Introduction

This is a cultural and intellectual history of a political event. It is not a traditional political history, nor is it a history of the Compromise of 1850. Rather, this book examines what the debates surrounding the Compromise reveal about the broad range of foundational beliefs and values held by northerners and southerners in Congress that, taken together, formed an ideological divide between the sections. That ideological divide would dominate the sectional battles of the 1850s and give definition, meaning, and force to the greater conflict that lay ahead.

This study began with a question: what was it like for those in each section of the Union, who had been demonizing one another over the issue of slavery for decades, to be thrown into the same room for nine months, forced to listen to the diatribes of their opponents, and then respond as they debated the future of slavery in the lands acquired in the recent Mexican War, along with other pressing sectional issues facing the country? Additional questions followed: How did the sectional conflict appear when it took this form of engagement? What did the language of combat, the “strife of tongues” as Massachusetts Whig representative Robert Winthrop called it, reveal about the basic systems of belief, the ideologies that dominated each section on the eve of the Civil War? And how did that language refocus and deepen the country’s sectional divisions as they developed on the national stage?1

The Compromise of 1850 is not a new topic of inquiry. Historians have studied the Compromise exhaustively and with great profit as a key event in the political history of the United States. It has offered students of the middle period opportunities to debate the strength of the two-party system at the dawn of the turbulent decade of the 1850s; claim either Henry Clay or Stephen Douglas as heroes in the legislative process; describe the drama of the final public appearances of men such as Clay, Daniel Webster, and John Calhoun; recount the numerous contentious encounters on the floor of the House and Senate; navigate the complexities of faction, patronage, and personality in the politics of the day; trace the intricacies of congressional voting patterns; and analyze and debate the significance of specific compromise measures that engaged such central issues as slavery in the territories, the Texas boundary, fugitive slavery, and slavery in the nation’s capital. It is a story that has been told often and been told well—a story full of contingency and political maneuver, ending in an “armistice” rather than a true compromise.2

But there is another story that the Compromise of 1850 tells, one that has been largely ignored and unexamined, lost in the focus on the measures of the Compromise and the endless balloting over them. It is the story told by the voices of 1850, by the language used in the lengthy debates and in the correspondence surrounding them. It is a history of discourse. Intellectual historian David Hollinger has written that an “idea contributed to a discourse is no less an ‘event’ … than a bullet fired in a war or the invention of a machine.” Hollinger was only arguing what North Carolina Democratic representative Abraham Venable had claimed during the debates themselves. As the nine-month confrontation over the Compromise drew to a close, Venable warned his colleagues that “words … become things.” Whatever the specific circumstance or individual motive of each representative, what is significant is that their expressions, taken together, formed a pattern that reveals common assumptions and a common set of values. Behind those shared values may have dwelled a multitude of personal considerations, but, when evaluated collectively, these considerations show an underlying unity that formed the foundations of belief. Their words became things and created a concrete reality with influence and consequence.³

The participants in the debates of 1850 knew that their words mattered. They understood that their speeches would be read and scrutinized by their constituents and by others around the country. The official record of the debates, the Congressional Globe, was republished in countless newspapers and examined closely by citizens everywhere. As historian Andrew Robertson claims, nineteenth-century congressional debates “attracted an attentive national audience that followed these events the way succeeding generations would follow sports playoffs.” The public was part of the political process as never before, and their representatives recognized the new role the public was now playing. Congressmen spoke to their voters at home at least as much as to their colleagues in the chamber and, as Robertson argues, to meet their growing audience’s expectations their speeches became more accessible, their rhetoric more intimate and “hortatory” in style, linking their “audience in an immediate, emotional way to events, principles, or policies.” “Deliberative speeches,” Robertson explains, became “popular oratory.” Congressional speeches in this period, historian of the Washington community Rachel Shelden concludes, “were designed to please” constituents.4

The Congressional Globe made it all possible. In the midst of the debates, Georgia Whig representative and future Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens wrote his brother a letter overflowing with praise for the technological advance the Globe represented and the towering impact it was having on American democracy. The United States, Stephens claimed, was “ahead of every other Nation” in its ability to widely broadcast the proceedings of a legislative body, and the results were revolutionary:

To be present and hear continuous debates for four hours—to watch every turn that even a word or an expression may give to the great winding current of national events which soon will be historical is a source of peculiar gratification—But to rise in the morning after and see the whole spread out in a broad sheet for dissemination to the remotest parts of the world is a matter which excites or should excite something higher than mere gratification.

Shorthand transcription of congressional debates allowed for verbatim publication of what was said on the floor of Congress and was making this all a reality, but so was steam power. Stephens had visited the Globe’s printing facility, and he reported back to his brother his astonishment at seeing

the magic genius at work—the ideas and thoughts of men as attend on the respective floors of the two Houses of Congress are caught in their airy sounds and fixed in strange marks or ciphers—then transferred into English manuscript—then handed to diverse compositors who transform them into a new language of types which are bound fast and then put under steam which throws off five or six hundred impressions while one hand would be copying a few sentences—and in a few hours fifty or a hundred thousand as the demand requires are ready for delivery—the steam engine is a wonderful invention.… We are certainly making great and rapid strides in making the laws of nature subservient to the uses and purposes of man.⁵

Stephens was overwhelmed. He could barely contain his excitement with the democratic potential industrial power had unleashed. The “language of democracy,” as Robertson termed it, could now be read and heard by hundreds of thousands as if they were present in the galleries of the House and Senate. Stephens and his colleagues felt their presence as they debated, and their words reflected their awareness that what they said was accessible as it never had been before.6

If congressmen spoke to their constituents, could they also have been speaking to each other? Could they even hear each other, especially in the poor acoustics of the House chamber, and if they could hear, did they bother to pay attention in view of the many distractions they encountered on the floors of both the House and Senate? Whether or not these problems interfered with congressional involvement in other sessions of Congress, the debates in 1850 overwhelmingly demonstrate that congressmen were intensely engaged with each other’s remarks and were fully responsive to them. But another question remains: how trustworthy is the record of their debates? All but a very few of the reported House speeches and virtually all of the Senate speeches were published word for word in the Globe, and while some congressmen at times revised their speeches before publication, this practice does not alter the value of what they eventually allowed to appear on the record. In fact, it only highlights the degree to which congressmen believed that their words mattered.⁷

Their votes mattered too. The votes of the senators and representatives turned into law the compromise measures of 1850. But votes could only reveal so much about the opinions of those who cast them. As Louisiana Democratic senator Solomon Downs observed, the “truth is, as it often happens, men vote for the same thing for different reasons.” That was certainly true of the myriad complex votes that took place over the nine months of debate. By focusing on the balloting, and the legislative maneuvering and cross-sectional border-state alliances that surrounded it, past studies of the Compromise have left largely unexamined the underlying beliefs and assumptions that were revealed in the language of the debates. An examination of the words used uncovers another level of meaning that a legislative narrative or a discussion of the measures debated and voted on, no matter how detailed, cannot.⁸

Remarkably, much of the language of the debate has been neglected in the studies of the Compromise. The countless speeches delivered have not been examined systematically, and in many cases have simply not been examined at all. Most of the speeches used in this study, especially those delivered in the House, have never been cited in any study of the Compromise, and many of the manuscript collections examined here have not been used previously for that purpose. What has been studied has only been used to describe the battles over the measures of compromise and has not been employed to analyze the conflict of values upon which the discussions of those measures were grounded. This study uses the words of the debate to focus on those values rather than on the compromise measures themselves.9

Those words usually were expressed in discussions of the compromise measures that dealt with slavery in the newly acquired Mexican territories and especially in the discussion over the fate of slavery in the prospective state of California. The resolution of the Texas–New Mexico border dispute was critical to the passage of the Compromise, but unlike any of the other questions debated, it required a concrete solution, a boundary line drawn somewhere in the rocky soil of the West, and so could not be finessed with ambiguous language. As a result, much of the debate surrounding the border question tended to be technical and did not involve significant expressions of ideological positions. Surprisingly, the Fugitive Slave Law, the part of the Compromise that, along with the territorial settlement, probably had the greatest impact on the course of the sectional conflict in the decade of the 1850s, was rarely mentioned in the debate until its conclusion. Many southerners saw no point in debating the return of escaped slaves, believing, fatalistically, that any law that Congress passed governing runaways would be ignored in the North. And many northerners were embarrassed by their section’s violations of the existing fugitive law and so were not anxious to raise the issue. Without any sustained discussion of the Fugitive Slave Law or of the Texas border dispute during most of the nine-month confrontation, it was the territorial measures that formed the basis of the majority of the debate, and it is the words exchanged about these measures and the ideological concepts they reveal that are, therefore, the primary focus of this study.¹⁰

Those words disclose a growing ideological division between the sections, stemming from conflicts over the status of slavery in the West that had been building and intensifying for at least six years. These contrasting ideologies were highly articulated, comprehensive worldviews composed of strong commitments to specific methods of social and economic organization, deeply felt racial prejudices, and intensely held political and constitutional theories, all frequently reflected in strikingly gendered language and emotionally filtered memories.

In some ways, these ideologies had common roots and were based on shared assumptions. Northerners and southerners had similar views of gender, pursued the common goal of capital accumulation, and were in fundamental agreement about the superiority of the white race. But conflicting attitudes toward slavery, and especially slavery expansion, led to what ultimately became highly divergent systems of belief about politics, economics, and society that would sustain the growing sectional division and eventually support separation itself. In the lengthy debates of 1850, the sections’ divergent beliefs gained an even greater voice than in the past and revealed a conceptual totality that would propel the sectional conflict forward over the next decade.11

In the current historiographic debate, this study falls within the “fundamentalist” school that views the Civil War as the result of irrepressible sectional divisions revolving around slavery, rather than with the new “revisionism” that focuses instead on contingency and the role of discrete events in its explanation of the sectional cataclysm. Grounded in differing attitudes toward slavery and slavery expansion, contrasting systems of belief governed each section. Even when the North and South were in agreement, when discussing gender or memory for example, their basic differences led them to use the values they shared as weapons against one another. By demonstrating each other’s disloyalty to their commonly held beliefs, northerners and southerners ensured that the assumptions they shared, rather than tying them together, would drive them still farther apart. This is not to suggest that ideological divisions by themselves led to the Civil War. The unpredictable flow of events had an obvious central role as well. In that sense, the revisionist school’s emphasis on contingency contributes significantly to an interpretation of the coming of the conflict. But the clashing ideologies revealed in the debates gave citizens in both sections a way of understanding those contingent events, a way to judge their importance and, ultimately, determine their impact.¹²

Northerners and southerners expressed their ideological beliefs on a stage set first by a debate over the reality of the sectional conflict. A legion of deniers sought to quell the developing national divisions by claiming that those divisions were politically motivated and not based on authentic concerns. Natural limits barred slavery from the areas conquered in the Mexican War, they argued, and thus made the key issue of the institution’s spread westward a theoretical question only, with no concrete consequences. Many historians in the early twentieth century shared this view. These original “revisionists” also claimed that slavery could not survive in the climate and soil of the West, and they too blamed political agitators and extremists, North and South, for manufacturing a sectional crisis that need not have been, a position more recently echoed by the new “revisionists,” who also deemphasize the fundamental, intractable nature of the conflict. But in 1850, efforts to deny the territorial basis of the sectional conflict failed. Many senators and representatives in each section continued to believe that the slavery expansion issue was real and pressing. They found compelling evidence for their belief in the words they heard daily on the floor of Congress from those who openly advocated the expansion of slavery into the Mexican territories. The words of the debate told the story for them, as it does for us, of an issue that could not be easily dismissed.13

Perspective is the key to interpretation. There are many angles of vision historians can employ in order to understand the meaning of politics in this period of turmoil. Each has validity, and much can be learned from histories that focus on political division. But by stepping back from a narrow consideration of the partisan maneuvering and political battles that have preoccupied past studies of the Compromise, by concentrating instead on the language of the debates, it is possible to see more clearly the underlying conflict that would soon be called irrepressible. It is also possible to look beyond the intensity of party conflict and focus instead on the unity and general agreement that existed within each section. By listening to the voices of the debate, historians can distinguish between divisive political means and unifying ideological ends.

Internal divisions within the sections abounded, but they operated within a larger consensus that allowed for a unified system of belief. There was, as some historians have argued, an ongoing drive within each section for political and factional enemies to differentiate themselves from each other, but always the goal was the same—to demonstrate a greater commitment than one’s opponent to a basic sectional consensus. Party loyalty could be intense, but that intensity served to enhance each section’s ideological unity, not diminish it. Political competition within each section resolved itself into a process in which northerners and southerners alike competed among themselves to show unyielding fealty to their own section’s orthodoxies, a process that was frequently so embittered that it inhibited unified sectional action that would have furthered those mutually agreed-upon beliefs.¹⁴

Geographic differences within the sections also existed. Southern border-state congressmen, for example, at times had tactical disagreements with those from the deep South over the compromise measures and voted differently on them, but that did not signify a divergence of fundamental beliefs or an alternative ideological stand. Border-state senators and representatives shared in the ideological commitments of their section, which a focus on a complex series of votes and a shifting pattern of political alliances obscures.¹⁵

Within their respective sections northerners and southerners each exhibited a striking ideological agreement. They shared the same views of the Union and the Constitution, the same conflicted attitudes toward race and slavery, the same notions of the ideal society, the same concepts of masculinity, and the same distilled memories of the republic’s founding. This agreement within each section was on full display in 1850. Northern and southern positions on many of these critical issues contrasted sharply with those of their sectional adversaries. Senators and representatives were readily willing to proclaim their views on all of these topics, and the Compromise debates offered them a perfect setting to do exactly that.

At times it seemed that sectional disagreements over the meaning of state equality were what the debates were all about. These differences led to profoundly opposing concepts of the Union that would have grave consequences for the future of the republic. State equality, what today is called states’ rights, was primarily used to defend the South’s institution of slavery. But it also had an agency of its own that has been lost in the rush to return slavery to its rightful, central place in the sectional debate. The northern denial of state equality had real implications for southerners’ ability to expand westward with their slave property, but it also provoked among southerners a sense of moral isolation, inferiority, degradation, enslavement, and dishonor that would form the basis of southern rage. In response, southerners developed a theory of a transactional union in which they offered loyalty in return for the protection of their human property. If the Union denied their property that protection in the territories, then they would deny the Union their loyalty. The Constitution was the bulwark of their defense, but if ever interpreted to allow for majority rule, many southerners concluded, it would be time to leave the Union.

Northerners of all persuasions rejected the southern notion of state equality and claimed that the exclusion of slave property from the territories was imposed equally on citizens of both sections. Many also believed that the equal right to bring into the West an institution that itself denied equality to its labor was a logical absurdity. More significantly, northerners were concerned with the risk of a loss of their own equality within the Union. They believed that southern domination of the Union already denied northerners equality and threatened to degrade, dishonor, and even enslave them. To defend themselves, northerners relied on a concept of the Union that was enshrined in the constitutional principle of majority rule, which mandated an unbreakable, perpetual Union. That Union was more essential than the elements that composed it, more critical than the states within it, and more lasting. So convinced were northerners of the perpetual nature of their Union that they did not accept and could not believe that it would ever be dissolved.

Slavery and race were at the heart of the sectional crisis, yet attitudes toward both were conflicted. Northerners were united in their opposition to slavery expansion but had differing views of slavery and race. In the debates, southerners revealed a serious struggle over the morality of the institution that defined their society. The belief in slavery as a positive good was by no means universal among congressmen from the South, and was questioned by those representing every part of the section. Historians have themselves struggled for decades over how to gauge southern attitudes toward their “Peculiar Institution.” Some have gone so far as to suggest that southerners suffered a crippling guilt over their involvement in an institution that seems to us so clearly in conflict with the South’s political commitments and religious beliefs. Guilt, the hidden feelings of one’s deepest self, is difficult to chart, and there is no clear evidence of this emotion in the record of the Compromise debates. But many southern congressmen did demonstrate a palpable discomfort with the institution of human bondage. Some even entertained the possibility that slavery was an evil, and many saw diffusion, the spread of slavery westward into the territories, as a solution to the moral dilemmas the institution posed. No account of the southern defense of slavery in 1850 can be complete without a recognition of the complex, contradictory plight in which many southerners found themselves. The debates offer an extensive opportunity to examine how they dealt with this challenge.16

Southerners and northerners in Congress maintained strikingly antithetical images of each other’s society. Their profoundly contrasting views heightened sectional antagonism and increased the difficulty of reaching a reconciliation. However, their portraits of the ideal successful society were, in many ways, quite similar. They shared common goals of economic advancement and political liberty, though the methods they employed to achieve those goals differed dramatically. By attacking the other’s society, northern and southern congressmen sought to show how much more effective their own system of labor was in achieving the objectives that the two sections shared. Congressmen engaged in numerous debates over which section produced greater wealth for its people, which section was economically dependent on the other, and which best guaranteed political freedoms.

Images of gender were very much a part of northern and southern views of their own and their opponent’s societies, and these images further complicated sectional divisions. Northern and southern assumptions about the meanings of gender were substantially the same. A quantitative analysis of the gendered language employed in the debates demonstrates this broad similarity between the understandings of manhood in the North and South. Both martial and restrained definitions of masculinity were equally pervasive in each section. But the uses to which this common gendered imagery was put differed dramatically according to what the situation and the sectional need required.¹⁷

These images were not universally accepted. Many women in Washington contested the concepts of gender shared by northerners and southerners. Contrary to societal expectations, they pursued political involvement and during the Compromise debates made their influence felt in a variety of ways. Still, the men of Congress did accept established understandings of gender. Their widespread use of gendered language and imagery makes clear just how significant concepts of gender were to American society in 1850. At times, northerners and southerners even saw each other and the sectional conflict that divided them in gendered terms. Concepts of manhood, when joined with sectionalism, strengthened existing divisions and placed the republic at increased peril.

Sectionalism in 1850 often took the form of battles over ownership of the American past. As senators and representatives felt the legacy of the Revolution slipping away, they grasped ever more tightly to the relics and the memory of the founding. Northerners and southerners each claimed the legacy of George Washington and fought over the intent of his Farewell Address, the meaning of the Declaration of Independence, and the purpose of the Northwest Ordinance, among other memories of the revolutionary era. For many, North and South, “getting right” with the fathers was key to establishing their credentials as authentic Americans who possessed the most patriotic answers to the sectional crisis.

Traditional political histories of the Compromise dispute the relative importance of Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas in the tactical decisions that resulted in the passage of the Compromise legislation. But the language of the debates tells a different story. It was William Seward, Horace Mann, Jeremiah Clemens, and, especially, Thaddeus Stevens and Richard Meade, who by their use of intensely provocative language had as great an impact on the course of the Compromise debate as other, more generally recognized figures. It was the language of the debates, not the political maneuvering in the halls of Congress, that defined the crisis for Americans on both sides of the sectional divide.18

By presenting a cultural and intellectual history of this political event, by focusing on the discourse of 1850 rather than studying the minutia of congressional maneuvering or the unending stream of ballots taken on every conceivable proposal, it is possible to discern an entirely different controlling dynamic in 1850. Listening to the voices of 1850, the political consensus within each section becomes clear. Examining the language of the debates, we can identify and understand the differing concepts of the Union and the ambiguous commitment to slavery. Looking at the words spoken in 1850, we can explore the critical importance of clashing societal and gendered imagery. And, finally, by concentrating on what was said, we can appreciate the significance of contested memories of the founding in sustaining the sectional conflict. The discourse of 1850 not only shows a Congress unable to resolve specific sectional issues; it also reveals an intensifying ideological division that would make a future healing of sectional animosities difficult to accomplish or even imagine.

Other histories can build on the story that the voices of 1850 tell. Social histories can test the relationship between the language of 1850 and the social reality that existed in the constituencies the senators and representatives addressed from their seats in the capital. Political histories can study the relationship between the intra-sectional unity found in the words of the debate and the divisions that characterized the political maneuvering on the floor of Congress. But those are neither the goals nor the objectives of this study. This cultural and intellectual history of the debates over the Compromise of 1850 lays bare the broad ideological basis for the social and political conflict that would soon envelop the Union.

Sadly, in 1850 that conflict could not be resolved. Congressional interaction became the enemy of peace. In the face-to-face setting of the debates, congressmen heard their worst fears about their adversaries confirmed and their greatest concerns substantiated. Northerners listened in alarm as southerners declared their intention to expand slavery into the West, and southerners sat in horror as northerners described their goal of encircling and eventually abolishing slavery in the South. In these and countless other encounters, the debates and the language used in them not only exposed the country’s divisions; they themselves became part of the process of national dissolution. As historian Elizabeth Varon argues, discourse did not cause the Civil War, but the “discourse was more than a catalyst for political strife—it was an integral part of the course that strife took.” Nothing was inevitable, but the debates of 1850 would establish the conditions within which the contingencies of the future would play themselves out. They defined the context that would give the events of the growing sectional conflict their meaning and their power. In the ideological formulations of the congressional debate over the Compromise of 1850 lay the foundations of the American Civil War.19