We are natives of this country; we only ask that we be treated as well as foreigners. Not a few of our fathers suffered and bled to purchase its independence; we ask only to be treated as well as those who fought against it.
—PETER WILLIAMS, JR.
PASTOR, ST. PHILIP'S EPISCOPAL CHURCH, NEW YORK
Can any one of common sense believe the absurdity that a faction of any state, or a state, has a right to secede and destroy this union and the liberty of our country with it; or nullify laws of the union; then indeed is our constitution a rope of sand; under such I would not live… The union must be preserved, and it will now be tested, by the support I get by the people. I will die for the union.
—PRESIDENT ANDREW JACKSON
NOVEMBER 1832
I am opposed to slavery, not because it enslaves the black man, but because it enslaves man.
—DAVID PAYNE (1839)
* What Did the Industrial Revolution Have to Do with the Civil War?
* What Did the Louisiana Purchase Have to Do with the Civil War?
* Who Were the First Abolitionists?
* What Was the Missouri Compromise?
* What Rights Does a State Have?
* Who Were Gabriel, Denmark, and Nat?
* Why Did the State of Georgia Want to Arrest a Publisher Named William Lloyd Garrison?
* What Was the Gag Rule?
* What Did the War with Mexico Have to Do with the Civil War?
Ironic, isn't it? America's vaunted Industrial Revolution began with a design for a machine that was pilfered from England. This bit of industrial espionage created the huge demand for cotton. And the demand for cotton made healthy and profitable once more a slave system that had seemed headed for a natural death. Those northern cotton mills created the industrial wealth that modernized the North with railroads, canals, and roads and brought hundreds of thousands of Europeans to America. And those immigrants would eventually end up in Union armies.
Born in England, Samuel Slater (1768-1835) was apprenticed at age fourteen to Sir Richard Arkwright, the Rumpelstiltskin of the Industrial Age, who had designed a mechanical spinning frame that turned cotton fiber into yarn. Using first horses, then water, and finally steam to power his mills, Arkwright basically invented the modern factory system. Eager to protect the secret behind its cotton-milling monopoly, however, Great Britain wouldn't allow textile workers with knowledge of Arkwright's invention to leave the country. In the United States, bounties were offered for this information. Slater, having memorized the machine's design, snuck out of England in disguise and brought the secret to America, where he opened the first American spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1790. Slater tempered his sin of industrial theft by establishing a Sunday school for his workers in 1796, one of the first such programs in the United States.
What Did the Industrial Revolution Have to Do with the Civil War?
A militant Quaker patriot from Rhode Island, Nathanael Greene (1742-1786) was a self-taught general who became one of George Washington's most trusted lieutenants. (Washington wanted Greene to replace him if he were ever killed or captured.) Greene had been at Boston's Battle of Breed's Hill and said memorably of that costly British victory, “I wish we could sell them another hill at the same price.” After taking command of an army in the South, Greene enjoyed significant successes, and following the war he was given three valuable estates confiscated from Tories (Americans who were loyal to the king) in gratitude for his service. It was at one of these, Mulberry Grove on the Savannah River in Georgia, that a young Yale graduate arrived in 1793 to visit the overseer of the plantation, now in the hands of Greene's widow, Catherine, one of Washington's favorite dancing partners.
Planning to work nearby as a tutor, Eli Whitney (1765-1825) was intrigued when a group of planters discussed the difficulty of separating the seeds from the cotton fiber. Working all day, a slave could clean about a pound of cotton. This laborious process kept cotton from becoming a major cash crop for plantation owners at a time when the new mills of New England were demanding more. According to the legend, Whitney put his mind to it and invented a cotton engine (shortened to gin) that could clean cotton fifty times faster than by hand.
While Whitney clearly produced this machine, he apparently didn't just imagine it out of thin air. According to Richard Shenkman's Legends Lies & Cherished Myths of American History, “The cotton gin was invented in Asia and perfected in Santo Domingo in the 1740's—half a century before Whitney produced his gin. The Santo Domingo gin was crude but effective….The Santo Domingo gin, however, did not work on the slippery seeds of American cotton. That was where Whitney came in. His gin was effective on American cotton.”
In a way it's appropriate, then, that even though Whitney received a patent in 1794, he never profited greatly from his “invention.” So simple to duplicate, the machine was widely pirated. Far beyond legend, though, is the impact of the machine on the future of the Deep South and the course of American history.
Cotton can't grow anywhere. It needs about two hundred consecutive days without frost and about twenty-four inches of rain—conditions that the Deep South could ideally provide. Even though Whitney's machine revolutionized the processing of picked cotton, planting and picking it was still backbreaking, tedious work. Sounds like a perfect job for slaves!
In 1790, the year Slater set up shop in New England, about 3,000 bales of cotton (a bale weighed about five hundred pounds) were produced in the United States. By 1801 the number of bales produced with the spread of the cotton gin had risen to 100,000; after the disruptions of the War of 1812, production reached 400,000 bales by 1820, then surged even further, reaching 4 million bales just before the Civil War. The leading product of the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century, cotton exports exceeded the value of all other American exports combined. Cotton was king!
To keep the king on top of the hill, plantation owners needed two things: more workers and more land. The slave system had been dying out because the Protestant work ethic was alive in America and favored free—more accurately, cheap—labor. Admittedly, there was also some moral discomfort over the obvious contradiction between the new nation's ideals and the inhumane system of slavery. Fear as well was a big factor in the temporary decline of slavery. Many white Americans were afraid that the slaves, who were being bred so successfully, might eventually overwhelm the white population as they had done in the French Caribbean colony of St. Domingue. In addition, the recognition that the slave trade was scheduled to die in 1808 (as part of the original constitutional compromise) suggested that slavery was headed for extinction, just as Jefferson and Washington had hoped.
But the cotton gin and the demands of the northern factories changed everything. The boom in cotton exports created a drastic need for labor, so overnight a dying vampire came back to life, sustained by human blood. In 1790 America's first official census counted 697, 897 slaves. By 1810—two years after the foreign slave trade was banned—their number had grown by 70 percent, to 1,191,354. During the next fifty years, that number would more than triple to the 3,953,760 slaves counted in the 1860 census. American slaves were capable of reproducing even faster than they could be shipped in from Africa.
The other part of the equation—more land—was easy too. North America was a pretty big place. And that's where Jefferson comes in again.
What Did the Louisiana Purchase Have to Do with the Civil War?
A little revolution can be a dangerous thing. Like a bad cold, it can be contagious. First the Americans had their rebellion. Then the ideas of liberty and equality caught hold in France, where the head cold became virulent pneumonia, particularly for members of the ruling class. Of course, the guillotine was remarkable for clearing the sinuses. From France, the Revolutionary Flu spread to the colony of St. Domingue, on the Caribbean island Christopher Columbus called Hispaniola. There, slaves inspired by the American and French examples had taken over, made it the second republic in the Western Hemisphere (and the first run by blacks), and eventually renamed it Haiti, its original Arawak name.
Then in 1802 France—now under Napoleon Bonaparte—sent an army to its former colony to put down the slave rebellion and retake the island. France's North American property, the Louisiana Territory, could serve as the breadbasket for Napoleon's European armies. Originally settled by the French in the early eighteenth century, the huge province of Louisiana was passed to Spain in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years' War (a.k.a. the French and Indian War). Under a secret treaty, Louisiana was returned to France in 1800 with the provision that if France ever gave it up, Spain would get the territory back. But France held the territory in name only; to control it meant an armed occupation.
Before he could launch a North American offensive, Napoleon needed an army base, and the former French colony of Hispaniola would make a convenient jumping-off point for North America. But first there was the problem of Toussaint-Louverture, the former carriage driver who had led the slaves in overthrowing the French.
Secretly, President Jefferson began to prepare for a possible war with France, but he wanted to try diplomacy first, so he sent James Monroe to assist Robert Livingston, the American envoy in Paris, in negotiating a deal. Jefferson hoped to purchase parts of either Louisiana or Florida or, at the very least, to guarantee the right of Americans to continue doing business in New Orleans. But the notion of buying this territory was never in Jefferson's mind. Then the French army sent to St. Domingue was wiped out in 1802 by a combination of yellow fever and Toussaint-Louverture's army. With a war against England looming, Napoleon knew that holding on to Louisiana would be a costly drain. France would have to defend the territory against a likely attack from the British, moving south from Canada. Strapped for cash, Napoleon decided to concentrate his energies in Europe, putting aside any dreams for North America. The French offer to the Americans was unexpected and dramatic: all of Louisiana or nothing. Jefferson jumped at the chance.
In other words, Jefferson's greatest presidential accomplishment might not have happened without Toussaint-Louverture and the rebel slaves of Haiti. The price for the entire Louisiana Territory was fixed at $15 million, about four cents an acre. Although Jefferson doubted the constitutionality of his actions, he pressed ahead, and in 1803 the United States more than doubled in size. An area of more than 800,000 square miles was added overnight. It was enough land to create eventually all or parts of Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado.
Suddenly the question of more land for growing cotton had become academic. Of course, there was a slight problem: the Indians already living there. Jefferson idealistically thought the Indians might be “educated” to give up their traditional way of life and adapt to farming and trading. But the next few presidents, including the Indian fighter Andrew Jackson, had their own agendas for the Indians. It wasn't going to be a pretty picture.
Further, all this new territory to slice, dice, and redecorate in red, white, and blue bunting posed another problem. Where all the new states to be carved out of the Louisiana Territory going to permit slavery when they entered the Union? A lot of people said, “I don't think so.”
The Northwest Ordinance, used previously to admit new states, had expressly prohibited slavery; the argument went that the Founding Fathers must have been opposed to the expansion of slavery into any new state. The slaveholders argued that the Constitution talked about ending the slave trade, but it stopped short of restricting slavery itself. And in the three-fifths rule the Constitution seemed to clearly recognize the legitimacy of slavery. Besides, said the slavery supporters, the Constitution reserves certain powers to the states, meaning that the people in each state had the right to choose for themselves. Finally, the Fourth Article in the Bill of Rights protected “property,” a category that included slaves. Braced by these legalistic arguments, cotton planters were quick to leave their worn-out land—cotton is hard on soil—and move west to the new lands of the Louisiana Purchase, bringing with them slaves by the hundreds of thousands.
PRELUDE TO THE CIVIL WAR: 1790-1820
1790
December In Pawtucket, Rhode Island, the first American cotton mill begins to turn out yarn using new “Arkwright machines,” once a closely held British industrial secret. Operated by children as young as four years old, the machines outproduce adult manual labor, marking the onset of the Industrial Revolution in America and increasing the demand for cotton.
The first official census mandated by Congress, for the purpose of establishing the number of each state's delegates to the House of Representatives, shows a total population of 3,929,625. This includes 697,624 slaves (and 59,557 free blacks).
1791
December 15 The Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, is ratified.
Following a slave revolt on the island of St. Domingue (modern Haiti) led by Francois Dominique Toussaint-Louverture (1743-1803), France abolishes slavery on the island in 1794. In 1801 Toussaint-Louverture liberates the island from the French and becomes its ruler. Captured and later killed by the French, he is succeeded by General Jean-Jacques Dessalines (1758-1806), who proclaims a republic named Haiti in 1804 and declares himself emperor.
1792
April At Kentucky's constitutional convention, clergyman David Rice unsuccessfully attempts to prohibit slavery in the state. (A second attempt at abolition in Kentucky fails in 1799.)
June 1 Kentucky becomes the fifteenth state, a slave state.
Denmark is the first nation to abolish the slave trade.
1793
February The Fugitive Slave Act is passed, providing legal mechanisms for the recovery of runaway slaves. It is illegal to harbor a slave or prevent his arrest.
October 28 Eli Whitney of Mulberry Grove, Georgia, files an application for a patent on the cotton gin. The patent is granted in March 1794, but the machine is so simple to duplicate and construct that it is widely pirated. Cotton production is revolutionized in the Deep South.
1796
June Tennessee becomes the sixteenth state, a slave state.
1800
January In Philadelphia, a group of free blacks present Congress with a petition condemning slavery, the slave trade, and the Fugitive Slave Act. The petition is tabled and dies in committee.
August Attempting to create a free black state in Virginia, slave Gabriel Prosser (c. 1776-1800) leads armed slaves in rebellion. He is caught and executed along with many of his followers.
The 1800 census shows a population of 5.3 million Americans, including 1 million blacks (90 percent of them slaves).
1803
March Ohio admitted as the seventeenth state, a free state under the terms of the Northwest Ordinance.
December After the Louisiana Purchase, the United States takes possession of the territory from the French. More than 800,000 square miles, the land doubles the size of the United States and intensifies the debate over the future of slavery in this new territory.
1804
New Jersey's legislature announces gradual emancipation.
1807
At the urging of President Jefferson. Congress prohibits the importation of any new slaves after January 1808.
The British Parliament prohibits British subjects from engaging in the slave trade after March 1, 1808. (West Indian slavery is abolished by the British in 1833.)
1810
The third national census: total population: 7,239,881, a 36 percent increase since 1800; black population: 1,377,808 (free blacks number 186,746).
1812
December Louisiana, formerly the territory of Orleans, becomes the eighteenth state, a slave state. Its capital, New Orleans, becomes America's fifth-largest city.
1814-1815
December 1814-January 1815 The Hartford Convention. Unhappy over the War of 1812 and its effect on New England's fishing and shipping business, a gathering of New England Federalists meets in Hartford, Connecticut, to consider states' rights and possible secession from the Union. The war ends before the convention can press its recommendations. The dying Federalist party doesn't even run a candidate in the presidential election of 1820.
1816
The American Colonization Society is chartered by Congress. Supported by a $100,000 grant from Congress, it begins to organize ship caravans of freed slaves who want to return to Africa. Six years later, the first shipload lands near the mouth of the Mesurado River on Africa's west coast. In 1824 American philanthropist Ralph Randolph Gurley names the colony Liberia and the settlement at Cape Mesurado, Monrovia, in honor of America's President James Monroe. The colony is declared an independent republic in 1847, although the United States does not recognize it until 1862.
December Indiana is admitted as the nineteenth state, a free state.
1817
December Mississippi enters as the twentieth state, with slavery allowed.
1818
December Illinois becomes the twenty-first state, a free state.
1819
December Alabama admitted as the twenty-second state, a slave state.
1820
March The Missouri Compromise calls for the admission of Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state in 1821, maintaining parity between free and slave states. Under the terms of the Compromise, slavery will be excluded in the future from any Louisiana Purchase territory north of Missouri's southern border.
May Congress makes trading in foreign slaves an act of piracy and includes a death penalty for American citizens caught smuggling slaves.
Maine is admitted as the twenty-third state, with a ban on slavery.
U.S. census. Total population: 9,638,453; black population: 1,771,656 (18.4 percent).
Civil War Voices
Philadelphia Quaker leader Anthony Benezet (1754).
To live in ease and plenty, by the toil of those, whom violence and cruelty have put in our power, is neither consistent with Christianity nor common justice; and we have good reason to believe, draws down the displeasure of heaven; it being a melancholy but true reflection, that where slave keeping prevails, pure religion and sobriety decline; as it evidently tends to harden the heart, and render the soul less susceptible of that holy spirit of love, meekness and charity….How then can we…be so inconsistent with ourselves as to purchase such who are prisoners of war, and thereby encourage this anti-Christian practice; and more especially, as many of those poor creatures are stolen away, parents from children and children from parents;
You who by inheritance have slaves born in your families, we beseech you to consider them as souls committed to your trust….Let it be your constant care to watch over them…that if you should come to behold their unhappy situation in the same light that many worthy men who are at rest have done…and should think it your duty to set them free, they may be more capable to make a proper use of their liberty.
Who Were the First Abolitionists?
Not everyone was happy about the new cotton power, which was growing by leaps and bounds. White workers didn't like it because slavery drove down wages and they didn't want to compete with blacks—slave or free—for jobs in the new western territories. Many in the North didn't like it because all those slaves were giving southern states an advantage in Congress, where the major decisions about tariffs and dividing up all the new land were being made. Every new slave state would get two new senators. And remember the threefifths rule? The slave states were getting votes in the House of Representatives entirely out of proportion to their voting population.
There were a few people who didn't like slavery because it was wrong. Not many but a few. And they made themselves heard. The Germantown Protest, the first organized demonstration against slavery and the slave trade, was made by Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1688. Slowly and hesitantly, they were joined by a few lonely voices. In 1700 Samuel Sewall, who had been a judge in the Salem witch trials and the only one to express publicly his regret, published The Selling of Joseph, one of America's first antislavery tracts. But his words and the voice of Cotton Mather (1663-1728), the prominent pastor of North Church who established a school for blacks in Boston, had a marginal effect, even in that Puritan city. Although joined by other denominations, the Quakers—or the Society of Friends—were the most persistent group to maintain a steady drumbeat against slavery before the Revolution. Quaker leader John Woolman (1720-1772), preaching against the evils of slavery, published his sermons under the title Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754). He argued that “free Men, whose minds were properly on their business found a satisfaction in improving, cultivating and providing for their families; but Negroes, laboring to support others who claim them as their Property, and expecting nothing but slavery during Life, had not the like Inducement to be industrious.” Woolman urged Quakers not only to free their slaves but to educate them as well.
Woolman's friend Anthony Benezet was even more tireless in his efforts to improve life for blacks. In 1770 he founded a school for slaves and freed blacks in Philadelphia, the city that was home to a vibrant and influential free black community in the early days of the United States. By 1787 no Quakers owned slaves, and many southern Quakers had left their homes to migrate westward rather than remain in a slave society. But the Quakers were on the fringe, a small group of ardent people whose influence was out of proportion to their numbers. While Quaker resistance to slavery had its greatest effect in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, the Friends had little political or economic impact on the explosion of slavery in the cotton gin era.
Still, these voices in the wilderness made gradual progress, and abolition societies began to spring up in both the North and South. It was in Philadelphia in 1776 that Dr. Benjamin Rush (1745-1813), a signer of the Declaration and surgeon general of the Continental Army, started one of the first antislavery associations. (An unusually progressive thinker, Rush was also among the first to call for humane treatment for the mentally ill. For his book Medical Inquiries and Observations upon Diseases of the Mind [1812], he is known as the father of American psychiatry.) It was this group that Benjamin Franklin joined late in his life.
Perhaps the greatest contribution of the Quakers was to help create a young generation of free, educated African Americans who were passionate about ending slavery and who moved into the forefront of the abolition movement. Born free in Philadelphia, James Forten (1766-1842) had enlisted in the Revolutionary navy as a “powder monkey,” a young boy who scrambled between the decks on warships, bringing powder for the ship's cannons. After the war, he started a sailmaking shop and prospered in the shipping business, amassing the rather substantial fortune of $100,000, making him the equivalent of a modern millionaire. Among the first to argue that the races were biologically equal, Forten eventually used his wealth to fund the abolition movement.
Two other Philadelphia leaders were Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, who founded the Free African Society. Allen's master had allowed him to earn enough money as a bricklayer to purchase his freedom. When Allen and Jones, another slave who had bought his freedom, were kneeling in prayer one day in 1787, they were yanked from their pew in St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church and told to pray in the gallery because they were black. They walked out. Allen established the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church, the first independent black Protestant denomination in America, and became its first bishop. Allen and Jones became heroes during a yellow fever epidemic in 1793, when they nursed the city's sick as many others fled. In 1800 Jones, Allen, James Forten, and other freemen of Philadelphia petitioned Congress with an attack on slavery and the slave trade. Congress quietly tabled the petition. Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts noted, “To encourage a measure of this kind would have an irritating tendency, and must be mischievous to America very soon. It would teach them the art of assembling together, debating, and the like, and would so soon, if encouraged, extend from one end of the Union to the other.”
Paul Cuffe, another free black Quaker and a successful shipowner, had a proposal that did interest Congress. The son of an African-born slave father and a Nantucket Indian mother, Cuffe had gone to sea on a Nantucket whaler and eventually owned a fleet of ships. Although he had to pay taxes, he couldn't vote, so he sued in a Massachusetts court, arguing that blacks and Indians had fought in the Revolution and deserved the full rights of citizenship. In 1815 Cuffe began to sponsor the immigration of freed blacks back to Africa, transporting thirty-eight black Americans and bearing the $4,000 cost himself. Cuffe's plan was exactly what many white opponents of slavery thought was the perfect solution to the real problem of abolition: What are we going to do with all those freed slaves?
For all the good intentions of many early white abolitionists, blacks were not especially welcome in the free states of America. Several territories and states, such as Ohio, not only refused to allow slaves, but also had passed laws specifically limiting or excluding any blacks from entering its territory or owning any property. This was the flip side of the abolition question, and in 1816 Cuffe's plan was eagerly adopted by Congress as a solution to “the Negro Problem.” Congress authorized $100,000 to form the American Colonization Society, and President Monroe appointed two commissioners to help it establish a settlement. Six years later, a colony came into existence under the group's auspices; in 1824 it was named Liberia by philanthropist Ralph Gurley, an agent for the society.
But the colonization solution presented a big problem. Except for Paul Cuffe and a few other supporters, most African Americans had not been consulted about it. And most of them didn't think it was such a great idea. (Despite the good intentions of the Quakers, Paul Cuffe was buried in a segregated section of a Quaker cemetery.)
A leader among free black abolitionists, Peter Williams, Jr., spoke for many of his brethren when he said, “We are natives of this country; we only ask that we be treated as well as foreigners. Not a few of our fathers suffered and bled to purchase its independence; we ask only to treated as well as those who fought against it.”
While well-meaning whites saw colonization in Africa, the Caribbean, and Central America as the perfect way to deal with freed slaves, it did not suit many free blacks, in particular those who had struggled to gain a place at the American table. Their ancestors had fought in the Revolution. They had worked hard. They no longer considered themselves Africans but Americans. Although colonization was eagerly promoted by many white politicians, including Henry Clay and later Abraham Lincoln, only about eight thousand blacks accepted the offer to return to Africa.
Civil War Voices
Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Holmes in response to the passage of the Missouri Compromise (April 22, 1820): “But this momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it the knell of the Union.”
What Was the Missouri Compromise?
From the day Jefferson drafted the Declaration through the debates at the Constitutional Convention, slavery was clearly on the American agenda. In their wisdom, the Constitution's framers had delayed a tough decision for twenty years, thinking that slavery would eventually flicker out like a candle. Instead it became a bonfire, and now “the fire-bell” was ringing.
The unavoidable confrontation finally came. By adding the massive real estate deal of the Louisiana Purchase, the free state-slave state debate finally became a national issue in 1818 when the Missouri Territory petitioned for statehood, jeopardizing the equilibrium between free and slave states at eleven each. Once again, the nation tried to compromise.
The chief architect of what came to be known as the Missouri Compromise was Henry Clay (1777-1852), one of the most influential politicians of his day and Lincoln's political idol. Born in Virginia, Clay had moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where he established a law practice and, while still in his twenties, joined the state legislature.He moved on to the House of Representatives in 1811 and soon became Speaker of the House and one of the leading “War Hawks,” who eagerly sought war with England in 1812.
When the bill requesting Missouri statehood was submitted, New York Representative James Tallmadge proposed an amendment forbidding the entry of slaves into Missouri and allowing for the emancipation of the two thousand slaves already there. About the same time, Maine applied for statehood. But the slaveholders in Congress wouldn't accept slaveless Maine into the Union unless Missouri could enter as a slave state. Henry Clay eventually brokered a deal reached on March 3, 1820. Maine would enter as a free state and Missouri as a slave state, but slavery would be prohibited forever from states created from Louisiana Purchase lands north of Missouri's southern border. Since that was the natural boundary of cotton-growing territory, it was accepted by the slaveholders. As a result, the Missouri Compromise regulated the extension of slavery for the next quarter century, in practical terms simply delaying an inevitable showdown.
Civil War Voices
During a heated debate over tariffs and the sale of western lands, Senator Robert Young Hayne of South Carolina had attacked the New England states, questioning the patriotism of its citizens, whom he derided as selfish as he asserted the superiority of the states over the federal government. For two days before a packed gallery, Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts replied in one of the most memorable speeches in Senate history (January 1830).
I have not allowed myself, Sir, to look beyond the Union, to see what might lie hidden in the dark recess behind. I have not coolly weighed the chances of preserving liberty when the bonds that unite us together shall be broken asunder. I have not accustomed myself to hang over the precipice of disunion, to see whether, with my short sight, I can fathom the depth of the abyss below.… While the Union lasts, we have high, exciting, gratifying prospects spread out before us for us and our children. Beyond that I seek not to penetrate the veil. God grant that in my day, at least, that curtain may not rise! God grant that on my vision never may be opened what lies behind! When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original luster, not a stripe erased or polluted not a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as “What is all this worth?” nor those words of delusion and folly, “Liberty first and Union afterwards”; but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart—Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.
Civil War Voices
President Andrew Jackson, in a White House toast on the anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's birth (April 1830): “Our Federal Union it must be preserved!”
To which Vice-President John C. Calhoun responded, “The Union—next to our liberty, the most dear.”
What Rights Does a State Have?
In 1994 California's Governor Pete Wilson opposed implementing a federal “motor voter” law, which required the states to register voters at the same time they register their automobiles or renew driver's licenses. Wilson complained that Congress was forcing the states to do something without offering to help pay for it. Sympathetic congressmen agreed, and there was a heated debate over whether Congress can pass legislation that affects the states without providing the funding to carry it out. These are the so-called unfunded mandates that the new Republican Congress opposed so vigorously in 1995. Apart from the fact that Wilson and other Republicans also objected to the motor voter law because they assumed that it would create more new Democrats than Republicans, his objection reopened the debate over states' rights versus federal powers. It is an old fight, one that goes back to the days of the Articles of Confederation.
Early in the nineteenth century, the battle over states' rights nearly brought the nation to civil war. That it did not is important to keep in mind. The main players then were three of the most influential American politicians who were never president: Henry Clay of Missouri Compromise fame; Daniel Webster (1782-1852), the fiery orator from Massachusetts; and the curmudgeonly dean of states' rights theory, John Caldwell Calhoun (1782-1850). Born in South Carolina and educated at Yale, Calhoun practiced law until his marriage to a cousin, whose inheritance allowed him to become the Jeffersonian ideal—a planter-politician. After two years in the state legislature, he began his national political career as a member of the House from South Carolina, serving from 1811 to 1817. A powerful nationalist, along with Henry Clay, Calhoun was an outspoken leader of the War Hawks, who persuaded the House to declare war with England in 1812. He also advocated the federal financing of canals and roads, a modern navy, and a standing army. After serving as secretary of war for eight years under President Monroe, Calhoun had the curious distinction to serve consecutive terms as vice-president to successive presidents. He was first elected vice-president to John Quincy Adams in 1824; four years later he was reelected vice-president when Jackson defeated Adams.
Andrew Jackson was the towering presidential figure of American politics, the only president on a par with the celebrated congressional trio of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster. But Jackson and Calhoun did not like each other. Both were ambitious and shrewd, and they had personal antagonisms as well as political differences. As secretary of war, Calhoun had recommended that Jackson, then fighting Indians in Florida, be summoned to a court-martial. But Calhoun had told Jackson that he supported him. When Jackson later learned the truth, he felt Calhoun had been dishonest. Now they were dueling politically over the issue of federal power.
The core of the argument was a stiff tariff placed on imports in 1828. The recent passionate debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) might give modern Americans some sense of what the debate over tariffs was all about. But the NAFTA fight was a tea party compared to the vicious regional fighting that took place over these taxes on imported goods. Passed at the insistence of northern merchants, who wanted to protect their products by making European imports more expensive, and reluctantly signed into law by President John Quincy Adams, it was the highest tariff imposed in America and was labeled the Tariff of Abominations. An angry Calhoun anonymously wrote an essay in 1828, “The South Carolina Exposition and Protest.” Calling the tariff “unconstitutional, oppressive and unjust,” he began to lay the legal groundwork for the right of the states to “nullify” federal laws. In 1831 Calhoun made a clean break with Jackson, publicly issuing an address that made it clear he stood with the “nullifiers.” In 1832 he became the first man to resign from the vice-presidency, leaving when he won a seat from South Carolina in the Senate, where he served until his death in 1850.
Nullification, the theoretical right of a state to suspend the operation of a federal law within its boundaries, was not a new idea in America when Calhoun floated it in 1831. It went back to the very beginnings of the republic, after the loose Articles of Confederation had proved ineffective. Although the states definitely feared a tyrannical central government, they had agreed to yield certain powers to the federal government under the Constitution. But the principle of nullification was supported by many of the founders, including James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. It had also been used by slavery opponents as a justification for failing to enforce the fugitive slave laws, which compelled the return of runaway slaves.
On November 24, 1832, a South Carolina state convention issued an Ordinance of Nullification, which declared “null, void, and no law” the high protective tariff. President Jackson was not amused. He wrote to one of his generals, “Can any one of common sense believe the absurdity that a faction of any state, or a state, has a right to secede and destroy this union and the liberty of our country with it; or nullify laws of the union; then indeed is our constitution a rope of sand; under such I would not live.… The union must be preserved, and it will now be tested, by the support I get from the people. I will die for the union.”
Jackson, threatening to send fifty thousand troops to enforce the tariff in the port of Charleston, said, “Disunion by armed force is treason. Are you really ready to incur this guilt?” The defiant governor and legislature of South Carolina called for ten thousand militiamen to repel any “invasion” by federal troops. America truly seemed to be on the verge of civil war. Faced with the prospect of warfare over the tariff, Calhoun joined with Clay to reconcile the claims of South Carolina with those of the federal government. As a result, the Compromise Tariff of 1833, which gradually reduced tariffs until 1842, was passed, the second of Henry Clay's three compromises to avert war. The South Carolina convention repealed the Ordinance of Nullification, and both sides claimed victory. But the point remains that whenever questions of states' rights came up, they had been solved through compromise. It was only when the issue became attached to the perpetuation of slavery that compromise became impossible.
Civil War Voices
From The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831).
Our mother, weeping as she went, called me away with the children Hannah and Dinah, and we took the road that led to Hamble Town, which we reached about four o'clock in the afternoon. We followed my mother to the market-place, where she placed us in a row against a large house, with our backs to the wall and our arms folded across our breasts. I, as the eldest, stood first, Hannah next to me, then Dinah; and our mother stood beside, crying over us. My heart throbbed with grief and terror so violently, that I pressed my hands quite tightly across my breast, but I could not keep it still, and it continued to leap as though it would burst out of my body. But who cared for that? Did one of the many by-standers, who were looking at us so carelessly, think of the pain that wrung the hearts of the negro woman and her young ones? No, no! They were not all bad, I dare say, but slavery hardens the white people's hearts towards the blacks; and many of them were not slow to make their remarks upon us aloud, without regard to our grief—though their light words fell like cayenne on the fresh wounds of our hearts. Oh those white people have small hearts who can only feel for themselves.
… The bidding commenced at a few pounds, and gradually rose to fifty-seven, when I was knocked down to the highest bidder; and the people who stood by said that I had fetched a great sum for so young a slave.
I then saw my sisters led forth, and sold to different owners; so that we had not the sad satisfaction of being partners in bondage. When the sale was over, my mother hugged and kissed us, and mourned over us, begging of us to keep up a good heart, and do our duty to our new masters. It was a sad parting; one went one way, one another, and our poor mammy went home with nothing.…
… The next morning my mistress set about instructing me in my tasks. She taught me to do all sorts of household work; to wash and bake, pick cotton and wool, and wash floors, and cook. And she taught me (how can I ever forget it) more things than these; she caused me to know the exact difference between the smart of the rope, the cart-whip, and the cow-skin, when applied to my naked body by her own cruel hand. And there was scarcely any punishment more dreadful than the blows I received on my face and head from her hard heavy fist. She was a fearful woman, and a savage mistress to her slaves.
… To strip me naked—to hang me up by the wrists and lay my flesh open with the cow-skin, was an ordinary punishment for even a slight offence. My mistress often robbed me too of the hours that belong to sleep. She used to sit up very late, frequently even until morning; and then I had to stand at a bench and wash during the greater part of the night, or pick wool and cotton; and often have I dropped down overcome by sleep and fatigue, till roused from a state of stupor by the whip, and forced to start up to my tasks.
… Poor Hetty, my fellow slave, was very kind to me, and I used to call her my Aunt; but she led a most miserable life, and her death was hastened… by the dreadful chastisement she received from my master during her pregnancy. It happened as follows. One of the cows had dragged the rope away from the stake to which Hetty had fastened it, and got loose. My master flew into a terrible passion, and ordered the poor creature to be stripped quite naked, notwithstanding her pregnancy, and to be tied up to a tree in the yard. He then flogged her as hard as he could lick, both with the whip and the cow-skin, till she was all over streaming with blood. He rested, and then beat her again and again. Her shrieks were terrible. The consequence was that poor Hetty was brought to bed before her time, and was delivered after severe labour of a dead child. She appeared to recover after her confinement, so far that she was repeatedly flogged by both master and mistress afterwards; but her former strength never returned to her. Ere long her body and limbs swelled to a great size; and she lay on a matin the kitchen, till the water burst out of her body and she died. All the slaves said that death was a good thing for poor Hetty; but I cried very much for her death. The manner of it filled me with horror. I could not bear to think about it; yet it was always present to my mind for many a day.
… For five years I remained at his house, and almost daily received the same harsh treatment. At length he put me on board a sloop, and to my great joy sent me away to Turk's Island. I was not permitted to see my mother or father, or poor sisters and brothers, to say good-bye, though going away to a strange land, and might never see them again. Oh the Buckra [white] people who keep slaves think that black people are like cattle, without natural affection. But my heart tells me it is far otherwise.
Not quite the same picture Margaret Mitchell gave us of happy slaves doing their jobs around the Big House!
Mary Prince's account of her life on Barbados and Antigua appeared in England in 1831, the first published narrative of a female slave. Sold to a series of owners of only slightly differing levels of sadism, Mary was eventually taken to England, where she gained her freedom. Her story was published by a British abolitionist group, and two years later slavery in the British West Indies was ended.
Her tales of beatings, hard labor, and cruelty would have been equally common among American slaves, although many slaveowners took care not to inflict such grievous wounds. Many would no more beat a slave than they would a prized horse or cow. After all, it was their own valuable property they would be damaging or destroying. But it was also no small wonder that some slaves struck back.
Who Were Gabriel, Denmark, and Nat?
A few years after the Revolution, Jefferson observed, “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing.… God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.… The tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” In advocating “a little rebellion.” he probably did not have in mind the likes of Gabriel, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner, three men who may have never heard Jefferson's words. These three black men represented white America's worst nightmare come true.
America in 1800 was turbulent and politically unsettled. The nation had settled into two fractious parties, the Federalists (led by John Adams and Alexander Hamilton) and Jefferson's Republicans. Under the election procedures of the period, Jefferson had become Adams's vice-president in 1796, and they had endured a stormy four years together. With the presidential election of 1800, the differences between these men and their parties were not simply polite arguments over policy but serious confrontations over the direction of the new nation that spilled over into nasty personal attacks on each candidate.
At just this time, a young slave living on a plantation near Richmond got caught up in all those ideas of freedom and democracy that the white gentlemen planters had been talking about since 1776. Born in 1776, ironically, Gabriel belonged to Thomas Henry Prosser, a successful tobacco planter whose father owned nearly sixty slaves. Thomas Prosser and Gabriel had grown up together as boys—until master went one way and slave another. Besides the plantation near Richmond that Prosser had inherited, he owned a tavern and an auction and real estate business. Following his father, Gabriel had become a blacksmith, a skilled tradesman who was permitted to hire himself out and even keep a portion of his earnings. In fact, he was hired out so often, it was assumed he was a free black. He had another distinction unusual for slaves: He could read, although who taught him is a mystery. (Douglas Egerton, the author of Gabriel's Rebellion, suggests that as many as 5 percent of the slaves could read.) Standing over six feet tall and shaped by years of smithing, Gabriel was physically imposing. The limited freedom he enjoyed, along with his literacy and physical prowess, made him a dangerous black man. Gabriel and other blacks in Richmond were well aware of the events in St. Domingue and inspired by the exploits of Toussaint-Louverture and his slave army. Using his freedom to move about the Richmond vicinity, Gabriel, with his two brothers, recruited a small army of slaves and free blacks willing to revolt against their masters. They even had a banner inscribed with a slogan that must have held a familiar (and embarrassing) ring to Virginians of that era: “Death or liberty.”
Gabriel's secret army, carrying scythes that had been turned into swords, prepared to march on Richmond. Although Gabriel estimated that as many as 600 men would join the uprising, approximately 150 men, including at least 2 white men, were actually awaiting the order to begin. Late in August, the word went out on the slave grapevine that the day was to be Saturday, August 30, 1800. The target was Richmond, then the home of 5,700 residents, half of whom were black; with another 4,600 slaves on nearby plantations, whites were actually in the minority in the area. Gabriel planned to take the guns stored in the Richmond armory and perhaps even capture the governor of Virginia, James Monroe, a friend and neighbor of Thomas Jefferson's and a future president. The only whites to be spared were Quakers, French, and others known to oppose slavery.
Confounded by a torrential rainstorm and then betrayed by two slaves from a neighboring plantation, the rebellion fizzled. An armed militia quickly put down the uprising, and although Gabriel escaped briefly, he was soon captured and brought to trial with most of his followers. After seventeen of the slaves were hanged, Jefferson counseled Monroe to stop the hangings. The revolutionaries of 1776 must have been a little uncomfortable when one of the rebels told the court, “I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer had he been taken by the British and put to trial. I have adventured my life in endeavouring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a willing sacrifice in their cause.”
Ultimately, Gabriel, his brothers, and twenty-four other followers went to the gallows. Two years later a second rebellion, the Easter Plot, was planned by one of Gabriel's followers and was similarly put down by Monroe. The immediate outcome of these two conspiracies was simple. Having determined that slavery would continue, the slaveowners realized that they had become too lenient toward their slaves. As one Virginian commented, “It is a pity, but slavery and Tyranny must go together.” Virginia and other slave states enacted new codes that restricted slave meetings on Sundays after work was finished. More important, slave literacy was going to end. A little learning for slaves was clearly a dangerous thing. Finally, Virginia ruled that all free slaves—those who had purchased or been given their freedom—had to leave the state within a year of their emancipation.
But the desire for freedom didn't end there. The same year that Gabriel tried to lead his army to freedom, Denmark Vesey purchased his freedom from a ship's captain. A skilled carpenter, he was able to save several thousand dollars, not a small amount for a free black man in Charleston. Vesey was a leader in the city's black church and could have easily returned to Africa, but like other free blacks, he rejected that option because it meant leaving too many fellow slaves in chains. When Vesey's church was seen as too outspoken, it was closed by Charleston authorities. (So much for the First Amendment.)
Having visited the black republic on St. Domingue and well aware of Gabriel's conspiracy of 1800, Vesey began to plot another insurrection, much along the lines of Gabriel's plan, in 1822. His band would also attack the armory and seize weapons, burn the city, and kill as many whites as possible. The men hoped to seize ships and eventually make their way to Haiti. As the plot built toward its culmination, it too was betrayed by a slave. By June Vesey and other conspirators had been arrested, and more than thirty of them were executed on July 2, 1822.
But the “little rebellions” didn't end. Once more slaves would lash out in a violent frenzy that threw the slaveholding territory of America into utter panic. Born in 1800, the year of Gabriel's rebellion, Nat Turner may well have grown up hearing of these exploits, for Gabriel had acquired mythic status on the plantations of Virginia. (During the Civil War, black troops made up a verse about him that was sung to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”) Raised on Samuel Turner's small plantation in Virginia by his African-born mother, Nat learned to read from his master's son. His father escaped and did not return, and he ran away once himself but returned voluntarily after thirty days. Over the years, Turner became fanatically religious and served as a preacher for the slaves of his area, who began to call him the Prophet, and people claimed that he had healing powers. By 1825 he had visions of a second coming of Christ, and a later vision told him to “slay my enemies with their own weapons.” A solar eclipse in 1831 was God's sign to Nat Turner that the time had come. He said, “I heard a loud voice in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said…I should arise and prepare myself, and slay my enemies with their own weapons…for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first.”
On the night of August 21, Turner and seven fellow slaves used hatchets and axes to murder the Travis family (who now owned him) while they slept. Then they set out on a campaign that terrorized the Virginia countryside. Picking up some sixty slave recruits as they traveled from one plantation to another, the group moved through Southampton County toward the country seat of Jerusalem, where they planned to capture the armory but apparently had no further goal. For forty-eight hours Turner's followers rampaged, but the alarm had been spread. The group was disorganized, with a few of them drunk, and the rebellion fell apart. Meeting a well-armed militia, they were killed, captured, or dispersed outside Jerusalem. Turner managed to escape with twenty followers. After another battle, he and four others escaped once more and hid out for six weeks before being captured. Turner was hanged along with sixteen of his followers on November 11, 1831. This rebellion also spawned a wave of terror for all blacks in the area, as state and federal troops swept through, killing as many as two hundred blacks in reprisal.
The slaveowners pointed at the radical northern abolitionists and the impact they were having on slaves. In the wake of the Turner rebellion, harsh new laws were passed forbidding slaves to read and write and eliminating the few freedoms that blacks enjoyed at the time. Postal officials were also instructed to seize abolitionist materials in the mail.
PRELUDE TO THE CIVIL WAR: 1821-1835
1821
January Moses Austin receives permission from Mexico to move three hundred American families from Missouri into the Mexican territory of Texas. This grant will be taken over by Stephen F. Austin after his father's death, and the first Americans move to Texas in 1825.
August Missouri is admitted as the twenty-fourth state, a slave state, bringing temporary parity between free and slave states at twelve each. Congress admits Missouri on the condition that the state constitution will not try to limit the rights of citizens, specifically free blacks.
The Genius of Universal Emancipation, one of the earliest abolition journals, is founded by Quaker Benjamin Lundy in Mount Pleasant, Ohio.
1822
May The Denmark Vesey conspiracy. In one of the most elaborate slave plots, slaves led by Denmark Vesey, a freed slave, plan a revolt in Charleston, South Carolina. The plot is betrayed, and thirty-seven blacks are hanged.
1827
The State of New York abolishes slavery.
1828
May 19 The “Tariff of Abominations” is signed into law. Passed to promote American industry, it is viewed as harmful to the southern economy while greatly benefiting the northern states.
The Tariff of 1828 is denounced as unconstitutional, oppressive, and unjust by the South Carolina legislature. An anonymous essay written by Calhoun argues that single states can nullify federal law.
1829
August Mexico rejects President Andrew Jackson's offer to buy the territory of Texas, by now home to thousands of Americans.
September Mexico outlaws slavery but exempts Texas from the law a month later.
1830
January 12-27 In a series of Senate debates, Robert Hayne of South Carolina and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts debate the origin of the Constitution and states' rights versus federal power. Hayne, speaking for most southern and western senators, supports state sovereignty and nullification. Webster argues that the states derive their power from the Constitution and that the national government is the final authority.
Mexico passes a law forbidding further American colonization of Texas and prohibits the importation of more slaves into the territory.
1831
January Radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison publishes the first issue of his journal, the Liberator.
August The Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia. After his capture, Turner is hanged in November. In the wake of this uprising, harsher slave laws are passed, abolitionist writings are censored, and southerners organize militias to suppress future uprisings.
1832
January In the Virginia legislature a grandson of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, presents his grandfather's plan for gradual emancipation.
July Congress passes a new Tariff Act, which is again seen as benefiting the northern states at the expense of the South.
November In response to the Tariff Act, South Carolina adopts a law to nullify the Tariff Acts of 1828 and 1832. The legislature calls for military preparations and secession if necessary.
December Following South Carolina's actions, President Andrew Jackson reinforces the federal forts off Charleston and warns that no state can secede from the Union.
The New England Anti-Slavery Society is organized at the African Baptist Church in Boston.
1833
January South Carolina's legislature defiantly calls the president “King Andrew” and prepares a volunteer unit to repel any “invasion.” Jackson responds with a “force bill,” enabling him to enforce the Tariff Acts.
February As Calhoun argues against the force bill, Henry Clay works out a new compromise tariff act aimed at gradually reducing the tariffs seen as onerous in the South. Both the force bill and the Compromise Tariff pass and are signed into law by Jackson, defusing the confrontation over nullification.
June In Connecticut, Prudence Crandall attempts to admit black girls to her private school, but the state legislature quickly passes a law against educating blacks. Crandall is jailed, and the school is closed.
August Great Britain outlaws slavery in its colonies.
December The Female Anti-Slavery Society is organized in Philadelphia by Lucretia Cottin Mott (1793-1880), who becomes its first president.
The American Anti-Slavery Society is organized, also in Philadelphia, with the backing of wealthy New Yorkers Arthur and Lewis Tappan and prominent abolitionist minister Theodore Weld.
About this time, abolitionist voices emerge elsewhere. Elijah P. Lovejoy begins the publication of his antislavery newspaper, the Observer, in St. Louis, and noted writer John Greenleaf Whittier publishes an abolitionist tract, Justice and Expediency.
Ohio's Oberlin College, the first coeducational college in America, opens; it is the first college to admit blacks.
1834
January After presenting a petition to the Mexican government requesting independence for Texas, Stephen Austin is arrested and jailed for eight months in Mexico City.
July On Independence Day, a mob breaks up an antislavery meeting in New York City because blacks and whites are mingling. Eight days of rioting follow.
August England abolishes slavery.
October In Philadelphia, the center of abolitionist societies, proslavery rioters go on a rampage and destroy forty houses belonging to blacks.
1835
July Chief Justice John Marshall dies. President Jackson nominates Virginian Roger B. Taney, a former slaveholder, to replace him. Due to vigorous opposition by northern senators, the nomination is not confirmed until March 1836.
July In Charleston, South Carolina, a mob burns abolitionist literature impounded by a local post office. Antiabolitionist laws are passed throughout the South. In Georgia, one of these calls for the death penalty for anyone who publishes material that incites a slave insurrection.
August In Canaan, New Hampshire, the Noyes Academy is destroyed by a white mob after it enrolls fourteen black students.
October In Boston, a proslavery mob disrupts an address by English abolitionist George Thompson. The mob parades radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison through the streets with a noose around his neck.
December Partly in response to the growing violence of the anti-abolitionists, President Jackson recommends laws to prevent the circulation of abolitionist materials by mail.
December Mexican President Santa Anna extends the law against slavery to include Texas. But American settlers there announce they will secede from Mexico.
Unitarian leader William Ellery Channing publishes his abolition tract Slavery.
Civil War Voices
Alexis de Tocqueville, from Democracy in America (1831).
…I do not think that the white and black races will ever be brought anywhere to live on a footing of equality. But I think that the matter will be still harder in the United States than anywhere else. It can happen that a man will rise above prejudices of religion, country, and race, and if that man is a king, he can bring about astonishing transformations in society; but it is not possible for a whole people to rise, as it were, above itself.
…I confess that in considering the South I see only two alternatives for the white people living there: to free the Negroes and to mingle with them or to remain isolated from them and keep them as long as possible in slavery. Any intermediate measures seem to me likely to terminate shortly, in the most horrible of civil wars, and perhaps in the extermination of one or the other of the two races.
…If freedom is refused to the Negroes in the South, in the end they will seize it themselves.
Why Did the State of Georgia Want to Arrest a Publisher Named William Lloyd Garrison?
In 1831, the year that Nat Turner led his doomed band, the State of Georgia offered a reward for the arrest and conviction of William Lloyd Garrison. A slight, ascetic, owl-faced man, Garrison had never been to Georgia and had broken no laws there, but he was considered very dangerous throughout the slaveholding South. He received hundreds of abusive letters, many of which threatened him with assassination. What had this printer done to deserve hate mail and the reward of arrest?
Born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1805, Garrison was indentured at age fourteen to the owner of the Newburyport Herald. He became an expert printer and began to write anonymously, attempting to arouse Northerners from their apathy on the question of slavery.
In 1829 Garrison began to work with antislavery agitator Benjamin Lundy (1789-1839), who started The Genius of Universal Emancipation, a monthly periodical, in 1821. In 1827 Lundy, who believed in gradual emancipation, had described a prosperous Baltimore slave trader as “a monster in human shape.” (The slaver knocked him down in the street. Lundy sued and won a dollar, the judge ruling that the assault had been provoked.) Impressed by Garrison's writings, Lundy had walked from Baltimore to Vermont to recruit the Northerner. Working in Baltimore, then a center of the domestic slave trade, Garrison began to denounce this trade in uncompromising terms. When he wrote an attack on two New Englanders whose ship was carrying slaves from Maryland to New Orleans, he was sued for libel by the slave traders, find fifty dollars, and jailed when he refused to pay. From his cell, he continued to attack the slave trade until he was released after forty-nine days.
Garrison returned to New England and launched the Liberator on January 1, 1831. James Forten, the wealthy Philadelphian freedman, was one of his strongest financial supporters. Later Garrison formed the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and the New England Anti-Slavery Society.
Viewed as fanatics by the general public, Garrison and his fellow abolitionists were relatively few in number—only about 160,000 in the years from 1833 to 1840. Most were educated church people from a middle-class New England Puritan and Quaker heritage. Support from the working and upper classes was minimal, and even in the northern states, abolitionists were often attacked by mobs. Garrison himself was paraded through the streets of Boston with a noose around his neck in 1835.
Convinced that slavery had to be abolished by moral force, Garrison appealed through the Liberator, especially to the clergy, for the practical application of Christianity in demanding freedom for the slaves. But few listened, and Garrison grew more militant and less compromising. Believing that the slavery clauses of the Constitution were immoral and that stronger action was needed, he took increasingly radical views that opened a fifth in the abolition movement. In 1839 the society split over tactics and policy into two main groups. The moderates, or gradualists, included James Birney, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, and Theodore Weld, who believed that emancipation could be achieved legally through religious and political pressure. In 1840 the Tappans founded the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. The “Garrisonians” wanted immediate action and were far more radical in their approach.
A further cause of dissension was Garrison's advocacy of equal rights for women in general and especially within the abolitionist movement. When women abolitionists were excluded from an international anti-slavery convention held in London in 1840, Garrison walked out with them. The radicals, led by Garrison and others, including the Quaker feminist Lucretia Mott and her husband, James, refused to remain in a party committed to gradual and legal emancipation, and with Garrison, they formed the American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1840 Garrison publicly burned a copy of the Constitution and denounced it as “a covenant with Death and an agreement with Hell.” Instead, he chose as his motto, “No union with slaveholders.” True to his pacifist beliefs, Garrison advocated the peaceful separation of the free states from the slave states, a view shared by Horace Greeley, who started the New York Tribune in 1841.
Garrison traveled widely as a lecturer. It was on an April night in 1839 that he may have had his greatest impact. Speaking in New Bedford, Massachusetts, he captivated one young man in the audience with his words and impassioned delivery. A recently escaped slave, this young man decided that he too would speak out against slavery. His given name was Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, but having made his escape, he had changed it to Frederick Douglass.
What Was the Gag Rule?
You flip on C-Span to catch the House of Representatives at work. There they are, legislating. One politician rises to say that the budget deficit is a big problem but that to discuss it on the House floor would be inflammatory. This representative introduces a rule that prohibits the House or any committee of the House from discussing the deficit and petitions from the public would be ignored. Preposterous idea? Well, it happened. Only the issue wasn't the deficit but slavery.
From 1836 to 1844, the House opened each session by adopting a number of procedural rules designed to exclude from consideration by the House, or by its committees, petitions asking for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, where the federal government held the power to legislate. Known as gag rules, they were supported by southern congressmen and by many northern representatives who regarded the petitions as a dangerous threat to the Union.
For all those years one congressman fought to have this so-called gag rule lifted. He was a former president, John Quincy Adams, then a member of the House from Massachusetts. Adams contended that the Bill of Rights protected the right of petition and that the refusal of Congress to consider petitions was unconstitutional. At the beginning of each session, therefore, when the House adopted its rules of procedure, he moved to strike out the offending gag rule.
Born in Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts, John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) was the son of John and Abigail Adams. At age twelve, he had traveled to Europe with his father and served as his secretary during the peace negotiations that ended the American Revolution in 1783. Graduating from Harvard College, he opened a law office and later became minister to Russia. He then served as the principal American negotiator of the Treaty of Ghent (1814), ending the War of 1812. In 1815 he became minister to Great Britain and continued to ease tensions between the two nations after the war.
In 1817, Adams became James Monroe's secretary of state, a long and harmonious association during which he helped formulate the Monroe Doctrine, which asserts that Europe should remain out of the Americas. In the 1824 election, Adams was involved in a bitter political contest in which none of the four candidates obtained a majority in the electoral college. With eighty-four votes, Adams ran behind Andrew Jackson but ahead of William Crawford and Henry Clay. The vote went to the House of Representatives, where Clay, the Speaker, threw his significant support to Adams. Adams won and later named Clay his secretary of state, prompting Jackson's charge of a “corrupt bargain.” This bitter political feud meant that Adams's presidency was marred by constant fighting with Jackson's allies. Committed to a protective tariff much favored in his native New England. Adams signed the Tariff of Abominations in 1828; later that year he was overwhelmingly defeated by Jackson.
Two years later Adams returned to the House and led the anti-slavery forces in Congress. A vigorous speaker known as Old Man Eloquent, he finally succeeded on December 3, 1844, when the gag rule was abolished. On February 21, 1848, Adams suffered a stroke on the House floor and died two days later without regaining consciousness.
Civil War Voices
Abolitionist James Birney (September 1835): “The antagonist principles of liberty and slavery have been roused into action and one or the other must be victorious. There will be no cessation of strife until slavery shall be exterminated or liberty destroyed.”
A slaveholder from Kentucky who converted to abolitionism, James Gillespie Birney (1792-1857) became, like many religious converts, a zealot for his cause. Educated at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), he gave up a prosperous law practice in Alabama to become an agent of the American Colonization Society, which supported political actions to end slavery and resettle freed slaves in Africa or the Caribbean. Having freed his inherited slaves, Birney began to publish an abolitionist newspaper, the Philanthropist, in Cincinnati and became executive director of Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society. In the presidential elections of 1840 and 1844, he was the nominee of the Liberty party, which advocated the abolition of slavery by moral persuasion and political action. His third-party campaign in 1844 was particularly significant, because he drew enough popular votes to allow the Democratic candidate, James K. Polk, to win the election, defeating the Whig candidate, Henry Clay. An adroit politician and master of the art of compromise, Clay was a slaveholder who was dedicated to the Union and looked for an end to slavery. Ironically, he might have been the strong president who would have found a political solution to the issue.
What Did the War with Mexico Have to Do with the Civil War?
Although the Liberty party's James Birney may well have altered the course of the election of 1844, most Americans weren't thinking about slavery when they went to the polls. The big issue was America's expansion under “Manifest Destiny,” a term coined by a newspaperman (John L. O'Sullivan in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review) who stated the widely held belief that America should stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific. There were even those who believed that Mexico should be part of America. The stormy relations between the two countries had been simmering since the 1820s, when the first Americans were invited by the Mexican government, eager for development, to farm the sparsely settled borderland of Texas, then a Mexican province. Led by Stephen Austin (1793-1836), they brought their slaves with them.
In 1833 the colonists met and asked Mexico for the right to govern themselves. When Austin told them to declare independence, he was jailed in Mexico City and held until 1835. By then there were twenty thousand Americans in Texas and four thousand slaves. When General Antonio López de Santa Anna became Mexico's military dictator in 1835, the Texans revolted. In February 1836 Santa Anna led four thousand Mexicans against 189 Texans barricaded inside an old Franciscan mission in San Antonio, the Alamo. When the Texans finally fell, only six survived, and the general ordered them killed; all the bodies were then doused in oil and burned. Santa Anna allowed a woman, her child, and a single slave to warn other Texans of what would happen to them. A second massacre of Texans followed at Goliad. But “Remember the Alamo” became the rallying cry at the Battle of San Jacinto, fought on April 21. With only eight hundred men, Texas commander Sam Houston attacked a larger force, routing the Mexicans in an eighteen-minute battle. Capturing Santa Anna, Houston basically ended Texas's war for independence. The Republic of Texas was established but was never recognized by Mexico, who wanted the territory returned. For the next decade, American politicians would battle over admitting Texas into the Union as a slave state.
Most Texans and most Americans wanted Texas to join the Union, and President Jackson recognized the independence of Texas in 1836, on his last day in office. But Mexico refused to recognize the republic and disputed the boundary of the Rio Grande. Nine years later, in November 1845, President James K. Polk, attempting to settle with Mexico, offered to purchase Texas and California, but the Mexicans refused to negotiate with Polk's ambassador, James Slidell. After this failure, a U.S. Army under General Zachary Taylor advanced to the mouth of the Rio Grande, which Texas claimed as its southern boundary. Mexico claimed that the boundary was the Nueces River, northeast of the Rio Grande, and considered the advance of Taylor's troops an act of aggression. In April 1846 the Mexicans sent troops across the Rio Grande.
After a border incident in which an American soldier died under questionable circumstances, President Polk had sufficient pretext to tell Congress that war existed. Congress happily went along, with only a few dissenting voices coming from several Easterners, scattered Whigs, and a rather unusual writer named Henry David Thoreau, who went to jail rather than pay taxes in support of the war and wrote about it in an 1849 essay called “Civil Disobedience.”
For Polk, the biggest complication was that his two senior military commanders, Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, were both Whigs, the party formed in opposition to Andrew Jackson's power. All three men knew that battlefield heroics could lead to the White House. While greatly outnumbered by Mexican troops, the Americans were generally better organized and trained and held a marked advantage in artillery, probably the decisive factor in their victory. A relatively brief war, the conflict with Mexico was costly. In So Far from God, a history of the Mexican War, John S. D. Eisenhower, son of the general and president, wrote, “Of the 104,556 men who served in the army…13,768 men died, the highest death rate of any war in our history.”
With victory, America had acquired another massive new territory, including California and Texas. Of course, this meant more land into which slaves could be brought. This issue would divide the country into increasingly hostile camps over the next twelve years. That the aftermath of the Mexican War would be complicated by slavery became clear immediately. At the conclusion of the war, Polk requested $2 million from Congress for reparations to the Mexican government for the territory annexed by the United States. But David Wilmot (1814-1868), a Democrat from Pennsylvania, attached an amendment to the House bill appropriating this money: The Wilmot Proviso moved to exclude slavery from the acquired territory; it was approved by the House on August 8, 1846. The Senate adjourned without considering the measure. After a second approval by the House on February 1, 1847, the bill was rewritten by the Senate to exclude the amendment. The differences of opinion on slavery, presumably settled by the Missouri Compromise, were back squarely on the American agenda. The Wilmot Proviso simply turned the heat up a few notches.
Perhaps one of the saddest retributions for the sins of the Mexican War was that, thirteen years later, former comrades-in-arms would use their hard-won experience against one another on the battlefields of the Civil War. Almost every significant Civil War commander served in the Mexican War, including Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, George B. McClellan, George Meade, James Longstreet, George Pickett, Pierre Beauregard, and Joseph E. Johnston. Some of these Mexican veterans, like Lewis Armistead and Winfield Hancock, had become close friends but went their separate ways in 1861, only to face each other on the fateful third day at Gettysburg in 1863.
Civil War Voices
From Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845).
I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far, the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant. I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday…
My father was a white man. He was admitted to be such by all I ever heard speak of my parentage. The opinion was also whispered that my master was my father; but of the correctness of this opinion, I know nothing; the means of knowing was withheld from me. My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant—before I knew her as my mother. It is a common custom in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age. Frequently, before the child had reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken off from it, and hired out on some farm a considerable distance off, and the child is placed under the care of an old woman, too old for field labor. For what this separation is done, I do not know unless it be to hinder the development of the child's affection towards its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child. This is the inevitable result…
The whisper that my master was my father, may or may not be true; and, true or false, it is of but little consequence to my purpose whilst the fact remains, in all its glaring odiousness, that slaveholders have ordained, and by law established, that the children of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers, and this is done too obviously to administer to their own lusts, and make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as pleasurable; for by this cunning arrangement, the slaveholder, in cases not a few, sustains to his slaves the double relation of master and father.
I know of such cases; and it is worthy to remark that such slaves invariably suffer greater hardships, and have more to contend with, than others. They are, in the first place, a constant offence to their mistress. She is ever disposed to find fault with them; they can seldom do any thing to please her; she is never better pleased than when she sees them under the lash, especially when she suspects her husband of showing his mulatto children favors which he withholds from his black slaves. The master is frequently compelled to sell this class of his slaves, out of deference to the feelings of his white wife; and, cruel as the deed may strike any one to be, for a man to sell his own children to human flesh-mongers, it is often the dictate of humanity for him to do so; for, unless he does this, he must not only whip them himself, but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother, of but a few shades darker complexion than himself, and ply the gory lash to his naked back; and if he lisp one word of disapproval, it is set down to his parental partiality, and only makes a bad matter worse, both for himself and the slave whom he would protect and defend.
Born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in Maryland, he was the son of a slave mother. His father's identity was a mystery, though certainly it was one of his masters. After a farmhouse childhood on Chesapeake Bay, young Fred was sent to Baltimore as a companion to a white boy. There his mistress illegally taught him to read until her husband forced her to stop, and he later worked on the docks, learning to write and continuing his reading. Sent back to the country, he was rented by a cruel farmer who beat him often until he faced the man down at risk to his life. In 1838 he escaped from Baltimore in the guise of a free sailor and, using forged papers, made his way to New York. He eventually reached the whaling port of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he was joined by his wife. Renouncing his slave name, he took the name Frederick Douglass.
Having heard William Lloyd Garrison lecture, Douglass himself rose before a Nantucket abolition convention in 1841 and delivered an unrehearsed speech that marked him as a natural speaker—eloquent, commanding, dramatic. Garrison immediately hired him to work as a speaker and agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Beaten and stoned by a mob in Indiana, Douglass eventually wrote his narrative, which became an international success. As his fame grew, he went to England for fear of being captured and returned to slavery. Friends later raised the money that allowed him to purchase his freedom.
Returning to the United States, Douglass established an abolitionist newspaper, The North Star, in Rochester, New York, although he and Garrison later parted ways over tactics and personality traits. (Neither man was especially easy to get along with.) Without question, Frederick Douglass became one of the most influential men of his times; he was eventually powerful enough to advise and even contradict President Lincoln during the war years.
PRELUDE TO THE CIVIL WAR: 1836-1848
1836
January Congress is presented with abolitionist petitions aimed at outlawing slavery in Washington, D.C. Senator John C. Calhoun rejects them as “foul slanders” on the South.
February A Mexican army of six thousand led by General Santa Anna is raised to defend Mexico's claim on Texas. Four thousand Mexican troops lay siege to the Alamo, overwhelming the garrison and massacring its defenders.
March Texas adopts a constitution that formally legalizes slavery.
April The Texans defeat Santa Anna, ratify their constitution, and elect Sam Houston as president. An envoy sent to Washington requests annexation or recognition as an independent republic. Slavery is again at issue in the following congressional debate over the annexation or admission of Texas.
May The House passes a “gag” resolution, designed to table any petitions relating to slavery, a rule that continues through 1844.
June Arkansas, a slave state, becomes the twenty-fifth state.
1837
January Michigan, a free state, becomes the twenty-sixth state.
March President Jackson recognizes Texas as an independent republic on his last day in office.
August Texas formally petitions the United States for annexation. The request is denied because Congress wants to avoid the issue of slavery there.
November Abolitionist publisher Elijah Lovejoy, whose presses have twice been destroyed by proslavery rioters, is murdered by a mob in Alton, Illinois.
December The gag rule is temporarily lifted, allowing northern congressmen to present an antislavery petition. Southerners present a countermeasure that will protect slavery or recommend dissolving the Union. The House responds with a stricter gag rule.
1838
February Former President John Quincy Adams, now a representative in the House, introduces 350 petitions opposed to slavery, but they are all tabled under the gag rule.
May Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Hall, the site of antislavery meetings, is burned to the ground.
1839
January Henry Clay condemns abolitionists as he bids for southern support in a campaign for the presidency. He claims that there is no constitutional right to interfere with slavery where it already exists.
The Amistad rebellion. Slaves capture a Spanish slave ship near Cuba. They are later captured in Long Island Sound, near Connecticut. In March 1841 the Supreme Court orders the release of the men, who have been defended by John Quincy Adams, saying they are free persons. Thirty-five Amistad survivors return to Africa.
1840
December William Henry Harrison defeats Martin Van Buren to become the ninth president. He dies one month after his inauguration and is replaced by Vice-President John Tyler, formerly the governor and a senator from Virginia and a strong advocate of states” rights.
* Edgar Allan Poe publishes his first collection of stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Though he later becomes an editor and critic of some note, Poe never achieves any financial success from his writing.
1841
November A group of slaves being transported from Virginia to New Orleans mutinies and captures the transport ship Creole. After sailing to the British port of Nassau, all are freed except those accused of murder. (In 1855 a British court awards the United States $119,330 in damages over the case.)
* Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes his first series of Essays. In Philadelphia, Edgar Allan Poe publishes “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the first American detective story.
* The Deerslayer, the last of James Fenimore Cooper's “Leather-stocking Tales,” is published.
1842
George Latimer, said to be a runaway slave, is captured in Boston. But the city's abolitionists force the authorities to allow Latimer to buy his freedom from his Virginia owner. This is one of a growing number of incidents in which the rights of runaways are defended by antislavery forces in the northern states.
March The Supreme Court overturns a Pennsylvania law forbidding the seizure of fugitive slaves. But the ruling also makes the enforcement of fugitive slave laws a federal responsibility.
1843
August The Liberty party holds another convention and denounces the extension of slave territory. James Birney is again nominated for president.
1844
June The Texas annexation treaty, negotiated by John C. Calhoun and submitted to the Senate by President Tyler, is rejected, because antislavery forces convince a majority that admitting a slave state will simply lead to another North-South confrontation.
December Tyler asks the Congress to annex Texas. The next day, Democrat James K. Polk defeats Henry Clay for president. Polk is an aggressive expansionist who favors annexing Texas and acquiring other territories in Oregon and California.
John Quincy Adams successfully urges the House to revoke the gag rule that prohibits discussion of antislavery petitions.
The Baptist Church, divided over the question of slavery, splits into northern and southern conventions.
* The first telegraphic message, “What hath God wrought?,” is sent from the Supreme Court room in Washington, D.C., to Baltimore by Samuel F. B. Morse.
* Amos Bronson Alcott moves his family to a utopian community he founds called Fruitlands. His daughter, Louisa May Alcott, will later write about the family and their life in Little Women.
1845
February At the request of President-elect Polk, the House and Senate adopt a joint resolution annexing Texas.
March Texas breaks off negotiations with Mexico. Mexico severs diplomatic relations with the United States. In his inaugural address, Polk makes it clear that he considers Texas a part of the United States.
Florida, a slave state, is admitted as the twenty-seventh state.
May Polk sends troops under General Zachary Taylor to the southwestern border of Texas to guard against an “invasion” by Mexico. Texas is still recognized internationally as part of Mexico.
November Polk offers to buy Texas, New Mexico, and California from Mexico.
December Texas is admitted as the twenty-eighth state.
Former slave Frederick Douglass publishes his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.
* The U.S. Naval Academy opens at Annapolis, Maryland.
* John C. Frémont publishes The Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842 and to Oregon and Northern California in the Years 1843-44. The book sparks enormous interest in the West.
* The potato blight strikes Ireland. About 1.5 million Irish emigrate to America in the next few years.
1846
January Polk orders Zachary Taylor to move his troops, an “Army of Observation,” near the Rio Grande. Polk's thirty-five hundred men are equal to about half the U.S. Army at the time.
March Taylor moves his troops to the Rio Grande's left bank, recognized as Mexican territory.
April A small troop of Mexicans fire on American soldiers block-ading a Mexican town. Taylor reports to Polk that “hostilities may now be considered as commenced.” This serves as the pretext for war that Polk has been awaiting.
May Following an attack on Fort Texas, Taylor pursues the Mexicans and at the Battle of Resaca de la Palma on May 9 defeats a much larger force in the first concentrated action of the war with Mexico.
On May 13, Congress approves a declaration of war. From the outset, the country is divided mostly along North-South lines, with the South favoring war and the expansion of slavery it will mean and the North opposing it for the same reason.
May-June Polk orders a naval blockade of Mexican ports on the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico.
The Senate ratifies a treaty with Great Britain over the Oregon Territory.
Americans declare a Republic of California, breaking away from Mexican rule.
August The Wilmot Proviso. After the war with Mexico begins, Polk asks Congress for funding to purchase territory from Mexico. Pennsylvania Representative David Wilmot amends the appropriations bill to include the phrase, taken from the Northwest Ordinance, that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of” the new territories that might be acquired from Mexico. Divided sharply along regional lines, the House passes the bill, but the Senate doesn't act on it.
December Iowa, a free state, becomes the twenty-ninth state.
* The first organized American baseball game takes place in Hoboken, New Jersey, in June.
* Congress establishes the Smithsonian Institution, funded with the $550,000 willed in 1829 by James Smithson, the illegitimate son of the Duke of Northumberland.
* Elias Howe patents the first sewing machine. Despite having acquired great wealth, Howe will enlist in the Union army during the Civil War.
1847
January General Winfield Scott takes command of the Gulf expedition and orders nine thousand men from Taylor's force to attack Vera Cruz, a port city on the Gulf of Mexico.
February The Battle of Buena Vista, Taylor, vastly outnumbered, defeats Mexico's Santa Anna, who retreats to Mexico City.
Congress passes the Mexico appropriations without the Wilmot Proviso, leaving the question of slavery unresolved. During the debate, Senator Calhoun introduces resolutions laying out the southern position. Among them:
* Congress has no right to limit extant or prospective states in matters pertaining to slavery;
* Slaves are property, and Congress is obligated to protect them as such.
March Scott's army lands near Vera Cruz, one of the most heavily defended cities in the Western Hemisphere. Scott captures the city on March 29.
June Peace negotiations begin. The American delegation is led by Nicholas P. Trist.
September 8-14 Scott takes the strategic town of Chapultepec and marches victoriously into Mexico City.
December Elected to the House of Representatives from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln takes his seat in Congress. His first speech from the floor attacks the Mexican War.
The concept of popular sovereignty, introduced by New York Senator Dickinson, would allow local legislatures to permit or outlaw slavery in the territories. The resolution is adopted by influential politicians such as Lewis Cass, as it allows Congress to sidestep the slavery issue.
* A party led by George and Jacob Donner, traveling west through the Sierra Nevadas of California, is trapped by snow. Many of the party resort to cannibalism to survive.
* Stephen Foster's “O, Susanna” is performed for the first time and is Foster's first major success.
1848
February The United States and Mexico sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ending the war. The United States receives more than 500,000 square miles of land—a territory that will yield the future states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, most of New Mexico, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado. Texas is also conceded to the United States, with the boundary fixed at the Rio Grande. The United States agrees to pay $15 million for the land and reparations of $3.25 million. The Senate ratifies the treaty and provides the funding but without approving the Wilmot Proviso.
May General Lewis Cass of Michigan is nominated for the presidency by the Democrats after Polk keeps his pledge not to run for reelection. The party platform criticizes any attempt to bring the slavery question before Congress.
May 29 Wisconsin, a free state, becomes the thirtieth state.
August In Buffalo, an antislavery coalition forms the Free-Soil party and nominates former President Martin Van Buren. The party opposes slavery and upholds the Wilmot Proviso. Its slogan is “Free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men.”
August 14 Polk signs a bill organizing the Oregon Territory without slavery. Southerners agree, with the tacit understanding that other new territory will be open to slaveholders.
November 7 General Zachary Taylor, a slaveholder, is elected president. Van Buren's Free-Soil candidacy wins nearly 300,000 popular votes, helping to assure Taylor's victory by drawing votes from Democratic candidate Lewis Cass, an advocate of popular sovereignty.
* The Associated Press is organized in New York to speed newsgathering for newspaper publishers.
* Gold discovered in California sparks the great Gold Rush of 1849.