7
The Language of Conflict and the Battlefield of Memory
On Christmas Day 1849, as the Thirty-First Congress was convening, South Carolina Democratic representative William Colcock’s wife, Emmeline, wrote to her mother from Washington, predicting that the coming “session will be a very stormy one as the slavery question will be the most prominent and very hostile feelings exist on that subject.” Two days before, a correspondent of newly elected House Speaker Howell Cobb expressed “regret that I cannot congratulate you my friend on your election to the Speakership … for it will doubtless prove a perfect Maelstrom of the most unpleasant & infernal vexations that ever a poor devil has had the misfortune to be sucked into.… It will be,” he warned Cobb, “an honor purchased at the expense of tasting a ‘small sprinkling’ of Hell itself!”1
These warnings of a contentious congressional debate proved well-founded. Two members of Congress, one from the North, the other from the South, both used Psalm 31 to depict what was taking place around them. South Carolina Democratic senator Robert Barnwell called it a “strife of words,” while Whig representative Robert Winthrop from Massachusetts, using the more accurate translation, declared it to be a “strife of tongues.” Both men described a congressional debate that demonstrated dramatically the deep and bitter divisions that had overtaken the nation.2
The words spoken in Congress expressed a reality that could not be denied. “Words, sir, become things,” declared North Carolina Democratic representative Abraham Venable. “Speeches, letters, and editorials,” he explained, were filled with terms such as “Southern Hotspurs, nullifiers, ultras, disunionists per se, and traitors,” and meanings are “attached to them.” But Venable had hope. He gave each of these terms a positive meaning and had faith that “the people … the great lexicographers—will revise this edition of newly-defined terms.” Robert Barnwell joined with him in that hope. Upset that Henry Clay had used the “epithet ‘disunionist’” against a southerner, Barnwell concluded that, ultimately, “words do not make things.” Whatever meaning they assigned to reality was impermanent. “Rebel” had been “odious” to those who denied our ancestors their rights, but it became a positive term “to the ears of those who resisted them.” “Disunionist,” he claimed, “is rapidly assuming at the South the meaning which rebel took when it was baptized in the blood” of Bunker Hill. The same words could condemn or praise, depending on who was using them and who was listening. But either way, they assumed great importance in 1850, revealing the foundations of sectional belief and exercising a powerful influence over the meaning and significance of events.3
That power could be enhanced, as Barnwell found, when associated with the founding. The language of memory proved to be an effective and frequently employed weapon in the sectional battle over the Compromise. Loyalty to the Founding Fathers and the revolutionary heritage were the litmus tests to which all Americans were subject. Words and arguments had to pass muster with the founders to be taken seriously, and the debaters of 1850 proved wondrously adept at arguing that their words reflected the true ideals of the fathers and the Revolution, while their opponents’ words did not.
But words did not have to reference the founding to have an impact, and the words of no two representatives had a greater impact on southerners than those of Whigs Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Horace Mann of Massachusetts. Months after their speeches created their initial outrage, Kentucky Whig representative Humphrey Marshall still remembered them. Marshall quoted Mann telling Congress that he preferred disunion to the extension of slavery and reminded his colleagues that Thaddeus Stevens had claimed that slavery degraded free white labor and made southerners “arrogant, insolent, intolerant, and tyrannical.” Marshall concluded that the North had to understand that southerners could not feel safe “while such doctrines educate the public mind, or wound the public ear.” Words could teach the public damaging lessons and transform public opinion, and the words of Stevens and Mann proved especially instructive.4
Other southerners also focused on the impact of their opponents’ words. Virginia Democratic senator James Mason was appalled that slavery had been “spoken of as a crime.” “Such vituperative language has been heaped upon us day after day, not by fanatics only, but, I regret to say, by sovereign States upon this floor.” State legislatures had sent antislavery resolutions to Congress, and their language, along with that of representatives and senators, offended southerners in Washington as well as, potentially, those reading their words across the South. To Richard Meade, Democratic representative from Virginia, this was an old story. “Our ears have been filled for the last fifteen years with an abuse and scurrility, of which it is difficult to conceive that the most vulgar breeding could teach the tongue utterance.” He was shocked to see representatives “speak in terms so essentially low and ill bred as those we sometimes hear on this floor.” To Louisiana Democratic representative Isaac Morse, the treatment the South was receiving in Congress was unique. Morse concluded sadly that “where grave old men were wont to talk calmly and wisely—now hear constant and continued fulminations of one portion of the American people against the other.” “The Union,” warned William McWillie, Democratic representative from Mississippi, “is in danger.” “For proof of this fact I need not go beyond this hall. The speeches that have been made, the impediments to organization that have occurred, and the whole action of the House, must point every sane mind to the dangers that threaten us.” The language of conflict was taking its toll.5
Southerners were convinced that this language mattered. But did the language used in the debates reflect the reality of conflict or did it create that reality, as those who wished to believe that sectional issues were mere distractions often claimed? Was language a way of agitating artificial issues or did it authentically represent the underlying conflicting values and interests that plagued the country? If words did indeed become “things,” were those “things” representations of actual sectional division or the devices of irresponsible leaders seeking selfish, political advantage?
What to one congressional speaker was a sincerely held belief might well have seemed like rank demagoguery to another. In order to protect their own interests, some in Congress argued that their opponents’ language was only meant to agitate. But agitation was a fraught word that had different meanings for different parties to the sectional conflict. The term itself was a touchstone. How one understood agitation explained much about one’s perspective on the crisis. For southerners, it represented the reality of the threat they faced in a divided nation. John Calhoun asserted that the country’s problems “commenced with the agitation of the slavery question.” For others, it explained the artificiality of the crisis and enabled them to deny the threat. Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and Stephen Douglas all believed the slavery expansion issue to be only a distraction. For them, agitation represented the attempt to create a divisive issue where none need to have existed. Without agitation there would be no sectional crisis, no reason for a compromise, and certainly not such an extended struggle over one.6
Free Soil New Hampshire senator John Hale knew that his party was regularly charged with irresponsible agitation and the use of inflammatory language, so he turned the accusation around and claimed the same of southern senators and representatives. “The people of the South never suspected that they were being wronged and insulted,” he charged, “till they were told so from the city of Washington. I believe that disturbing matter goes out in the speeches made in this Hall, and in the other end of the capitol.”7
Some northern Democrats wanted to play down sectional issues they could not easily resolve within the confines of their national political coalition, and so they, too, blamed provocative language in the halls of Congress for the conflict. William Bissell, Democratic representative from Illinois, worried about the impact of southern speeches on a southern population that would believe all the warnings of northern domination contained in them. Northern Whig moderates had a similar concern, although few matched Webster’s invective against those he termed agitators. He denounced “foolish speeches and violent speeches in both Houses of Congress” and concluded that the “vernacular tongue of the country has become greatly vitiated, depraved, and corrupted, by the style of our congressional debates.” These words were greeted with laughter in the Senate chamber by those who may have felt ridiculed, but Webster was not joking. He seriously believed the very language of the debate to be a significant cause of the national turmoil. Others agreed with New York Whig representative John Thurman that the “public was at peace” and “agitation is strictly congressional in its character.” The assumption of all those who complained about disruptive rhetoric was that agitators in Congress were creating what Thurman called “unnecessary” issues. Without their drive for political gain, the country would be at rest.8
Why were these worried senators and representatives so sensitive to the impact of language, an impact they did not deny? The words of their opponents disturbed them because they were potent. These concerned congressmen believed the words spoken in Congress accurately addressed the fears, prejudices, and interests of the population, North and South. Local politicians gained popularity because they could effectively speak to what mattered most to their constituents, and the same was true of those making speeches in the House and Senate for home consumption. Congressional debaters were denounced by their opponents as agitators because these opponents feared that congressional messages reached their audiences and articulated what their publics believed. Congressmen considered their own words to be authentic representations of popular attitudes about real concerns.9
South Carolina Democratic senator Andrew Butler knew that congressional speech addressed the realities of the sectional conflict. “We have been here for nine months, constantly engaged in the discussion of one subject,” he explained in August. “If affairs have assumed a sectional aspect, it is because they originated in causes deep and abiding.” “Who has brought on this crisis?” Butler asked. He did not blame agitators or any individual or section. “I say,” he argued, “that events, perhaps beyond the control of either or all of us, have brought about a state of things, the present symptoms of which are so portentous.” Sectionalism was not the invention of anyone or any party. It was the unavoidable response to concrete conflicting interests and a cascading series of divisive events.10
Butler was a southern radical. Yet moderates from the North and South concurred. Cyrus Dunham, Democratic representative from Indiana, recognized that serious and fundamental differences existed between the sections. “We do not make sufficient allowances for each other’s prejudices and feelings,” he admitted. People raised in slavery came to believe it was a “civil, moral and religious blessing,” while those from a contrasting environment in the North saw it as a “civil moral, and religious curse.” Joseph Underwood, Whig senator from Kentucky, recognized that “men have differed, do differ, and will continue to differ in regard to the institution [of slavery] upon moral and religious principles.” Words expressed but did not create the crisis over what was so deeply believed.11
The debates demonstrated the potency of language, and at times language led to action. Confrontations could become more than verbal duels when language became especially intense. After another senator claimed he was on good terms with all his fellow senators, John Calhoun responded bluntly, “I am not—I will not be on good terms with those who wish to cut my throat.” Referring to William Seward, Calhoun explained that “the honorable Senator from New York justifies the North in treachery. I am not the man to hold social intercourse with such as these.” Calhoun was willing to engage in everyday pleasantries with his opponents. “I recognize them as Senators—say good morning, and shake hands with them—but that is the extent of my intercourse with those who I think are endangering the Union.”12
Calhoun’s encounters were minor and trivial when compared to those of others. The most celebrated confrontation on the Senate floor in 1850 took place in April between Missouri Democratic senator Thomas Hart Benton and Henry Foote, Democratic senator from Mississippi. While the encounter was driven by the idiosyncrasies of two colorful personalities, it captured the depth of division in Congress and dramatically demonstrated the level of anger and frustration that permeated the session. It also showed the potential for bitter verbal exchanges to turn into actual physical conflicts.
Foote was angry at Benton for initially opposing the acquisition of California but then demanding its immediate, unconditional admission in opposition to Foote’s plan for admitting the territory as a state only as part of the omnibus package of compromise measures. In February, he accused Benton of being motivated by “self-love” and concluded that the Missouri senator was deserving of “censures which a regard for decorum alone restrains me from uttering.”13
In March, the conflict escalated. Foote told the Senate he would not denounce Benton as a coward only because “such language is unfitted for this audience—but,” Foote suggested, if Benton wished to “patch up his reputation for courage, now greatly on the wane, he will certainly have an opportunity of doing so whenever he makes known his desire.… At present, he is shielded by his age, his open disavowal of the obligatory force of the laws of honor, and his Senatorial privileges.” This was too much for the Missouri senator. “Can I take a cudgel to him here?” he angrily inquired of his colleagues. “Is a Senator to be blackgaurded here in the discharge of his duty, and the culprit go unpunished?”14
That encounter set the stage for a stunning confrontation. Words spoken in anger finally led to an actual physical attack, or near attack. In April, when denounced yet again by Foote, Benton advanced on him. In response, Foote drew a pistol, at which point Benton dramatically shouted, “I have no pistols! Let him fire! … Stand out of the way, and let the assassin fire!” Other senators immediately rose to their feet and quieted the belligerents. New York Democratic senator Daniel Dickinson took away Foote’s pistol and locked it in his desk drawer before it could be used, and Wisconsin Democratic senator Henry Dodge physically restrained his friend Benton. The conflict of tongues that had characterized the session for months had almost become a conflict of weapons. A new level of invective and mutual recrimination had been reached. The encounter was depicted graphically in print and became emblematic of a session that was defined by incessant, bitter disputation.15
Words did not need to lead to a physical conflict to be damaging. They could be just as harmful simply by remaining words in a speech or phrases spoken in debate. Often the most intense and damaging words were those used to claim exclusive possession of the American past. In many confrontations over a variety of issues, both northerners and southerners insisted that they alone deserved to wear the mantle of the revolutionary generation. As they debated the future of the Union, it was crucial for each side to believe that it was acting in accordance with the values and traditions of the past. Northerners and southerners alike regularly claimed that they represented the section that was truly loyal to the old republic, while their opponents were subverting the Union the founders had created. Only one section could be the true keepers of the flame of the Revolution, and each fought mightily for that distinction.16
FIGURE 10. Scene in Uncle Sam’s Senate by E.W.C. (Edward Williams Clay). This sketch depicts the armed confrontation between Mississippi senator Henry Foote and Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton on April 17, 1850. (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62–4835)
One way to take possession of the American memory was to hold onto the surviving objects of the revolutionary period. As northerners and southerners debated, they both sensed a past receding beyond their reach, and as it faded they grasped onto its remnants, not only with their words, the “things” their language created, but with actual things that had been created in their hallowed past. Relics of the old republic become important to those debating what the character of the Union would be in the years to come. Both sides participated in this movement toward historic preservation as a way of restoring the lost national unity of the revolutionary era.17
Fearing an end to the Union the fathers had created, Kentucky Whig representative Finis McLean, brother of Supreme Court justice John McLean, begged his colleagues to “postpone” its demise at least as long as the Revolution’s artifacts and the men who fought in the heroic battles of the past survived. The old republic could not be lost while the physical and human witnesses to its founding achievements were still present. The Union should last, he insisted, “until the finger of time has erased the signatures of our fathers from the old parchment which hangs in the Patent Office, and contains the original Declaration of Independence.”18
Finis McLean hoped that day would be a long way off, but even now, Massachusetts Whig representative Horace Mann worried, the spirit of the Revolution was fading. Reminding his wife, Mary, that he was writing to her on Bunker Hill Day, Mann admitted that “there is not much of the Bunker Hill spirit here” in Washington. The death of John Calhoun on March 31 in the midst of the debates awakened many to the passing of the old republic. From his home in South Carolina, former governor James Hammond observed in his diary that the leading contemporaries of Calhoun, “Webster, Cass, Benton, Berrien are all as old [as] Mr. C. and Clay much older. In five years most or all of them will go.” Sadly, Hammond concluded, “I think these men as diverse as they were and are, are the last links of the chain of the Union.” The spirit, the men, even the documents of the revolutionary era were disappearing, and the generation of 1850 felt the loss.19
The march of death could not be halted, but the objects of the Revolution could be saved and with them, perhaps, the republic whose birth they had witnessed. In the midst of the debates, Kentucky Whig senator Joseph Underwood sent his wife, Elizabeth, a piece of the table on which the Declaration of Independence had been signed. “We are a strange people!” he decided. “We cherish as relics all the memorials connected with the birth of our nation at the time when its dissolution is threatened & its existence is spurned!” Holding onto the relics of the past was a way of holding onto what they represented. They were needed now more than ever because people feared that what they memorialized was, at that exact moment, slipping away. Memory could preserve in the minds of Americans what was in danger of being lost in the halls of Congress.20
No object represented more directly the spirit of the national unity the country feared it was losing than George Washington’s Farewell Address, which had warned against precisely the internal divisions the country was experiencing. Just days before Henry Clay introduced his compromise measures to Congress, he offered a joint resolution proposing the purchase of the original manuscript of Washington’s address. Clay had seen an advertisement for the sale of the document and feared it might be bought by a foreigner and taken out of the country. This he could not allow. “We may derive great pleasure from tracing the narratives of the glory of our ancestors and the deeds of the men of celebrity in our own country,” Clay conceded. “Yet some physical memorial of them, some tangible, palpable object, always addresses itself to our hearts and to our feelings.… Is there,” asked Clay, “an American son of Washington, as we all are, who cannot and who will not always look with pleasure and satisfaction upon the objects with which his name was connected?” Amid all the talk of disunion, “which assails our ears in every part of this country, and in both halls of Congress—who is there that would not find refreshment and delight behind the Farewell Address of Washington to the people of the country?”21
It was because this was a moment of great danger for the Union that Clay thought it appropriate that Washington’s words cautioning against sectionalism should be preserved in their original form. Who would not now accept the “paternal and patriotic advice with pleasure that was written by” Washington’s “own hand,” demanded Clay, “that hand which, after having grasped the sword that achieved the liberties of our country, traced with the instrument of peace the document which then gave us that advice.”22
With the Union at risk, how could the nation not hold onto the physical embodiment of the legacy of unity the “Father of His Country” had left to his admiring people with such paternal love. Daniel Webster, for one, supported Clay’s resolution, and he also agreed that it was the “natural disposition of men” to value “what might perhaps be called the relics of the great and good … benefactors of their country.” Both senators wished to be able to grasp in their hands a connection to the old republic now that the republic itself seemed to be at risk of disappearing.23
They were not alone. In just ten years Alexander Stephens would lead the Confederacy out of the Union, but in 1850 he was not totally without hope. Perhaps if northerners saw the address, he argued, “they would refresh their recollections with the salutary suggestions it contained, that the safety of the Union could only be maintained by brotherly love.” The address could serve as an inspiration for the rebirth of the Union Washington had envisioned. “Let the casement that shall contain the sacred treasure,” proclaimed Stephens, “be a national altar about which and around which the true friends of the Republic, from all sections, may come and renew their vows to the Constitution and its compromises, in the spirit in which it was formed.”24
Stephens, Clay, Webster, and those who favored purchase of the address dreamed that if the memory of the founding was “refreshed” through the acquisition of Washington’s famous document, if it became an object of veneration, then the country would be reunited as Washington had wished. His warning against sectional strife would then be observed at last and the Union would be secure.
Relics could, then, offer hope. But they could also serve as warnings of the impending loss of what the founders had achieved. As Henry Clay presented his Compromise to Congress, he famously held up for his colleagues to see a splinter from the coffin of George Washington that had been given to him the night before. “It was a warning voice,” declared Clay, “coming from the grave to the Congress now in session to beware, to pause, to reflect before they lend themselves to any purposes which shall destroy that Union which was cemented by his exertions and example.” This hallowed artifact, he hoped, would awaken the people and their representatives to their responsibilities to their Founding Fathers.25
Chief among those responsibilities was the preservation of the ideals and institutions of the past. Sam Houston, Democratic senator from Texas, urged his colleagues not to forget the “blessings which we have inherited and enjoyed.” He insisted that the country must “transmit to our posterity the same glorious institutions which we have inherited from our forefathers.” North Carolina Whig senator George Badger was confident that this mission would not be abandoned. “I will not believe,” he declared, “that we have so degenerated from our sires of the Revolution as not to be able harmoniously to adjust the questions before us.” These southern calls to preserve the goals of the fathers were proclaimed just as loudly by northerners. The founders, explained the young Wisconsin Democratic senator Isaac Walker, “ignited the fires on the altar of freedom and left them brightly burning, with the injunction to us to keep the flame perpetual.” Illinois Democratic senator James Shields looked beyond his responsibilities to the Union. “To me,” he argued, “this is not merely an American question.… If the great experiment of republican government fails on this continent, it need never be attempted again in this world.” The “glorious institutions which you have received as a legacy from a wise and noble ancestry” were at stake. The founders had dreamed of a worldwide political transformation, and now their vision was threatened by the sectional confrontation of 1850.26
As the debates progressed, it became increasingly clear that the American memory could not be separated from the sectional confrontation. What was a mutual effort to preserve a unified history rapidly became a sectional competition to take possession of it. With such an intense attachment to the past and to the mission of the founders, it was not surprising that northerners and southerners would in time come to judge each other according to their loyalty to the ideals and accomplishments of their common ancestors. Each side in this contest attempted to prove that its concept of the Union was correct by demonstrating that its memory of the founders’ intentions was more accurate and profound than its adversary’s, and that its commitment to their goals was more pure. Language was the weapon they used on this battlefield of memory. Whether they were declaring their devotion to George Washington or vowing their antagonism to King George III, whether they were debating the meaning of the Declaration of Independence or contesting their positions on slavery and slavery expansion, both sections attempted to prove that their dedication to the founders was beyond doubt.27
Northern and southern attempts to assume exclusive ownership of the founders’ legacy focused first and foremost on the memory of George Washington. The “Father of His Country” was beyond reproach. He, more than any other figure, represented the revolutionary tradition in America. The control of his memory, proof that a section was following in his footsteps, would secure its patriotic reputation, as it would that of a political leader who was seen as heir to Washington’s greatness. A correspondent of Daniel Webster told the senator that his March 7 speech placed him in exactly that position. “If Washington had arisen from his tomb & had addressed the Senate on that day,” he wrote Webster, “he would have uttered the words of your speech.” Webster took his correspondent’s judgment to heart and soon after conceded that “where Washington has led, I am willing to follow, at a vast distance, indeed, & with unequal, but not faltering steps.” With forced humility, Webster was ready to take on Washington’s mantle.28
Each section was eager to do the same. Joseph Jackson, Democratic representative from Georgia, reminded his colleagues that Washington, along with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, were slaveholders. “Yet,” he complained, “we are taunted as Aristocrats.” Pointing to Washington’s portrait hanging in the hall, he asked if any northerner would rise and call Washington an aristocrat? But New Hampshire Free Soil senator John Hale, for one, was not convinced of Washington’s proslavery credentials. He claimed that Washington should be considered an abolitionist since he freed his slaves in his will. Neither section was ready to surrender the memory of the nation’s Founding Father to the other. Such was Washington’s importance that representatives from each section devised ways to claim him.29
The most serious sectional battle over Washington’s memory took place between John Calhoun and Michigan Democratic senator and former presidential candidate Lewis Cass. In his final speech to the Senate, Calhoun referred to Washington as the “the illustrious Southerner whose mortal remains repose on the western bank of the Potomac. He was one of us,” declared Calhoun, “a slaveholder and a planter.” That was too much for the Michigan senator. Cass complained that Calhoun had called Washington an “illustrious southerner” rather than a “great American.” “The Washington of our whole country— receives in this Senate the epithet of ‘southerner,’” cried Cass, “as if the glory of his name and fame could be divided or assigned to a single section of his beloved country.” Listening in the chamber, Calhoun refused to take this charge quietly and concede an error. He countered Cass’s accusation by explaining that Washington’s Farewell Address, which Congress had just voted to purchase in a gesture of unity, was now being used against the South, and that southerners were being “stigmatized as disunionists.” “It was to meet this, that I reminded the Senate and world—and rightly reminded them—that Washington was an illustrious Southerner.” But, Calhoun added, “he was not less an illustrious American.” The South Carolina senator was ready to grant Washington the status of a national hero, but Cass’s sensitivity had revealed how very important an issue Washington’s identity was. Calhoun had called him “one of us,” and any suggestion that he belonged to one section and not the other brought an immediate response.30
Calhoun’s complaint that the Farewell Address had been used to attack the South was not an isolated allegation. The address, which pleaded for national unity and tolerance, and had been purchased to further those goals, now proved to be the greatest point of contention in the debate over Washington’s memory. Since the address was Washington’s parting advice to his country, the battle over its meaning represented, more than anything else could, a fight over his legacy. Northerners claimed that the South, by threatening disunion, was engaged in exactly the kind of sectionalism Washington had warned against, but southerners found that suggestion offensive. Arkansas Democratic representative Robert Johnson was angry that the address was now being made the “means of disuniting and destroying the South.” He was certain that if alive, Washington would “indignantly condemn the sectionalism and injustice of the North.” Jeremiah Clemens, Democratic senator from Alabama, argued that the address was employed by those “who are seeking to oppress us.” Taking the argument further, Tennessee Democratic senator Hopkins Turney claimed that some northerners were violating that portion of the address that warned against foreign influence. Specifically, he charged that by joining forces with the Free Soilers, former president Martin Van Buren was uniting “himself and his destinies with this party in the United States, governed by British abolitionists and by crowned heads, according to their own avowal.” The address, along with the first president’s memory, could be mined to serve the purposes of either section.31
The address was used in a variety of other ways as well. It could even be turned against enemies within a section. Southern sympathizer Thomas Ross, Democratic representative from Pennsylvania, accused his fellow Pennsylvanian, Whig representative Thaddeus Stevens, of violating Washington’s admonition against sectional strife. By calling the government a “despotism,” Stevens had defamed “the memories of Washington, and Franklin, and Madison.” Others focused on the actual intent of the address. Jacob Miller, Whig senator from New Jersey, introduced into the Senate resolutions from his state’s legislature asking that Washington’s warning against sectional animosities be respected. Echoing this sentiment on February 22, North Carolina Whig representative David Outlaw wrote his wife, Emily, questioning whether this would “be the last day, that as a United people we are to celebrate the birth-day of Gen. Washington.” Outlaw was not sure how peace could be restored, but he still hoped “that the sectional strife which now unhappily prevails may be quieted, and that our country may go forward in its giant strides to greatness.” Washington’s vision of a united America continued to hold great appeal across the nation he helped found.32
Whether seeking peace or sectional advantage, tying one’s cause to George Washington and his address was a wise and often-employed tactic. But just as common was the use made of the memory of the other George from the revolutionary period, King George III and the British Empire. Accusations that a sectional enemy was acting more like George III and the British than America’s heroes was a favorite device of both sides in the Compromise debate. David Hubbard, Democratic representative from Alabama, called Washington, Jefferson, and John Adams “disunionists” when as patriots they responded to King George III by breaking up the union of the thirteen colonies: “The Tories who profited from that bad government were all ‘union men.’” Hubbard suggested that “Good men, who understand what is going on, are ‘disunionists’ under bad governments.” Echoing his Alabama colleague, Albert Gallatin Brown, Democratic representative from Mississippi, asserted that the South did not seek disunion, but it did not fear it either. “Our fathers felt the oppression,” he reminded the House. “They saw the hand that aimed the blow, and they resolved to resist.” The North might call it treason, Brown declared, but so did the British. Another Democratic Mississippi representative, William McWillie, paraphrased Jefferson to make the same point. “The Tree of Liberty has ever been watered with the blood and manured with the bones of patriots.… If necessary,” he declared, “we will do as our fathers have done before us.” Southerners pictured themselves as the true revolutionaries and the North as the tyrannical opposition.33
Tyrannies did not always take the form of a single ruler or an oppressive empire. Majorities, southerners argued, could be just as oppressive. Texas Democratic representative David Kaufman explained that “it is totally immaterial to the South whether oppression comes to them in the person of one man or of many—of a king or an unlicensed and unscrupulous majority of those whom they have loved as brothers.” And there was another similarity between the southern memory of the Revolution and their present situation. John Savage, Democratic representative from Tennessee, recalled that a servile war was one of the means King George III intended to use to maintain the subjugation of America. “It is,” he declared, “our duty to-day to see that modern abolition shall meet a similar fate” as George III. The specter of a slave insurrection was never far from southern minds or from their memories.34
Northerners shared with southerners the same revolutionary past, but their memory of it was strikingly different. To Massachusetts Whig representative Horace Mann, “All the atrocities” of King George III were “mercy and loving-kindness compared with the wrongs and privations of three millions of fellow-beings, now existing among us.” Northerners believed the Declaration of Independence was the document of the revolutionary era most relevant to the crisis of 1850. Free Soilers, often labeled as fanatics by opponents in the North and South, were, as always, anxious to show loyalty to the Revolution and its founding documents, and so they especially made a point of emphasizing the importance of the Declaration. John Hale, Free Soil senator from New Hampshire, declared that he wanted to “put history right.” John Calhoun had claimed that agitation of the slavery issue began in 1835 with organized abolitionism, but actually, insisted Hale, “he ought to have gone back to 1776, and … found one of the most ‘agitating’ and ‘fanatical’ papers that he could well find, beginning with the declaration that all men are created equal.” Hale was particularly intent on applying the founders’ commitment to trial by jury to current fugitive slave cases, and so he appealed directly for support to the Declaration, claiming denial of trial by jury “was one of the causes” listed in the Declaration that “justified our fathers in going into the revolutionary war.” He concluded that “if the right of trial by jury was worth a seven years’ bloody war in 1776, it is certainly worth a struggle on this floor.” If the founders had been ready to fight, so was Hale.35
Other Free Soilers also looked to the Declaration for support. Joshua Giddings, stalwart Free Soil representative from Ohio, “believed that governments are constituted among men to secure the people in the enjoyment of their inalienable rights. These undying truths were proclaimed by our fathers, and placed on record.” Indiana Free Soil representative George Julian carried the logic of his future father-in-law’s position forward and asserted that the Wilmot Proviso barring slavery from the West was simply the application of the Declaration of Independence to the territories. These Free Soilers discovered that the founding documents could be remembered in a way that supported freedom just as easily as southerners found they could be used to endorse slavery.36
Many northern Whig representatives joined with the Free Soilers to make use of the Declaration in much the same way as had their more radical colleagues. New York Whig representative Henry Bennett took the Declaration as the basis for the Constitution and used it to argue that the southern claim that the Constitution was not established to “‘secure the blessings of liberty’ is a monstrous and unwarrantable assumption. The Constitution establishes and ordains freedom.” Nothing in it, he insisted, countenances slavery. Massachusetts Whig representative Orin Fowler went further and claimed that the Declaration was meant to be applied to “colored people” and had “looked to the early termination of slavery.” Resorting to sarcasm, Horace Mann best expressed this northern view of the Declaration. He suggested that a southern nation’s declaration would “hold these truths to be self-evident, that men are not created equal; that they are not endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights; that white men, of the Anglo-Saxon race, were born to rob, and tyrannize, and enjoy; and black men, of the African race, to labor, to suffer, and obey.” That was not the northern memory of the Declaration.37
Free Soilers and Whigs remembered the Declaration as a document that mandated freedom, and they applied that principle to the slave population of the South. But memories of the Declaration were flexible and could lead in many directions. Michigan’s Lewis Cass was just as committed to the revolutionary past as were his Whig and Free Soil fellow northerners, but to him, and to other northern Democrats, the Revolution, and specifically the Declaration of Independence, taught a different lesson, one more in keeping with northern Democratic Party doctrine. He and many in his party supported a policy of non-intervention in the territories, and he believed the Declaration validated that stand. It had accused King George of denying that “legislative powers of a colonial or territorial community belong to the people at large.” The idea, Cass argued, that the federal government can legislate in the territories was like the British claim over the colonies. To Cass it was almost identical to the Declaratory Act of King George III. It is “the very essence of arbitrary power,” he insisted, whether exercised by “Sultan, Emperor, King, Parliament, or Congress—it is equally despotism.”38
Cass’s anger was directed primarily at the Wilmot Proviso banning slavery by congressional law from the West, and his own memory of the Revolution provided him with a way of articulating that anger with patriotic language. “This Wilmot proviso is new in its name but old in its pretension,” he declared. “Every age of the world has had its Wilmot proviso. Sometimes it is a stamp tax … but at all times it is the result of a conviction that the governors know much better what is good for the governed than the latter know for themselves.”39
A commitment to free territory and a reverence for the country’s revolutionary past dominated northern society. The way northern Whigs, Democrats, and Free Soilers chose to remember the Revolution differed according to how they sought to ban slavery from the West. But in the end, each party was able to draw on the past to argue for slavery-free territories.
Southerners were not ready to cede the Revolution or the Declaration of Independence to the North. The memory of that document was also dear to them, but they saw it as supportive of their own position rather than as a validation of the northern view of slavery in the West. Independence to Tennessee Democratic representative John Savage meant freedom from British rule, not a revolution to “change the moral, social, and civil conditions” in America. “Our declaration was the declaration of the free white race for themselves,” Savage explained. “It left the negro where it found him, to his destiny with his master.” It also gave the South a blueprint for action. Samuel Inge, Democratic representative from Alabama, asked if the North had forgotten the words of the “memorable declaration,” which stated that when a people are put under an “absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government?” “I warn the North,” he declared, “that the living truth here uttered animates every southern heart.” The message of the Revolution embodied in the Declaration of Independence was one the South not only remembered but was, according to Inge, ready to put into practice.40
Of all the documents of the revolutionary era, none had greater relevance for the debates of 1850 than the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and its ban on slavery in the territories of the Old Northwest. Not surprisingly, the battles over the memory and meaning of that law were more intense than any other debate over the founding. No group participated more fully in them than the Free Soilers. To counter the constant charges that they were disrupting the Union the founders created, Free Soilers had tried to seize control of the meaning of the Declaration of Independence, and they were just as eager to point to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 to show that the Founding Fathers agreed with them and their focus on free territory. Ohio Free Soil senator Salmon Chase led the way, arguing that in 1787, “the national policy in respect to slavery was one of restriction, limitation, and discouragement.” The Ordinance demonstrated to Indiana Free Soil representative George Julian that the “doctrine of ‘no more slave States, and no slave Territories,’ was the doctrine of the founders of this Republic.” By allowing slave states into the Union in the years after the founding, Julian argued, the country had “abandoned the faith of our fathers.” Freedom was the legacy of the Revolution, Free Soilers believed, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 offered the proof.41
The implications for the current crisis were unmistakable. When Georgia Whig senator John Berrien claimed that it was inconceivable that the founders had intended to circumscribe slavery within geographic limits so that it would eventually fade away, New Hampshire Free Soil senator John Hale responded by reminding his colleagues that they had done precisely that by excluding slavery from the Northwest, the only territory then in the possession of the United States. Emphasizing the Founding Fathers’ support for territorial exclusion, Massachusetts Free Soil representative Charles Allen called the Ordinance the “Jefferson proviso of 1787,” recalling Jefferson’s role in the failed 1784 attempt to exclude slavery from the Southwest after which the 1787 law was patterned. Pennsylvania antislavery Democratic representative David Wilmot himself associated the Proviso he authored with the Founding Fathers. “I stand,” he declared, “upon this question of slavery extension, where Jefferson, and Madison, and [Patrick] Henry, stood sixty years ago. Were they now living they would advocate the policy I have advocated.” To demand free territory was patriotic and consistent with the intentions of leaders of the Revolution.42
Free Soilers were not alone in their use of the Northwest Ordinance. Northern Whigs also looked to the Ordinance to validate their opposition to the expansion of slavery. Vermont Whig senator Samuel Phelps denied any suggestion that the northern demand for the exclusion of slavery from the West was an encroachment on southern rights by reminding his colleagues that the Ordinance banning slavery from the Northwest was supported by Thomas Jefferson. Making a similar argument, William Seward, Whig senator from New York, pointed out that when given a choice, the founders excluded slavery forever from, as Hale had argued, the only territory they controlled.43
New York Whig representative Charles Clarke also believed the Ordinance offered patriotic grounds for the current effort to ban slavery from the West. “The Wilmot proviso,” he explained, “is only a reassertion, under this new name, of a great principle of human liberty older than the Republic.” It could be found, he insisted, in the petitions of “our fathers to the King of England.… It was emblazoned in our Declaration of Independence” and, he added, enacted into law “by our wise forefathers” in the Ordinance of 1787. Clarke was certain the “bones of those departed patriots [would] rattle in their coffins when it was alleged that the ordinance of 1787 ‘was a useless, mischievous, abstraction.’ It is a practical, an enduring principle.” John Davis, Whig senator from Massachusetts, agreed, arguing that neither the Ordinance nor the Proviso were abstractions. The Wilmot Proviso, he claimed correctly, was “merely a copy of the ordinance of 1787,” which had received the sanction of Washington, Jefferson, and Henry.44
Northern Democrats were no more interested than others in their section to see slavery spread, and they believed the Founding Fathers had endorsed their various ways of blocking it. Illinois Democratic representative William Richardson supported non-intervention and opposed the Wilmot Proviso ban on slavery in the West but nevertheless maintained that the founders did not intend for slavery to expand. Antislavery Democratic representative Kinsley Bingham of Michigan also looked to the past to validate his opposition to slavery’s expansion. He supported the Proviso, and in defending a ban on slavery in the Mexican territories, explained that “we are only walking in the footsteps of the patriots and statesmen who have preceded us.” For Democrats, Whigs, and Free Soilers, the past gave authority to the antislavery expansion campaign of the present.45
Southerners understandably had a different memory of the past and a sharply contrasting view of the Founding Fathers’ position on the spread of slavery. Andrew Butler, Democratic senator from South Carolina, believed that “our fathers” “supposed that… Territories were open to the possession and occupancy of all.” Other southerners more directly attacked the claim that the Ordinance of 1787 justified banning slavery from the territories won from Mexico. That ordinance, argued Tennessee Democratic representative James Thomas, was created prior to the Constitution and was therefore only valid for the specific areas it covered. Georgia Whig representative Robert Toombs concurred. Since the Ordinance was adopted before the Constitution, it did not grant Congress the power to ban slavery from territories just acquired. Other southerners joined in, making the same claim. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 appeared to northerners to provide evidence of the territorial intentions of the founders, but southerners were determined to deny that meaning and reject its applicability to the new lands in the West.46
The continued authority of the Ordinance of 1787 was a critical point in the debate over the fate of slavery in the territories, but at the heart of that battle over the role of the founders in slavery expansion was the institution of slavery itself. The record of the revolutionary generation’s relationship to slavery and its attitude toward slavery’s future in the republic was hotly disputed in 1850. Neither section could cede their memory of the Founding Fathers’ position on slavery to the other without abandoning the validity of its own stand on the central issue of the day.
Southerners in Congress believed the founders had a clear and unambiguous position on the institution. Volney Howard, Democratic representative from Texas, spoke for many when he declared, “What the greatest and purest men that the world has ever seen—a Washington, a Franklin, a Hamilton, and a Madison—guarantied as a right, cannot be proved sinful by the latter-day saints of abolition and free-soil.” Those words stated the southern position perfectly. The Founding Fathers had guaranteed slavery and that was enough to answer any charge that there was something wrong with the institution. The founders’ endorsement put the matter to rest.47
Southerners may have thought nothing more needed to be said, but northerners disagreed. Free Soilers, especially, were not about to let southerners take possession of the Founding Fathers’ legacy on the issue that was most critical to them. Ohio senator Salmon Chase spoke out forcefully. At the founding, Chase claimed, “The extinction of slavery itself was expected at no very remote period; and the last thing that the framers of the Constitution or the ordinance would have thought of would have been … its perpetuity and indefinite extension.” Indiana representative George Julian agreed. “Our fathers,” he insisted, did not write the Constitution to uphold slavery but rather to “secure the blessings of liberty.” “We simply demand a return of the Government to its early policy in relation to slavery.” The fundamental antislavery nature of that policy was clear to Connecticut Free Soil representative Walter Booth. All he needed for proof was Thomas Jefferson’s oft-quoted warning: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” That fear for a future with slavery captured for Booth the founders’ attitude toward the institution. For the Free Soilers there could be no greater authority for their position and no clearer message.48
Other northerners, from all parties, also found Jefferson to be an important source for their belief that the Founding Fathers had opposed slavery. William Upham, Whig senator from Vermont, used more specific language from Jefferson to make the point. “Abolition,” he quoted Jefferson as saying, was “the greatest object of desire in these colonies.” Ohio Whig representative Lewis Campbell added James Madison, George Washington, and Patrick Henry to the list of Founding Fathers who opposed slavery, all of whom, he claimed, had called the institution a curse. So alienated from slavery were the founders, argued Ohio Democratic representative Moses Hoagland, that they were “guarded in the selection of language” and consciously excluded the word “slavery” from the Constitution. New York Whig representative Henry Bennett made the same point. How could the fathers have endorsed slavery and then not even mentioned it in the nation’s founding document? But the founders went further than a refusal to endorse the institution. New York Whig representative Charles Clarke echoed his Free Soil colleagues and added an attack on the South’s passion for diffusion by insisting that the Founding Fathers “contemplated a termination of slavery; they apprehended no danger from its being ‘hedged in, girdled round, pent up.’” And now, asked an outraged Vermont Whig senator Samuel Phelps, what were those who used the founders’ words and with Jefferson trembled for their country’s future called? They were now seen as fanatics. These followers of the Founding Fathers, who denounced slavery just as the founders had, were now regarded by the South as extremists who were outside the American mainstream.49
This kind of talk was too much for the southerners in Congress to accept. Texas Democratic senator Sam Houston was a moderate, a supporter of non-intervention, and fiercely loyal to the Union. Nevertheless, he had little tolerance for what he described as northern “aggression,” and he had a succinct and unique way of describing the relationship of present-day antislavery “fanatics” to the Founding Fathers. “They are bastards, they are aliens to their fathers’ principles,” he proclaimed. Other southerners may have agreed with Houston’s characterization, but they took the northern threat to slavery to a more radical conclusion and drew on the memory of the revolutionary era for support. South Carolina Democratic representative Daniel Wallace claimed that the founders did not create an everlasting Union. They believed, he argued, that states “were at liberty to consider the whole dissolved” if there was a “breach” in the “compact of union.” Agreeing with this assessment, another South Carolina Democratic representative, Isaac Holmes, declared that if men in California had the right to gain admission to the Union, “we who have sovereign power … may by right go out.” “Our fathers” left the government of Britain, and the South had the same right. The South, he contended, had “the right to secede.”50
Actually, Holmes used the memory of the founders to go even beyond this claim and justify a still more radical interpretation of the past. Memory proved malleable. It necessarily included both remembering and forgetting and was applied in virtually any way a member of Congress wished. Representatives and senators used memory either to support abolition or endorse slavery, to back non-intervention or champion the Wilmot Proviso, defend the Union or argue for disunion. But Holmes was so angered by the direction of the country that he used his memory of the Revolution to repudiate the actions of the Founding Fathers and the American experiment altogether. He supported the right of secession, but he did not really believe the Union was justified to begin with. The United States, he concluded, was a “mistake.”51
“It is supposed,” Holmes argued, “that a government based upon the principle of majorities, can wield a force sufficiently potent to fashion the thoughts and fix the habits of entire communities.” However, he maintained, that was “an error, and one in which our fathers fell. They endeavored (by the Constitution) to do that which cannot be done, make ‘two people one.’” The Founding Fathers created a system that did not honor or protect the diversity of the country. The “government,” claimed Holmes, “can only provide for the liberty and equality of all its parts, which shall have respect to common differences.” Liberty depends on the equality of all, not the rule of the majority. In providing this equality, “our Constitution,” charged Holmes, “is woefully defective. It proceeds upon the idea, that … it could make—‘one people out of many,’ without any provision for the peculiar views … and institutions” of the various States, which differed widely from one another. That, he believed, “was a mistake, and we now see that our fathers acted unphilosophically.” But he was not just arguing abstract political theory. The problems caused by America’s majoritarian Constitution were concrete. Currently the legislature, argued Holmes, “subjects the labor and profits of one cluster of States to the absolute control of another.” Specifically, “upon the admission of another free State without the counter action of a slave State, the law-making power is in the hands of the North. There should have been a provision in the Constitution for equality of sections” because now with the admission of California, the “North will have ‘tyrannical sway.’”52
There was no room for reform in Holmes’s telling of the country’s difficulties. No number of constitutional amendments, what Calhoun proposed to deal with the tyranny of the majority, could now solve the problem. The entire national project was ill-conceived, and it was time to secede from a union that should never have been created.53
The vast majority of southerners in Congress agreed with the goal of state equality that Holmes espoused, but they would never defend that goal by renouncing the efforts of the founders. Northerners were perverting the Constitution by denying state equality and thus undoing the noble work of the founders. Northerners were not loyal proponents of a Constitution the founders had created in error. The memory of the Founding Fathers was sacred. Southerners simply could not accept Holmes’s condemnation of them and their Constitution. The purpose of the memories southerners cherished was to establish heroes, not tear them down. Southerners would rather bend their memories to serve their purposes than use them to create villains of those they had been taught to worship.
Holmes had gone too far. However, while his rejection of the founders was not by any means representative, his anger and desperation were characteristic of many southern congressmen whose underlying assumptions and values differed dramatically from those of their northern neighbors. That divide was more difficult to bridge than the concrete sectional issues the two sides debated, and it was that divide that would ultimately make a military conflict difficult to avoid.
Yet, in 1850, the sectional conflict assumed a different form. It would take time for the lessons of the congressional session to have their full destructive impact. Instead of an armed conflict, an unending congressional deadlock fueled by the language of division and the dominance of conflicting memories governed the day. With neither side willing to look further than their own basic beliefs, any meaningful, lasting solution to the territorial crisis they faced was beyond their reach. And so the senators and representatives kept talking past one another, month after month, with no end in sight. But eventually their words, the words of 1850, became repetitive and overused. In time, all sides came to realize that there was nothing left to say that had not already been said.
Congress faced an intractable problem. In nine months little had been accomplished, and the senators and representatives, along with the public, were frustrated and angry. Even Speaker Howell Cobb, Democrat of Georgia, admitted that he was “worn down.” Not only were the central issues in the debate still unresolved but the basic business of Congress was not getting done. In March, New York Democratic senator Daniel Dickinson complained to his colleagues that “we are now in the middle of the fourth month of the session. The most urgent public business has been delayed for the discussion of this one question.… Nothing else can come up but abolition, until the very atmosphere is fetid, as in [an] abolition meeting.” The regular work of the Senate was neglected in order to pursue a purpose the senator abhorred. A month later, Dickinson again showed his frustration, reminding the Senate that “we have been engaged now some five months in doing nothing but attempting to legislate for negroes … and forgetting to legislate for twenty millions of the white citizens of our own country, whose destinies are in our hands.” Dickinson was militantly opposed to what he called abolition and anything that appeared to support African American rights, but even his antislavery New York Whig colleague William Seward was frustrated. He, too, complained that “the public business is practically at a stand still.” There were appropriation bills to be passed. Senators from opposite sides of the political spectrum saw the same problem and were equally discouraged.54
In the House, the level of frustration caused by the seemingly eternal sectional gridlock was just as strong. In March, Massachusetts conservative Whig representative George Ashmun complained that “the whole legislative business of Congress is brought to a standstill.” Congress was totally absorbed with the question of the expansion of “human slavery.” Ashmun, a Whig opponent of the Mexican “war of conquest,” concluded sarcastically that “these are the first fruits of our war; and to-day we eat them.” To him, the territorial impasse was the result of that war. Without its acquisitions, there would be no conflict over the West. But Democrat William Bissell, a representative from Illinois and no opponent of the war, was just as frustrated with the deadlock as his Whig colleague. “This cursed slavery question,” wrote Bissell to a correspondent, “thrusts itself, in some of one of its thousands shapes, into every thing that comes up,” and slows all business. North Carolina Whig representative David Outlaw agreed. As early as February he had written his wife, Emily, that “I have heard so much about negroes, slavery, dissolution of the Union and a Southern Confederacy that I am tired and disgusted.” The session had just begun, and Outlaw was already exhausted.55
None of these representatives, North or South, was especially concerned with the fate of African Americans, but Free Soiler Joshua Giddings was, and by August, even he concluded that enough congressional time had been spent on the subject of slavery. “Both Houses have presented to the world the appearance of a continued abolition convention, discussing the subject of slavery and nothing else,” admitted Giddings. “Of this I am the last man in the world to complain.” Giddings was happy that the debates had exposed the country to more “intelligence” on the issue of slavery than ever before, but, he conceded, it was now time to act. Echoing Seward, he too noted that there were appropriation bills that needed to be passed.56
There was a limit to the words that could be spoken. The debate had exhausted all the arguments. The language of conflict had worked its will. It was now time to act, and it almost seemed as if any action would be a relief to the assembled representatives and senators. Texas Democratic senator Sam Houston decided that if a majority wanted to pass certain measures after six to nine months of debate, the minority could not consider that oppression. Kentucky Democratic representative Linn Boyd agreed. “We have already been listening to speeches for nine long months,” he argued in August. “It is time we should act.… In God’s name let us act.” “Nothing has been left unsaid,” concluded John McClernand, Democratic representative from Illinois. “The subject, prolific as it is, has been explored to its utmost limits; every argument and probably every thought of which it is susceptible has been gleaned and garnered.” Members from both houses, of all points of view, and in every party had reached the same conclusion. It was time to act—and then to adjourn.57
However, the senators’ and representatives’ readiness to act stemmed not only from legislative frustrations. Their separation from family and home also contributed to their conclusion that the time to end their debate had arrived. They had been away from home for nine months. Never had they experienced anything like such a separation. They worried about the state of their farms and businesses, they were apprehensive about the condition of their slave property, they fretted over the raising of their children, and they missed their wives. Kentucky Whig senator Joseph Underwood felt the separation from his family and home deeply. In July, he wrote his wife, Elizabeth, that he hoped “to get home next month but it is impossible to say when.” Still in Washington a month later, he admitted that “I am even now not able to say when we shall adjourn. I sometimes feel like running away & going home.” In September, he told his wife that he was “worn down.… I want rest & quiet. I want to get clear of the annoying collisions of selfish men for a time at least.” But even then he feared he would not be home for another month.58
Others also experienced the pull of family and home. In June, Michigan senator Alpheus Felch had to explain to his wife, Lucretia, that “when we shall get away is as uncertain as the meaning of Egyptian Hieroglyphics.… Business moves very slowly.” In early August, the date of adjournment was no more certain. Mississippi Democratic representative William McWillie wrote his wife, Catherine, that he wished he could tell her when the “confounded Congress will adjourn” and he could get home, but he could not. By mid-August, Speaker Cobb reported to his wife, Mary, that “it is impossible to say when we are to get through.” He had no idea how long the session would last.59
In mid-September, the frustrations with congressional gridlock and a longing for home combined with a successful legislative maneuver to bring the debates to a conclusion. It had taken nine months to reach some kind of resolution of the outstanding disputes over slavery and its expansion, but the problems of dealing with the sectional conflict had been clear from the start. In February, James Doty, Democratic representative from Wisconsin, proposed admitting California into the Union with its constitution banning slavery. The reaction that followed in the House captured for the members, more than any other event in the session, the debilitating impact of the congressional impasse. Southern delegates refused to allow Doty’s motion to be voted on. They introduced an unending stream of procedural motions, mostly to adjourn the House without considering the proposal, and after forcing thirty-three ballots, the midnight hour arrived and the Speaker ruled that the resolution could no longer be taken up. Earlier, as the debate continued and the sunlight receded from the room, the House chronicler, drawing on Paradise Lost’s vision of hell, had reported that “the evening was closing in apace, and darkness became somewhat visible in the Hall.”60
That memorable confrontation took place in February. By the time the session neared its end, a more complete darkness had descended over the entire Congress. In July, David Outlaw sadly confessed to his wife that “things do not look very promising. The seeds of our destruction as a nation I apprehend are already sown, though it may be some considerable time before they spring up and bear their fruit. That fraternal and brotherly feeling which is so essential to the permanence of the Union, has been greatly weakened, if it is not destroyed.”61
Outlaw recognized the underlying hopelessness the session had revealed and the sectional divisions that had been deepened by it. While the compromise measures were eventually enacted into law, the language of the debate had already foreshadowed the dark days ahead. Without a common understanding of the country’s past, a shared memory, the Union was without a mutually accepted anchor, and the language of conflict had nothing to restrain it. Celebrations of the passage of the Compromise would not signal a lasting peace. The quiet created would be fleeting. Moderate Whig senator Joseph Underwood of Kentucky explained why: “As long as men are tolerated in uttering and publishing their thought, the question of slavery, like religion and politics, will be discussed and agitated in a free country.… You cannot prevent the operations of the minds of men, or silence their tongues.” The strife of tongues, once unleashed, could not be easily stilled.62