Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 25: Charles Sumner takes the lead in the Senate against the Fugitive Slave Act

In Congress in late 1851, the recently enacted Fugitive Slave Act became a point of hot contention.

In a history published in 1876, Henry Wilson gave an account of the intensity of the controversy in Congress that began after Congress convened in December, 1851, over the Fugitive Slave Act:

The debate at once elicited and exhibited the party tactics that controlled the nation, showing not only the disposition of the slave-masters to dictate terms to the rival parties, but the anxiety of leaders to conciliate and control the political strength of the slave-masters. ...

On the 26th of May, [first-term Massachusetts Senator Charles] Sumner presented a petition from the Society of Friends in New England, asking that the Fugitive Slave Act should be repealed; but there were only ten votes for its consideration. On the 27th of July, he submitted a resolution requesting the Committee on the Judiciary to consider the expediency of reporting a bill for the immediate repeal of that Act. (1)

At the demand of pro-slavery Democrats, the Senate on that occasion refused to allow him to speak on the Senate floor in defense of that petition. But he later used a parliamentary maneuver to defend his position on the floor:

In the Senate, on the 26th of August, he moved to amend the civil and diplomatic bill, so as to provide that no allowance should be made for expenses incurred in the execution of the Fugitive Slave Act, and that such act be repealed. In his speech on their introduction he alluded to the immeasurable importance of the slavery issue, dwarfing all others, and constantly casting its shadow across those halls. Referring to the impotent and inconsistent attempts of the [pro-slavery] propagandists to enforce silence, while always provoking discussion, he denounced the attempt to repress the liberty of speech, protested against the wrong, and claimed the right to be heard on slavery, as on every other subject. "The convictions of the heart," he said, " cannot be repressed. The utterances of conscience must be heard. They break forth with irrepressible might. As well attempt to check the tides of the ocean, the currents of the Mississippi, or the rushing waters of Niagara. The discussion of slavery will proceed wherever two or three are gathered together, — by the fireside, on the public highway, at the public meeting, in the church. The movement against slavery is from the Everlasting Arm. Even now it is gathering its forces, soon to be confessed everywhere. It may not yet be felt in the high places of office and power, but all who can put their ears humbly to the ground will hear and comprehend its incessant and advancing tread."

He arraigned the enactment in the name of the Constitution it violated, of the country it dishonored, of the humanity it degraded, of the Christianity it offended, and affirmed that every attribute of God united against it. Referring to the requirements of the Act that every citizen, when summoned, should aid and assist in its prompt and efficient execution, he boldly affirmed that "by the supreme law which commands me to do no injustice, by the comprehensive Christian law of brotherhood, by the Constitution which I am sworn to support, I am bound to disobey this Act." He closed his speech with an earnest demand for the repeal of an act so incompatible with every dictate of truth and every requirement of justice. In the words of Oriental adjuration, he said: " Beware of the wounds of the wounded souls. Oppress not to the utmost a single heart, for a solitary sigh has power to overset a whole world." This speech — learned, logical, exhaustive, and eloquent, worthy of the cause it advocated — placed the new Senator at once among the foremost of the forensic debaters of America. [my emphasis]

Sumner’s biographer David Donald argues that Sumner actually understood his position on slavery as being in the tradition of conservative reform represented by John Quincy Adams, who also opposed slavery. But he also notes that Sumner took inspiration as well from English democratic history:

He liked to fancy himself the [political] descendant of the Separatists of the English revolution, who uncompromisingly contended ‘for religious, intellectual, and political emancipation.” As their heir, he boldly announced that slavery was wrong. (2)

Sumner found in the Separatists his own “usable history.” And since the Puritans who founded the Colony of Massachusetts (and who were rescued from starving to death by the native inhabitants) were Separatists, invoking them as a precedent presumably had some political marketing value in his home state.

Charles Sumner became one of the most important anti-slavery leaders before the war and on the most committed advocates of democratic Reconstruction in the South after the Confederacy’s defeat.

Notes:

(1) Wilson, Henry (1876): History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Vol. 2, 353- Boston: J. R. Osgood. <http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015028747783>

(2) Donald, David (1960); Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 226. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 24: Frederick Douglass and the Compromise of 1850

The controversial core of the famous Compromise of 1850 was the strengthened Fugitive Slave Law, which infuriated many free-state citizens who were being required to be complicit in returning escaped slaves to their owners and masters in the slave states.

The escaped slave and major abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass was not at all happy about it either. He had contempt for the Great Compromiser and Kentucky Senator Henry Clay who had played a major role in negotiating the package of agreements:

[W]hatever the contemporary [1950] admiration for Clay's parliamentary abilities and personal incorruptibility, Douglass could have no good word for a man who owned fifty slaves. Singling out Clay's first proposal, that of admitting California as a free state, Douglass unloosed his choicest irony. "This liberal and generous concession to be fully appreciated," he wrote, "must be viewed in the light of the fact that California has already, with singular unanimity, adopted a constitution which excludes forever the foul system of bondage from her borders. . . . Mr. Clay's proffered liberality is about as noble as that of a highwayman, who, when in the power of a traveller, and on his way to prison, proposes a consultation, and offers to settle the unhappy difficulty which has occurred between himself and the latter, by accepting half the contents of his purse, assuring him, at the same time, that if his pistol had not missed fire, he might have possessed himself of the whole." (1)

Benjamin Quarles also provides Douglass’ analysis of the goals of the Slave Power (slave states) at that juncture:

To Douglass and his fellow abolitionists there existed in 1850 a slave power conspiracy. Douglass believed that this plot of the "slavocracy" embraced "five cardinal objects. '' He listed them. ''They are these: first, the complete suppression of all anti-slavery discussion; second, the extirpation of the entire free people of color from the United States; third, the unending perpetuation of slavery in this Republic; fourth, the nationalization of slavery to the extent of making slavery respected in every State of the Union; fifth, the extension of slavery over Mexico and the entire South American States.”

The only one of that list that may have been a bit overblown is the last one. Maybe.

This conspiracy was not a “conspiracy theory” in today’s meaning. It was pretty obvious from what the slave states were actually doing in Congress.

Quarles notes that the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law provoked a number of escaped former slaves living in the North to flee to “cold Canaan” (Canada). And he notes that “[t]he unpopularity of the Fugitive Slave Law thus dated from the hour of its passage.” And for good reason!

The abolitionists focused on showing the citizens of the free states the danger the Fugitive Slave Law was to their own freedom:

Douglass and the abolitionists … began to stir the collective conscience of the nation by stressing the fact that more than the slave was at stake; freedom itself was at stake. Highlighted by the Fugitive Slave Law, the abolitionist crusade perceptibly broadened from a sympathetic effort on behalf of the slave to a deep concern for the preservation of civil liberties in America.

It's worth noting that many abolitionists were ready to use force to resist the efforts of fugitive-slave hunters to send their fellow citizens back to slavery. A month after the passage of the new law, Douglass addressed an antislavery meeting in Boston:

Charles Francis Adams [son of President John Quincy Adams and grandson of President John Adams], after stating the object of the meeting, called first upon Douglass, asking him especially "to state the condition of the colored people under this new act for their oppression." Arising amid an ovation, Douglass did not mince words. The colored people of Boston, said he, had resolved to suffer death rather than return to bondage. "We must be prepared should this law be put into operation to see the streets of Boston running with blood.”

That didn’t occur in Boston. But the conflict that came to be called Bleeding Kansas – which was not simply a metaphor - broke out in 1854 and was a “small civil war in the United States, fought between proslavery and antislavery advocates for control of the new territory of Kansas under the doctrine of popular sovereignty.” (2)

Notes:

(1) Quarles, Benjamin (1950): Douglass and the Compromise of 1850. Negro History Bulletin 14:1. 24, 19-21. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/44212401>

(2) Editors (2024): Bleeding Kansas. Britannica Online 03/14/2024. <https://www.britannica.com/event/Bleeding-Kansas-United-States-history> (Accessed: 2024-24-04).

Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 23: More on how the Compromise of 1850 was terrible

The major provisions of the Compromise of 1850 included a resolution of issues involving the territories seized from Mexico in the war of 1846-48 (la Guerra de los Estados Unidos contra México). Three of the five major provisions of the compromise involved admitting California to the Union as a free state, setting the boundaries of Texas to exclude what became New Mexico, and organizing/establishing the territories of Utah and New Mexico with the question of slavery to be left to “popular sovereignty” in the territories.

This is a map showing the boundaries of Mexico as of 1824 (1):

A fourth element was abolishing the slave trade in the District of Columbia but allowing slavery itself to remain legal there. This was a cosmetic concession to remove the embarrassing presence of the buying and selling of human beings as property in the national Capital.

The fifth element was the explosive establishment of a new and much tougher Fugitive Slave Law. Its provisions were drastic enough that even former slaves who had been established as free persons in free states for decades became subject to new legal proceedings to return them to bondage.

As unstable and unjust as the Compromise of 1850 was, it can be and has been argued in retrospect that it bought time for the Northern states to strengthen their economy and infrastructure enough to defeat the South in the war set off by the latter in 1861 in defense of slavery.

Frank Heywood Hodder in an article published posthumously in 1936 offered that defense of the compromise:

The defense for the Compromise lies in the f act that, had not some settlement of the outstanding questions been reached in 1850, the secession movement would certainly have been started in the South and could not have been stopped. The building of the railroa.ds in the succeeding decade changed the situation completely. Ten railroads linked the Ohio with the Great Lakes in 1860 where there had been but one in 1850. Five roads joined the Mississippi and Ohio valleys in 1860 where there was none in 1850. The result was the new alignment of the East and the West that saved the Union in the Civil War. (2)

That counterfactual judgment is speculative, of course. But it’s hard to imagine that the advantages the North had in population and industrial development would not have been at least as superior to that of the South in the early 1850s as they would become a decade later. And the North would have had American patriotism and the moral cause of fighting against slavery and the Slave Power then just as they did later.

To tease out that what-if scenario, we would also need to speculate about whether the same Southern coalition of states could have been persuaded to join a Confederacy in 1850. The polarizing experiences of the 1850s like the guerilla war in Kansas and the Dred Scott decision certainly played a polarizing role in hardening Southern resistance to freeing the slaves. The recent shared experience if the Mexican War could have made senior officers more reluctant to enter into a treasonous uprising in 1850.

We would also have to speculate whether President Millard Fillmore (he held the office 1850-1853) would have been more effective and careful in reacting to Southern attempts to secede as Abraham Lincoln was in 1860-61. That’s also speculation. But the answer there is almost certainly: No, he would not have.

But understanding potential and feasible alternative decisions and speculating on their impacts is also part of understanding the situation in which the actual decisions were made.

Notes:

(1) File:Mexico 1824. Wikimedia Commons 06/29/2015. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mexico_1824_(equirectangular_projection).png#filehistory> (Accessed: 2024-23-04).

(2) Hodder, Frank Haywood (1936): The Authorship of the Compromise of 1850. The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 22:4, 525-536. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/1897319>

Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 22: The Compromise of 1850

I want to give some attention to the Compromise of 1850 in this year’s “heritage” posts.

That compromise provided a stopgap solution to the problems raised by the theft of one-third of Mexico’s land, including Texas and California, in the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. In those days, seizure of the territories of neighboring countries was standard operating practice for the US. Lots of slaveowners were hot for the annexation of Cuba back then, too.

The evil spirit of American history, John C. Calhoun, was still in the Senate then. He wanted all of the newly-seized territory to be open for slavery. Kentucky Sen. Henry Clay came up with a package of compromises, which Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois (of the Lincoln-Douglas debates fame) steered through Congress. Michael Woods summarizes its provisions this way:

The compromise admitted the free state of California; organized the territories of New Mexico and Utah under the slippery principle of popular sovereignty; reduced Texas’s size but promised to pay its massive debt; restricted the sale, though not the ownership, of enslaved people in Washington, D.C.; and established a draconian Fugitive Slave Act, which made recovery of alleged runaways a federal priority. (1) [my emphasis]

This situation was a major advance for the Slave Power in the South. More slave states had been added to the list. The slave state/free state balance in the Senate was still intact. But the writing was on the wall. The slave states intended to increase their power until they became dominant in the national government.

The Fugitive Slave Act was seen by many in the free states as making them even more complicit in what they viewed as the evil institution of slavery. It also trampled on the “states rights” of the free states. In fact, this was part of a series of efforts by the slave states to override the rights of free states. It was only after Lincoln was democratically elected to the Presidency in 1860 that the slave states suddenly became obsessed again with state sovereignty over federal. The Nullification Controversy of 1832 had been a trial run by the South for this approach.

The phrase “popular sovereignty” was a euphemism for allowing territories to decide themselves by popular vote (among white men, of course) whether they should enter the Union as a slave or free states, and Congress should defer to that choice. The practical outcome of this was displayed in the mini-civil-war in Kansas Territory later that decade, when pro- and anti-slavery forces attempted to achieve a majority in the territory to decide on the slavery issue.

Woods identifies three basic strands of thought on the Compromise of 1850: the triumph of statesmanship and moderation (at the expense of the slaves, of course); viewing the agreement as “a cowardly act of appeasement” (which it was): and, a “skeptical interpretation” that emphasizes “ironic outcomes and the limits of federal influence.”

The praise of the statesmanship of the compromise involves some colorful figures as major actors. But Woods politely but accurately describes Calhoun’s villainy even in the 1850 compromise this way:

Given his efforts to forge a southern political bloc and the secessionist threat embedded in his March 4 address, he fits less easily into the role of patriotic patrician. In the final volume of a massive biography, Charles W. Wiltse insisted that Calhoun remained committed to the Union. More recent interpreters view the glass as half empty: increasingly convinced that northerners would not concede to proslavery demands, Calhoun went to his grave striving to maintain the Union on southern terms while reserving secession as a last resort. From this perspective, Calhoun’s final appeal was less a plea for national unity than a sectional ultimatum. [my emphasis]

Calhoun was a defender of slavery. The only “patriotism” involved was that he would have preferred to make the entirety of the United States a safe haven for human slavery.

As Woods notes, “some historians condemn the Compromise of 1850 as a shameful capitulation to slaveholders.” It certainly was, and it only served to encourage the Slave Power to expand its pressure against democracy.

What Woods refers to as interpretations that emphasize “ironic outcomes and the limits of federal influence” mainly have to do with some of the larger implications it had for the American West. For instance, “the [popular sovereignty] doctrine raised a host of other questions in Utah, where Mormon leaders strove to maintain local control over issues ranging from Indian policy to polygamy.”

Notes:

(1) Woods, Michael E. (2019): The Compromise of 1850 and the Search for a Usable Past. Journal of the Civil War Era 9:3, 438-456. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/26755582>

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 22: Compromise of 1850

Historian David Blight reminds us of the decades of bad compromises that the Slave Power dragged the country though leading up to the Civil War in ‘A Doubtful Freedom’ New York Review 01/16/2020 issue):

In 1830 the Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster famously pronounced his dedication to “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable,” under the tremendous pressure of sectional division between North and South over tariffs, states’ rights, and slavery. In the midst of the 1832 nullification crisis, a confrontation over South Carolina’s resistance to federal tariffs and fear of how they would affect cotton prices, Webster warned that disunion would mean “states dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched…in fraternal blood.” Twenty years later, he stood in the Senate to support the Fugitive Slave Act—a law, widely loathed in his state, requiring that all citizens and officials of free states cooperate in returning escaped slaves to their masters through special new magistrates—while trying to save the Union in the Compromise of 1850.

The Compromise grew out of westward expansion following the Mexican War in the late 1840s, which raised the question of whether slavery would exist in California or any new state formed in the vast southwest territories gained from Mexico. In close sectionalized rather than partisan votes, Congress admitted California as a free state, set new borders for Texas, and opened up the entire southwest to the possible expansion of slavery, while ending slave-trading in the District of Columbia. Congress also passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed Southerners to think that they had secured a federal legal system by which to retrieve their runaway “property.” The Compromise, however, was a weak and untenable settlement of the slavery question, and it backfired by stimulating a more militant antislavery movement. This time, the patriotic urge for union ultimately failed, and a decade later the nation collapsed and descended into civil war. [my emphasis]