Epilogue

THE NINE-MONTH DEBATE AND THE CRISIS OF THE UNION

A southern opponent of the Compromise of 1850 described the exultant scene that greeted the final passage of the long-sought agreement. With the announcement of the vote, Mississippi Democratic representative Albert Gallatin Brown recounted, “There went up from the lobbies, from the galleries, and from the floor of the Hall of Representatives, one long, loud, wild, maniac yell of unbridled rejoicing—the South was prostrate, and Free Soil rejoiced. The South degraded, fallen and her enemies rioted.” The celebrants marched to the Potomac and then to the Washington Memorial, and “with drums beating, fifes blowing, and banners streaming, they paraded the streets of Washington” on to the residences of Henry Clay, Stephen Douglas, Howell Cobb, and Henry Foote. “It was a night of riot and revelry,” concluded Brown. “The foul deed had been done, and when there should have been sorrow and mourning, there was ecstasy and the wild notes of untamed rejoicing.”1

Clearly, Representative Brown was unhappy with the Compromise. But those he described and many others who had participated in the nine-month debate did not share Brown’s contempt for the joyous celebrations in the nation’s capital. Their overwhelming response was one of relief and hope for a final end to the crisis that had gripped the country for so long. Two used identical words to express their sense of deliverance, words used originally by Gouverneur Morris to begin and end an often-quoted oration delivered in 1814 to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte. As President Millard Fillmore signed the compromise measures, he wrote to New York governor Hamilton Fish that “the long agony is over.” “I am rejoiced” at the passage of the Compromise bills, “and trust they will restore harmony and peace to our distracted country.” Pennsylvania Democratic representative Alfred Gilmore also repeated Morris’s words to express the same feeling as Fillmore. “The long agony is over,” he declared, “and peace, justice and moderation has triumphed over northern fanaticism, and Southern nullification.” Most of Washington seemed jubilant, even gleeful. “Every face here,” reported Gilmore, “was a smile excepting the agitator and disunionist who regret that peace is triumphant and the Union is safe.” Robert Winthrop, now a Whig senator from Massachusetts, having replaced Daniel Webster, who had joined Fillmore’s cabinet, confirmed Gilmore’s observation. “Every body,” he wrote, “is rejoiced that the questions which have so long paralyzed Congress are settled.”2

Henry Clay took personal satisfaction in the passage of the Compromise that he had worked so long and hard to enact. Publically he told his colleagues that the “events of the last few weeks are not, in my opinion, a proper subject for individual triumph or egotism. They are the triumphs of the country, the triumphs of the Union, the triumphs of harmony and concord in the midst of a distracted people.” But privately he proudly wrote his son, “All our Slavery troubles are now supposed to be adjusted. Every measure which I proposed in Feby last has substantially passed; and the Country seems to be disposed generally to give me quite as much credit as I deserve.”³

In triumph, Clay went to the Kentucky House of Representatives following the adjournment of Congress, and in a speech explained that his goal from the start had been to address all the subjects of conflict between the North and the South. The South, he argued, should be satisfied since their main goal of keeping the Wilmot Proviso from being applied to the territories had been achieved. Clay admitted that slavery might not enter the territories, but if it did not, it would be, as he had always claimed, because it was “against nature and nature’s God” and what he believed were “irreversible decrees against the institution of slavery in the mountainous, barren, and mostly unprofitable regions” of the West. In addition, he told the Kentucky legislature, the agreement provided the South with a more effective fugitive slave law. And finally, it gave “honor and dignity” not only to the South but to the North as well, with its District of Columbia slave-trade settlement. Clay was satisfied. “I hope, trust, and believe,” he concluded, that the agreement will halt the agitation and calm the country.⁴

Clay’s colleague Daniel Webster was equally gratified by the passage of the Compromise legislation. He revealed that since his March 7 speech, “there has not been an hour, in which I have not felt a ‘crushing’ weight of anxiety, & responsibility.” But now, he declared, “It is over. My part is acted, & I am satisfied. The rest I leave to stronger bodies, & fresher minds.” “We have gone thro’ the most important crisis, which has occurred since the foundation of the Government,” he concluded, and “whatever party may prevail, hereafter, the Union stands firm.”⁵

Both Clay and Webster were exultant. They had felt the crisis deeply and desperately hoped that their efforts to bring peace to the country would succeed. Now, as they faced their remaining years, they could believe that the Union to which they had been so devoted was at last secure.

Stephen Douglas was from a younger generation than these two leading statesmen of the early republic, and he was not so optimistic. He agreed that the Compromise had been fair. He had, after all, carried the Compromise forward after the collapse of the omnibus bill, and Jefferson Davis, among others, credited Douglas with its passage. But he recognized the dangers that remained. “My object,” he told the Senate, “was to settle the controversy, and to restore peace and quiet to the country.” “The South,” he insisted in a speech to his constituents after Congress had adjourned, “has not triumphed over the North, nor has the North achieved a victory over the South. Neither party has made any humiliating concessions to the other.” And yet, extremists North and South were agitating against the compromise measures, in the South as a “disgraceful surrender of Southern rights to Northern abolitionism,” and in the North as a “total abandonment of the rights of freemen to conciliate the slave power.” A lasting peace, Douglas knew, had yet to be achieved.6

Others were also doubtful that the Compromise had successfully ended all controversy. Conservative Ohio Whig secretary of treasury Thomas Corwin was fatalistic. He expected that antislavery advocates would continue their “agitation,” though he did not believe they would achieve any “relief from the evils of which they complain.” Alabama Whig senator William King supported the Compromise but worried about its implementation. “The preservation of the Union is in the hands of the North,” he concluded. “They have already filled the cup of forbearance and another drop will cause it to overflow, and this great, free and prosperous government of ours will be swept away by the flood, leaving nothing but wrecks behind.” He opposed the “fireeaters” for now, but “I may find myself before many months standing with them shoulder to shoulder in defense of our constitutional rights.”⁷

For many southerners the cup of forbearance had already overflowed. With the passage of the Compromise their patience with what they believed to be northern aggression had come to an end. Mississippi’s Albert Gallatin Brown, who had been so appalled by the celebrations of the Compromise in the capital, listed the elements of the settlement that he believed were particularly degrading to the South. Most upsetting was the admission of California, “by which we and our posterity have been cheated out of the most valuable property on earth” and forced to submit to the “most humiliating deprivation of our rights.” Just as outrageous were the limits placed on Texas and the northern decision that “no more slave States shall be added to the Union.” Finally, the ban on the slave trade in the District of Columbia, rather than giving “honor and dignity” to the North, as Clay had claimed, was an act designed to punish the “intentions of masters and to emancipate their slaves.” In Brown’s view, the Compromise was “yet another sacrifice.… The Northern wolf had tasted blood. The Southern shepherd was unfaithful to his flock, and another lamb was taken.” The Compromise had denied the South equality. “I can never consent to take a subordinate position” in the Union, Brown declared. “I will cling to the Union … but it must be a Union of equals.… Better by far that we dissolve our political connection with the North [than] live connected with her as her slaves or vassals.”8

In a series of phrases, Brown had recapitulated the fundamental southern position in the debates. Deprivation of rights, denial of equality, fear of enslavement had all fired southern anger during the first session of the Thirty-First Congress. Appealing to the American past for support, Brown insisted that “if Washington could speak to us today from the tomb, he would counsel us against submission.” If the South agreed to the Compromise, warned Brown, then the Union “will not, it cannot be the Union of our fathers—it cannot be a union of equals.”⁹

Most southern congressmen were willing to abide by the Compromise, at least for the time being, but they shared Brown’s anger and were ready to withdraw their support from the settlement if any of its provisions was violated. In particular, they threatened to bolt if the Fugitive Slave Law was not observed in its every detail. That law required northern participation in its enforcement, and its faithful execution, more than anything else, would demonstrate the North’s commitment to the Compromise and to southern equality. Alexander Stephens, Whig representative from Georgia, cautioned that “we rest upon the assurance that the North … will abide by” the compromise measures and that the Fugitive Slave Law would not be repealed in the next Congress. “My deliberate opinion is that if that is not carried out—if its execution is generally obstructed at the North or if it is repealed Disunion and Civil War will be inevitable.”¹⁰

Meanwhile, in the North it was precisely the Fugitive Slave Law that was causing the most anger with the Compromise and was the measure that was the least likely to be followed. Free Soil opposition was unequivocal. Indiana Free Soil representative George Julian found the part of the law that required northern participation in the capture of runaways to be especially galling. The new law, Julian claimed, “makes every white citizen of the free States a constable and jail-keeper for southern slaveholders.” Julian’s position was clear: “There is no earthly power that can induce us thus to take sides with the oppressor.” Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law was not the way to sectional understanding. “Concord is not the offspring of injustice and wrong,” he concluded. “Submission to outrage cannot restore permanent peace.” The law would have to be repealed.11

Free Soilers were not alone in their opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law. From New York, a correspondent wrote leading Whig politician Thurlow Weed that he had “never seen such unanimity in favour of any one thing, as in favour of the repeal of that fugitive slave law.” From Boston, a correspondent of William Seward agreed. He claimed that the “declaration of the compromisers that ‘all difficulties are settled,’ is not true.” The Fugitive Slave Law, he reported, was “repudiated by all parties, by general consent.” Even northern moderates who supported the Compromise urged revision of the controversial law. Massachusetts Whig senator Robert Winthrop believed the law should be amended to include a jury trial in the North for alleged runaways. The Fugitive Slave Law, Winthrop predicted from Boston, “will be a terrible bone of contention. The South has overreached itself in asking for such a law. They will get no runaways under it, in this part of the country.” Michigan Democratic representative Alexander Buel played down the opposition to the law, but even he suggested it might need amendment. Southerners would not tolerate any change in the law, yet northerners agreed that change was required. The issue was anything but settled.¹²

Missouri Democratic senator Thomas Hart Benton had predicted as early as June this kind of impasse. He examined the Compromise package then under discussion and concluded it was nothing more than “five old bills gathered up from our table, tacked together, and christened a compromise!” Nothing was compromised, he argued. And not only that, no power had been established to enforce the Compromise, no penalties created for its violation, “no obligation on any one—not even its makers—to observe it, and when no two human beings can agree about its meaning, then a compromise becomes ridiculous and pestiferous. I have no respect for it and eschew it,” Benton declared. “It cannot stand, and will fall; and in its fall will raise up more ills than it was intended to cure.” Benton’s words proved prophetic. Three months after he spoke, when the “Compromise” finally became law, his analysis still applied. Neither section had sacrificed any of its positions in order to a achieve a lasting peace. All that had been accomplished was what former South Carolina governor James Hammond called a “fatal truce” between the divided sections.¹³

Still, some had hope, or at least chose to look ahead optimistically. Ohio Free Soil senator Salmon Chase admitted to his friend, the future Massachusetts Free Soil senator Charles Sumner, that “clouds and darkness are upon us at present. The Slaveholders have succeeded beyond their wildest hopes twelve months ago.” But Chase, quoting John Milton, urged, “Bate no jot of heart or hope but still bear up and Steer Right onward.” And in further encouragement, the deeply religious Chase, drawing on Corinthians, called on Sumner to “Rouse up in Massachusetts, and quit you like men.” On the same day as Chase wrote this message summoning hope and action, Ohio Free Soil representative Joshua Giddings also wrote Sumner and with the same message: “We are beaten, but not conquered,” proclaimed the veteran antislavery leader. These Free Soilers were deeply committed to their mission, and one defeat would not divert them from their cause.14

Both William Seward and John Calhoun opposed the Compromise, but nevertheless neither saw its success as a defeat. “The cause of political justice is stronger now than ever heretofore by just the extent to which the public conscience has been educated,” Seward wrote abolitionist Gerrit Smith. The debate had taught the people of the North the true nature of the issues they faced, and so passage of the Compromise could not be considered a defeat. Almost exultingly, he concluded it was instead a beginning, the “beginning of the end.” Nearly eight months before, Calhoun had come to the same conclusion. The debates had not been a failure. They had educated the people of the South and demonstrated to them what their real interests were. “The discussion before it closes will cover the whole issue between the North & South,” Calhoun wrote James Hammond, “and, I think, it will be of a character to satisfy the South, that it cannot with safety remain in the Union as things now stand & that there is little or no prospect of any change for the better.” Two of the leading opposing protagonists of 1850 were in agreement. The language of the debates had raised the level of consciousness of their respective constituencies and so had strengthened their hopes for the long-term struggle that lay ahead.¹⁵

From the perspective of those who wanted to avoid a struggle, there was less reason for optimism. The Compromise of 1850 had not only failed to bring compromise; it had taught the nation, North and South, just how difficult and unlikely a true compromise would be. That was the lesson learned over the nine months of debate. The coming conflict was not inevitable. The next decade would lead the country through a myriad of experiences that could conceivably have taken the nation in a different direction. But in 1850, the country was educated as it never had been before to the depth of the divisions it faced. It was now aware, fully aware, of the strikingly comprehensive nature of the sectional differences that had overtaken the nation. By educating the country to those differences, and by intensifying them, the debates of 1850 had created a pathway to civil war. Whether or not the nation would take that path would be decided in the future, but, warned Thurlow Weed early in the session, “Revolutions of opinion go not backwards.” Words had become “things,” beliefs had become fixed, and there would be no simple way to avoid the tragedy that was to come.16