economic success, they rejected the southern image of a calculating North obsessed with profit. New York’s Charles Clarke recognized that “we at the North are accused of being cold, calculating, penny-wise, and that we approve or condemn, as we find the balance of profit or loss,” but he denied the validity of the charge. To demonstrate its inaccuracy, Clarke argued that the abolition of slavery in the South would retard the economic well-being of the North, not advance it. How could northerners be advocating an end to slavery for financial benefit if without slavery the South’s agriculturally based society would come to an end, southern dependence on northern industry wane, and southerners manufacture goods for themselves. We would “lose our best customers,” he contended. The North could not possibly be antislavery in order to make a profit. In effect, Clarke was accepting the southern argument of northern dependency on the South in order to deny their contention that opposition to slavery was economically driven.²⁹

In any case, argued Wisconsin Free Soil representative Charles Durkee, what was wrong with seeking a profit as long as the ends were just. And what about the South’s obsession with profit? Conservative Massachusetts Whig representative James Duncan responded to the charge that New England was “wholly actuated by sordid and mercenary motives” by asking southerners about their $1.6 billion investment in human property. It was in the South, concluded Duncan, that pecuniary interest was in control, and it was that interest that was behind the southern drive to expand slavery. The image of the South in the northern mind was of a section driven by greed just as the southern image of the North was of a section ruled by a profit-hungry elite.³⁰

Northern radical Democrats faced a special challenge when responding to the southern assault on the money power of the North. In the past, they too had assailed northern economic interests. How could they now criticize the South for making the very same attacks they had for decades engaged in themselves? Pennsylvania Free Soil Democratic representative David Wilmot praised the Democracy for redeeming men from “every species of bondage and tyranny.” He was proud of the Democratic Party’s struggle against the great northern moneyed interests. But now, he argued, there was a sectional struggle in which “southern aristocracy, and southern capital, seek to save themselves from the application of those great principles of justice and right, under which, they were willing to fight the battles of Democracy, against the capital and aristocracy of the North.” The southern attempt at expansion was a “great pecuniary question—a question of capital—of money.” Huge amounts of money invested in slaves controlled the government, and, declared Wilmot, it “wields the destinies of this boasted free Republic.” “Money,” he explained, “is cold, selfish, heartless.… It is here, sir, in these Halls, in desperate conflict with the rights of humanity and of free labor.” Wilmot was not prepared “to bow down to this money power.” He had always fought the moneyed interest, and now with its greatest threat coming from the South, he was ready to do battle again to stop its expansion into the West.31

Wilmot focused his attention on the southern moneyed interest, but southern charges against northern “capital” and its role in the slave trade and the establishment of slavery remained unanswered. Railing against the slave power and its profits did not respond to the question of northern profits and northern complicity in the creation of southern slavery. Virginia Democratic representative Thomas Averett posed precisely that question to Pennsylvania Whig representative Thaddeus Stevens from the floor of the House. “Did not New England sell slaves?” asked Averett. “Yes, she sold, she imported, slaves,” Stevens admitted. “She was very wicked; she has long since repented. Go ye,” Stevens demanded, “and do likewise.” Stevens did not believe that northern sins of the past justified southern sins of the present. Whatever their past responsibilities, northerners maintained that their own society was now honorable, free, and prosperous. It was the South’s turn to answer for its continuing dependence on slavery. But no southerner did as Stevens demanded. Southerners remained intent on criticizing northern society, and northerners continued to vigorously counter their attacks. Two contrasting images of society battled in endless rounds of accusation.³²

Often these verbal battles included gendered references and gendered images. Understandings of gender formed a central part of Americans’ perception of the worlds they occupied and the societies they formed. Each section drew on these understandings to describe unacceptable aspects of their adversary’s society. On other occasions, northerners and southerners used gendered terms and imagery to praise those they believed had acted nobly and condemn those whose actions they rejected. Just as northern and southern political and economic visions of the successful society had much in common, so too were their assumptions about the meaning of gender strikingly similar. However, these shared assumptions were regularly weaponized and employed based on sectional needs.

Southern dislike of the wealthy class of the North for its role in the slave trade and for what southerners believed was its continued exploitation of the South was expressed in gendered terms by Isaac Morse, Democratic representative from Louisiana, who referred to northern elites as the “effeminate, wealthy few.” Hoping to strike fear among the northern upper classes, Morse was suggesting that the wealthy were weak in contrast to the potentially threatening “numerous, powerful, and starving many.” Tennessee Democratic representative John Savage had another goal in mind. He wanted to demonstrate the horrors of the North’s manufacturing-based society. He condemned the North for working “brave men and fair women” twelve hours each day. Such a system, he argued, “not only ‘unmans a man,’ but it unmans the women and the Republic.” Savage’s focus was clearly on gender, not sex, and he was intent on showing that northern society emasculated and weakened both genders and the country as well. Abolitionists were another frequent target of attacks that employed gender-based imagery. Indiana Democratic representative Cyrus Dunham was only one of many, North and South, who referred to abolition’s “sickly sentimentality,” a description that often was used to mean effeminate. Edward Stanly, Whig representative from North Carolina, was more explicit in his attack on abolition. He condemned its political agenda for also supporting the “rights of women.”33

Southerners did not hesitate to associate specific examples of northern women’s behavior with the general depravity of northern society. Alabama Whig representative William Alston reported that women in Ohio had joined an anti-Mormon mob. “Woman in the South,” he asserted in contrast, “is looked upon as Heaven’s last, best gift to man, and we are unwilling that even the winds of heaven should visit her too roughly.” But not in the North. “In the highly moral Northwest, we find her in mobs, with missiles in hand, assailing the other sex. Is this the gentleman’s boasted morality?” he asked. These actions were not considered moral in either section, but Alston used the incident to reinforce the image of a degenerate North and to call into question the North’s adherence to universally accepted conventions.³⁴

Conservative North Carolina Whig representative David Outlaw offered a similar critique of what he believed northern mores to be. He complained to his wife that southern women who traveled North returned with northern manners. “There is a boldness, a brazenfacedness among the Northern city women, as well as a looseness of morals, which I hope may never be introduced South,” Outlaw wrote. “Many of our women who go there, when they come home are dissatisfied. There is not excitement enough. Their ordinary routine of domestic employment are distasteful.” Worse still, he heard that at Saratoga, New York, where elite southern women sometimes vacationed, there is “a new dance far surpassing in indecency and lasciviousness the polka or the waltz.” Outlaw was scandalized that the “dance is concluded by the gentleman throwing his leg over the lady’s shoulder; whether the lady follows the modest and delicate example we are not informed.” The southern critique of northern society focused on its hypocrisy and its mistreatment of labor, but its apparent rejection of common sexual decorum confirmed for Outlaw the degree to which it had strayed from standards of social morality.35

There is no record of Outlaw’s wife’s response to her husband’s fulminations against what he heard about the assertive women of the North. Emily Outlaw did write that if she had been a man she, in her husband’s words, “would have had a perfect passion for building.” Precisely what that would have meant in a slave society is unclear, but apparently she understood that in David Outlaw’s household such dreams were not to be realized. In the nation’s capital, life was different. Outlaw himself noted the presence in Washington of what he considered “he-women,” a phrase he claimed to have coined, who “hang around the capital” and “have the good taste of neither sex.” Here was an image that fit perfectly the reports of northern women he had received. He considered these politically involved women an “abomination.”³⁶

It was true that women sought inclusion in the Washington political community. Representative Alston may have wanted to protect them from the “winds of heaven,” but women were ready to take on the wind and more. An image of passivity did not describe them. If the images of northern and southern society were in conflict, so was the image of women in conflict with the reality women presented in the nation’s capital. Women there were especially intent on witnessing the debate over the Compromise as it unfolded in the House and Senate. If there was no room for them in the galleries, they did not ask for permission or wait to be invited to enter the Senate chamber. They simply forced their way onto the Senate floor to hear their senators speak.³⁷

When women learned that Henry Clay would address his colleagues on February 5, more women than could fit in the gallery arrived to hear the Great Compromiser present his great compromise. They crowded the halls leading to the Senate floor, hoping to gain entry. Michigan Democratic senator Alpheus Felch had trouble getting past the “multitude at the door” to the Senate chamber, which was blocked by “such a crowd” made up of “principally ladies.” To get in, Felch explained to his wife, Lucretia, “I elbowed my way along—pushing a little first on one side then on the other.” Someone told the others that Felch was a senator and so they made room. But “one lady said as I crowded past her ‘if we let you pass you must vote to let us ladies in upon the floor.’” Apparently before Felch could respond to this demand, “The pressure without finally became so great that … they pressed into the Senate Chamber, and every nook and corner was filled. The Senators, even, were scarcely able to retain their seats.” Massachusetts Whig representative Horace Mann confirmed that the Senate chamber was “packed, crowded, jammed.” David Outlaw could only hear part of Clay’s speech and could not see the Kentuckian at all.³⁸

FIGURE 8. United States Senate A.D. 1850. Often assumed to be a painting of Henry Clay presenting the Compromise to the Senate, it was intended by the artist to be only a representation of the leaders of the Senate. The absence of the women who crowded the floor is a key indication that it is not a depiction of the presentation of the Compromise. Engraved by Robert Whitechurch, based on a drawing by P. F. Rothermel. (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09398)

In the weeks following Clay’s presentation women were formally invited onto the Senate floor to hear Sam Houston and John Berrien speak. However, on February 13, when Senator Henry Foote, Democrat of Mississippi, made his “usual motion” to admit the “ladies” to the floor, this time to hear Jefferson Davis, Maryland Whig senator James Pearce objected. “The Senate,” he explained, “is not a court of love and beauty. Senators are not troubadours and minne-singers; and we have matters to deal with very different from those of romantic gallantry. The Senate has grave and weighty affairs to transact,” Pearce insisted, and the “oratory of the Senate … is utterly powerless when heard amidst that blaze of beauty with which the Senator from Mississippi delights to surround us.” He claimed that his goal was “to save the Senate from the dangers of this witchery—to avoid the artillery of Cupid, with which of late we have been besieged. I confess myself to have been a victim. I hope,” Pearce pleaded, “this will not be considered ungallant.”39

The other senators had fallen all over themselves to show the women their own gallantry by inviting them into the chamber. Now Pearce was charging senators with being distracted from their serious work by the frivolous beauty that they had permitted to enter into their domain. Senators regarded the presence of the women as a superficial diversion that could be indulged in with little cost, but Pearce was not ready to abandon his image of female coquetry and the temptations it posed. Foote responded to Pearce by reminding him that if he had looked in the gallery, “he would have found that he would not be protected. Even if I withdraw my motion,” Foote suggested, “the Senator will still be in the midst of dangers.” This was all too much for Henry Clay. “Oh, give way,” he shouted out to Pearce. But Senator Pearce was not quite done. “I am not so much afraid of the influence of the ladies at that distance,” he argued, “but I think I have reason to object to being brought into such close quarters.” With that he withdrew his objection and women were allowed onto the floor to hear Jefferson Davis speak.⁴⁰

To all of the senators, except Pearce, women’s participation, even merely as observers, was a matter of levity and an opportunity to display chivalric deference. But Pearce took their participation as a serious threat to the masculine sphere of political activity. Although he alone spoke out in what his colleagues saw as a comical circumstance, he spoke the prejudices, the imagery of the day that they all shared and that they would all act upon if the stakes were ever more important.

Women were not concerned with the dilemmas the senators faced or with their spheres of dominance. And they did not seem to fit the image of frivolity the senators had of them either. When Daniel Webster was to address the Senate they again did not bother to wait for an invitation. On March 7, women came into the chamber long before the Senate began its session, and it was “with great difficulty that any of the Senators could keep their seats.” Alexander Stephens wrote that he could not even enter the Senate chamber, and Speaker Howell Cobb of Georgia offered a similar report: “The ladies … by 12 had take[n] possession of the Senate chamber driving all the grave senators from their seats. The crowd of ladies was so great in the senate chamber that the Vice President had to be squeezed along to his seat which he finally reached after considerable struggles. Mr. Webster had scarcely room to stand upon to make his speech.”41

In addition to demanding entrance onto the Senate floor, many women demonstrated great concern for the content of the debates they sought to hear. David Outlaw wrote his wife, Emily, that the many women who filled the gallery “but shows” the “intense interest which the country feels” for the subjects under discussion. When Emily Baldwin, wife of Connecticut Whig senator Roger Baldwin, visited her husband in Washington during the debates, she went often to the Senate gallery, arriving early to get a front-row seat, reading a book while she waited. The gallery, she wrote to her daughter, was “so crowded that one must go very early or not at all.” She looked on with “great interest” and then reviewed the speeches she had just heard. She “enjoyed it greatly.” “The common routine of business is interesting to me,” she wrote to her family back home. “To see how the machinery moves on—even the presenting of Petitions, which must be so dull to those used to it interests me very much.” Besides visiting the Senate, Emily also liked to go to the Supreme Court.⁴²

Ellen Ewing, daughter of Ohio Whig senator Thomas Ewing, was not as successful at gaining access to the congressional proceedings. While in Washington, she too tried to hear Henry Clay address the Senate. “But being able to get no further than the door” of the Senate chamber, she explained, “I would not stay preferring a ride home in the omnibus to a discussion of the omnibus bill.” Still, her failure to attend did not signify a lack of interest in the proceedings. Women could not serve, but they tried mightily to be involved, breaking with the image assigned to them.⁴³

The same was true at home. Emily Baldwin was deeply invested in local Connecticut politics. She was especially concerned about the fate of the Whigs in the spring election of 1850. When she recognized that the election would go against her party, she wrote her husband that she was “prepared for it in some measure—but it is a powerful & mortifying result.” Elizabeth Underwood, wife of Kentucky Whig senator Joseph Underwood, followed the Senate proceedings closely. She was outraged by the part of the Compromise that provided for the United States to pay Texas $10 million in return for the settlement of its western boundary with New Mexico. To her, it was unjust to pay “unjust claims” under the threat of “vengeance.” She was certain that it would only invite more aggression. Worried that her husband might wonder at her expression of a political opinion, Elizabeth told him, “I guess you think I am encroaching on your sphere & had better return to my former theme of housewifely duties; but recollect families make up States & as I contribute my quota I claim a right to be heard, at least by my husband.” Women, Elizabeth was insisting, deserved to be part of the political process. She wished, she admitted to her husband, that she could be Oliver Cromwell and dissolve this “Rump Congress.”44

Mary Mann challenged her husband, Massachusetts Whig representative Horace Mann, even more directly. She praised Daniel Webster’s “7th of March” speech, which was reviled throughout New England and condemned by her husband in a series of public letters. In addition, she concluded that a speech by Georgia Whig senator John Berrien was “great.” “I confess,” she wrote Horace, “I begin to have more charity than I ever had for the Southerners.” “Should we have been any better,” she asked her husband and fellow educator, “if so educated?” The “intellectual deficiencies consequent upon their education excuse them,” she argued. She further claimed that, except for their denial of the “inalienable right of each human being to the possession of himself … they certainly have reason to feel aggrieved.” Were she a representative or senator, she would introduce a bill indemnifying the “South to the full amount if they abolish slavery,” and she asked her husband to do the same. “That would be true magnanimity, & it would show a disinterestedlove of the poor slave & also of the white brethren of the South.”⁴⁵

Horace Mann did not agree with his wife’s charitable approach. He pointedly told her that the “hallucination that rules the south on the subject of slavery is, indeed enough to excite our compassion, but as excuse of their conduct… [is] useless.” He would be willing to offer to indemnify the South for their slaves, but feared southerners would only “scowl” at such a proposition. “On this subject,” he lectured his wife, “they are not a reasoning people.” Yet, Mary Mann had different ideas about the sectional crisis than her activist husband and felt no hesitancy in expressing them.⁴⁶

New York’s William Seward recognized women’s interest in current controversies and celebrated their participation in the political world, in contrast to the apolitical image usually assigned to them. A group of women from Syracuse, New York, wrote him praising his “moral heroism” and specifically hailing the “higher law” part of his March 11 speech. He responded by defending their participation in the nation’s political life. “Why should not woman speak” to the question of slavery, he asked. “Not only do they participate … in all that befalls our country, but slavery … visits woman with its severest afflictions and its most debasing corruptions. What is slavery but a traffic in human bodies at the cost of human souls and all their inextinguishable affections.”⁴⁷

FIGURE 9. Mary Peabody Mann, educator and wife of Horace Mann. (Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society)

As Seward argued, the fate of women and specifically the fate of their bodies was at stake in the debate over slavery, literally but also figuratively. Nowhere was this more evident than in Mississippi Democratic representative Albert Gallatin Brown’s telling of the history of Texas annexation to an audience in Mississippi just after the first session of the Thirty-First Congress had adjourned. “Like an ardent lover,” Brown declared, “we wooed and won this fair daughter of the Saxon blood. Texas was young, blooming, and independent.” Willingly, “she fell into our arms, and with rapturous hearts we took her for better or for worse.… Texas merged her separate independence into that of the United States.” Brown pointed to the treaty and resolution of annexation that he referred to as the “marriage contract.” Holding up a map of Texas for his audience to see, he described it as a “portrait of the fair damsel as she was, before her limbs were amputated by the Northern doctors, aided by surgeons Clay” and others from the South. The dismemberment of Texas by the Compromise was nothing less than the violation of Texas womanhood and the breaking of the marriage vows. There was no better way to vividly capture for southerners the crime of a compromise that required the sacrifice of slave land than to invoke the imagery of gender assaulted and mutilated.48

Women were an important part of the 1850 debate. They participated as best they could as observers and contributors to the discussion. However, while women challenged their assigned gender roles by their active engagement in Washington politics both on the floor of the Senate and from their homes, traditional gendered images still thrived, as so graphically demonstrated in Brown’s representation of the Texas story.

For many participants in the Compromise debate, still-dominant gendered images helped articulate and define the lines of sectional division. In midcentury America, gendered imagery was often expressed through the language of masculinity. Masculinity was a highly valued trait. Northerners and southerners alike regularly claimed to be manly while charging each other, or each other’s society, with effeminacy. In both the North and the South, and among Whigs, Democrats, and Free Soilers, the questioning of the opposition’s masculine identity was commonplace.

On March 11 in the House of Representatives, Massachusetts Whig representative Orin Fowler accused slavery of emasculating its victims. “In a word,” he told the House, “American slavery sinks man into a machine—annihilates personality—despoils a human being of rational attributes—unmans a man.” On that same day, William Seward addressed the Senate, telling his colleagues that northerners thought it was adherence to antislavery beliefs that was emasculating. “Large majorities in all the free states,” he maintained, “regard sympathy with the slave as an act of unmanly humiliation and self-abasement.” Thus, both slavery and antislavery challenged one’s masculinity. The meanings of manhood, Fowler and Seward demonstrated, could be easily manipulated to serve opposing ends.⁴⁹

Charges of a weak masculine identity could be put to a variety of other uses as well. The targets of these charges were not limited to slavery and antislavery. A failure to stand up to the slave power could also be evidence of a lack of manliness. Ohio Free Soil representative Joshua Giddings was “sickened, nauseated, with this insipid cowardice, this moral and political effeminacy” that characterized those who refused to object to the compromise settlement of the Texas boundary dispute. Giddings’s future son-in-law Indiana Free Soil representative George Julian, made the same point. “I doubt,” he declared, “if there are men enough in Congress to-day to pass a bill through either House for … abolition.” Thaddeus Stevens, Pennsylvania Whig representative, was even more emphatic. Doughfaces, northerners who sympathized with the South, “were an unmanly, an unvirile race, incapable, according to the laws of nature, of reproduction. I hope,” he added, just in case there was any doubt about his meaning, “they have left no descendants.”50

While Stevens attacked the masculinity of those who aided the South, Virginia Democratic representative Richard Meade celebrated the manliness of those who defended the South and questioned the Union. “There is not a man from the South who, if he be a man,” claimed Meade, “does not at times feel his attachment to this Union giving away.” He warned his northern colleagues that “until our rights are respected, the appeals that I shall make to my constituents will be addressed to their sense of wrong, their pride, and manhood.” Virginia Democratic senator R. M. T. Hunter felt compelled to declare that his primary allegiance was to his state by the northern assertions of “doctrines so contrary to all that I learned in youth, to all the opinions of my manhood.” Challenges to one’s masculinity had to be answered, whatever the source.⁵¹

The mixed use of the concept of masculinity to defend slavery and oppose it, to question those who stood by it and those who attacked it, was reflected in the specific gendered words members from both sections used. The debates and the correspondence that accompanied them were replete with these gender-laden terms. Whigs, Free Soilers, and Democrats, southerners and northerners, frequently employed these words to make their points. The focus was manliness, and senators and representatives regularly referred to issues and to each other as “manly” or “unmanly,” and as either a challenge to or an expression of their “manhood.”

This gendered language also reflected the mid-nineteenth-century American transition in the meaning and imagery of masculinity. Early in the century the ideal male was restrained, fair, and honest, while late in the century a more muscular, bold, courageous, and martial model dominated. In the middle years, both meanings had currency, and each was used almost as often in both sections. The words associated with manliness appeared in a striking 8.8 percent of the 1,721 letters and speeches consulted for this study, indicating just how important a role gendered imagery played in midcentury American politics. Gendered terms that could be classified as meaning bold and courageous, honest and fair, or both occurred 88 percent of the time gendered-laden words were used. On a national level, the usages were evenly divided. Instances of gendered language that meant bold or courageous equaled exactly the number of occasions in which the meaning was fair or honest.52

In both sections the words had the same meanings. Only the purposes for which they were used differed. Of the 82 instances in which “manly,” “manliness,” “manhood,” “unmanned,” “unmanly,” and other gendered terms were used by southerners, they meant bold and courageous 39 percent of the time and honest and fair 34 percent of the time. Among northerners, 40 percent of the 102 times gendered terms were used the meaning was bold and courageous. They meant honest and fair 38 percent of the time. In both sections, the meaning was almost evenly divided. Concepts of masculinity were not sectionally determined. Usages among age groups and party loyalists showed some variation, with older men and Whigs in both sections favoring the older meanings of gendered words and Free Soilers and Democrats favoring the newer meanings. But these variations were limited, and all meanings were well-represented among southerners, northerners, Democrats, Whigs, Free Soilers, and men of all ages. How these groups used the language of gender depended on the situations they faced, not their sectional origin. For all Americans this was a period in which meanings and imagery were mixed and in transition.⁵³

Massachusetts Whig Horace Mann defined manhood as embodying honesty and fairness when he accused Daniel Webster, who he was debating, with a departure from “all the rules of courtesy belonging to a gentleman” and with disobeying “the obligations of truth, belonging to a man.” Representative Mann was a radical northern antislavery Whig, but the meaning he gave masculinity was the same as conservative Whig senator John Berrien of Georgia, who labeled Henry Clay’s Compromise “fair, frank, and manly,” and asked senators who would keep slavery out of the territories if their proposal was “fair? Is there any candor or manliness in it?” Both Mann and Berrien emphasized the honesty associated with manliness. So did southern Democratic representative Richard Stanton of Kentucky when he declared James Polk’s plan to establish territories without a ban on slavery to be “frank and manly.” James Seddon, Democratic representative from Virginia, did the same when he praised northern representatives who avowed with “manly frankness” that Congress was bound to admit states without reference to slavery.⁵⁴

Just as often as they considered manliness to mean honest and fair, northerners and southerners defined masculinity as bold and courageous. Correspondents of New Hampshire Free Soil senator John Hale regularly praised his manliness for standing up courageously to the South and its northern allies. One wrote lauding Hale for the “high, manly, courageous course you have pursued” in the Senate. But masculinity was given the same meaning in the North by opponents of the Free Soilers. Conservative Whig senator Truman Smith of Connecticut praised “those who stood up so manfully in opposition to the [Mexican War] policy of the late administration.” Nor was this usage exclusively northern. Southern Democratic senator Sam Houston of Texas also used terms of masculinity in this way. He cautioned his colleagues that to defend the Constitution would “require manly efforts” that would mean standing “firm to the Union, regardless of all personal consequences.” And southern Whigs could just as easily give masculinity the meaning of courage and boldness. North Carolina Whig representative Edward Stanly was pleased when he heard “bold and manly speeches,” and Whig senator John Bell of Tennessee reminded the North that many southerners “manfully and resolutely” opposed expansion into the Mexican territories.55

Most revealing, on many occasions, northerners and southerners gave masculinity the meanings of boldness and frankness at the same time. So interchangeable were these images of manliness in the North and the South that they could be used by the same person in the same situation, even in the same phrase, without any thought of inconsistency. A correspondent of William Seward’s hailed the senator’s March 11 “higher law” speech, calling it a “bold, frank, and manly Expression of the opinions” he held. Massachusetts Whig representative Daniel King claimed the people of his state believed that “slavery must not be extended.” But while he maintained that “our men are, resolute men, they will maintain their rights,” he also argued that “they are honest men, they will yield to others their rights.” North Carolina Democratic representative Abraham Venable praised the “bold, manly, and truthful manifestoes of those States” organizing a southern convention in Nashville, while Louisiana Democratic representative Isaac Morse admitted that some northern “gentleman” claimed “boldly, manfully, and honestly” that no more slave states should be added to the Union. There was nothing incompatible between boldness and honesty. Both could represent the best of mid-nineteenth-century manhood.⁵⁶

Gendered imagery entered into the events, speeches, arguments, and the very language used in the debates over the Compromise of 1850. The prevalence of gendered terms in the debates revealed the high level of gender consciousness that pervaded American society at midcentury. So significant was gendered thinking that it even became part of the way northerners and southerners understood sectional divisions.

When Henry Clay introduced his compromise measures into Congress, he had accused the North of being motivated by “sentiment, sentiment, sentiment alone.” Clay was making the argument that the slavery expansion issue was a “mere abstraction” for the North. “On your side,” he told the North, “it is a sentiment without sacrifice, a sentiment without danger, a sentiment without hazard, without peril, without loss.” It was not a matter of “principles” but “of feeling.” This belief, that for the North the crisis of the Union was a matter of feeling only, was held by others in the South. Sampson Harris, Democratic representative from Alabama, claimed that the “North is impelled by a mere sentiment; a sentiment.” Kentucky Whig representative Daniel Breck maintained that the northern “opinion” that slavery was a sin “must be the result of feeling.” And R. M. T. Hunter, Democratic senator from Virginia, worried that since northern ideas about slavery are “matters rather of sentiment than of opinion,” they would be “harder to combat.” From the southern perspective, northerners had nothing at stake in the sectional debate but their own sense of emotional well-being.57

Northerners responded angrily to the charge that their views stemmed simply from sentiment and not from substance, and they suggested that in addition to being false, this insulting accusation was a challenge to their manhood. New Jersey Whig senator William Dayton insisted that the northern commitment to free soil was not a “mere matter of sentiment.” Rather, it was “our duty, as statesmen and as men.” Northern views originated not in “sickly sentiment, but judgment.” Sentiment, and especially sickly sentiment, was a feminine attribute; judgment was a hallmark of male character. Dayton did not appreciate being assigned a feminine characteristic and neither did other northerners. John Thurman, Whig representative from New York, noted that the South often complained that northern opposition to “slavery proceeds from a sickly sentimentalism.” But to Thurman it was “conscience” that motivated northern opposition to slavery expansion, not an effeminate “mawkish sentimentality.” Daniel King, Whig representative from Massachusetts, also complained that the South charged that northern opposition to southern expansion was a “matter of sentiment.” It was instead, he contended, a “matter of substance and moment.” Men made hard judgments. They did not act from weak, “mawkish” emotionalism.⁵⁸

The dichotomy between female-linked sentiment, on the one hand, and masculine-associated judgment, or conscience and substance as Thurman and King put it, on the other, was commonplace in the discourse of the day. Ohio Free Soil senator Salmon Chase cautioned the Senate, “We should not, we must not, be moved from [our duty] by any appeal addressed to sympathy and not to judgment.” A correspondent of Georgia Whig senator John Berrien made the same association. He was ready to accede to a compromise of the sectional issues but admitted that this was the “determination of my judgment rather than my feelings.” Alabama Democratic senator William King also paired the two words when he criticized friends who opposed the Texas boundary settlement, concluding that they had “suffered their feelings to get the better of their judgment.” Wherever it might lead, judgment was always superior to feeling.59

This division between judgment and sentiment mirrored the classic split between thought and emotion, or head and heart, that was a typical assumption at the time and had strong gender associations as well. Referring to this division, Henry Clay declared that “all just legislation should be the result both of the head and of the heart.” He was speaking about the District of Columbia slave-trade bill. Of less importance, except to the correspondent, Kentucky Whig representative Humphrey Marshall received a letter from a constituent congratulating him for his speech on hemp, which “could have emanated only from a heightened head and a patriotic heart,” and which was “honorable alike to head and heart.” So widespread was the assumption that emotion and thought were in constant tension that the division between them even appeared in discussions of agriculture.⁶⁰

The eulogies to John Calhoun in early April 1850 often referred to the divide between emotion and intellect, both of which seemed to be central to Calhoun’s very being. In his eulogy for his state’s legendary senator, South Carolina Democratic representative Isaac Holmes dreamed of a time when Calhoun’s memory would inspire “peace on earth; good will to all mankind.” As part of that vision, Holmes predicted that “there shall arise a union of thought and sentiment.” Discussing his closeness to Calhoun as death neared, North Carolina Democratic representative Abraham Venable claimed that he “became intimately acquainted with his mind, and above all, with his heart.” Moved and emotional, Daniel Webster praised his old colleague by saying that “there was nothing groveling, or low, or meanly selfish, that came near the head or the heart of Mr. Calhoun.” But, most significantly, South Carolina’s Democratic senator Andrew Butler made clear the gendered nature of this dichotomy by identifying specific character traits as a result of Calhoun’s inheritance from either his father or his mother. Calhoun, he explained, “derived from the paternal stock, intellect and self-reliance, and from the Caldwell’s enthusiasm and impulse.” The heart was associated with the maternal, feminine side of Calhoun’s family and the intellect with the paternal, masculine side. Sentiment was a female characteristic, and intellect, or judgment, was masculine.61

Judgment was critically important to men in nineteenth-century America. Northerners and southerners alike associated it with conscience. To follow the “dictates” or the “convictions” of one’s judgment, like following the dictates of one’s conscience, was not only considered a sacred duty but also a fundamental aspect of one’s masculinity. Senators and representatives stated the importance of their judgment in a variety of ways, but always the message was clear. A man’s judgment was sacrosanct.

Henry Clay followed this pattern of expression. He explained to his colleagues that he came to the current session of Congress “with a settled purpose to follow the deliberate dictates of my own judgment, wherever that judgment might carry me.” Vermont Whig senator Samuel Phelps spoke similarly of having “followed the dictates of my own judgment,” as did Connecticut Whig senator Roger Baldwin, who declared that he “must act according to the dictates of my own judgment.” South Carolina Democratic senator Andrew Butler and Alabama Democratic senator Jeremiah Clemens offered only slight variations on what had become an established pattern for congressmen. Butler explained that on the Texas vote he had acted from what he believed to be “the convictions of his own judgment,” and Clemens declared that on the Compromise bill he would follow the “dictates of my best judgment.” When a senator or representative made a decision, it was his judgment that determined his choice.⁶²

Given this practically lockstep commitment to the sanctity of one’s judgment, it is not surprising to find that senators and representatives took offense at any attempt to force them to violate their judgment and reject the dictates of their conscience. To coerce them into abandoning what was so central to them was to deny a key element of their identity, an element closely associated with their dignity as men.

The requirements of the eclectic package of compromise measures Congress debated for most of the session did precisely that. It forced senators and representatives to vote for elements of a compromise they opposed in order to have measures they supported voted into law. “I have faith,” declared Missouri Democratic senator Thomas Hart Benton, “in open, manly, responsible declarations and votes, in which every Senator speaks for himself, and stands for a Senator.” By combining some measures Benton supported with others he opposed, the compromise package denied Benton the free exercise of his judgment. “I am for open and independent voting upon every point,” Benton insisted. Anything less forced dishonest choices on Congress and was therefore unmanly.⁶³

William Seward recognized the same challenge and stated the dilemma presented by the omnibus package of compromise measures perfectly. “If we vote for the bill to obtain the measures that we approve, we must vote also for measures which our judgments condemn,” he explained. But “if we vote against the bill on account of measures which we disapprove, we must sacrifice others, which we desire to see prevail.” This was unacceptable to the New York senator. “He who obliges me to vote for measures which I disapprove, by combining them with those which I do approve, seeks to control my judgment by coercion.” A loss of control over something as basic as one’s judgment could not be tolerated. “I think all legislative compromises radically wrong and essentially vicious,” Seward concluded. “They involve the surrender of the exercise of judgment and conscience on distinct and separate questions.” No man could countenance such a violation of duty.64

Seward and Benton were not alone in their concern. New York Whig representative Henry Bennett also recognized the problem. He declared succinctly, “I cannot give up the convictions of my own judgment” by voting for the package of compromise measures. John Davis, Whig senator from Massachusetts, also protested the package. It placed senators, he explained, “in a position in which they must violate their judgment to accomplish their anxious desires.” The manly attribute of judgment, tied closely to the masculine intellect, could not be violated without challenging a deeply held aspect of American male identity.⁶⁵

Men should be permitted to act as men and make principled judgments, and then be allowed to stand by them. Anything that forced men to abandon their judgments challenged their manhood. But were all men worthy of respect? One correspondent of Seward’s, remembering those at the center of the debate, included men of all races among those whose manhood should be valued. He complained that in his “7th of March” speech Daniel Webster had claimed that the government had “trodden down no man’s liberty.” But “it is not true!” declared Seward’s correspondent. “Is the colored no man! Are there no Men at Washington with honest upright principles that can meet this polished statesman on the merits of the case?” African Americans were men, yet were there no men in Congress ready to recognize them as men?⁶⁶

There were some, but not many senators or representatives who would champion an African American man’s right to manhood, as Seward’s correspondent had demanded. Neither northern nor southern society was concerned with the rights of African Americans. They were more focused on creating negative images of each other. Henry Clay recognized this and could find no future for the country in the unceasing cycle of denunciations. He warned that “it is not by such reproachful epithets as ‘lords of the loom,’ ‘lords of the plantation,’ ‘the slave power,’ and ‘the money power,’ that this country is to be harmonized.” Clay was correct. The conflicting images of northern and southern societies were enough by themselves to make reconciliation difficult. Perceived assaults on gender identity made the task still more challenging, if not insurmountable. Gender touched a wide variety of issues tied to the sectional conflict. Concepts of sentiment and judgment, head and heart, effeminacy and masculinity, honesty and courage, all joined the North-South confrontation and intensified it. Issues of manhood, once merged with sectionalism, reinforced the existing divisions and profoundly endangered Clay’s dream of a harmonious republic.67

Still, there was no greater test of American manhood than loyalty to the Founding Fathers. Battles over that loyalty also pervaded the conflict in 1850, and victory in that contest was sought as passionately as any constitutional point or territorial principle. “Getting right” with the fathers was imperative, and antebellum American men sought to demonstrate that not only were they on the side of the fathers, but the fathers were on their side as well.