Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (icecream ebook reader txt) 📗

but the idea had behind it the indisputable fact that the Missouri Compromise had worked for twenty-six years in keeping the slavery issue from polarizing Congress, and it offered what looked like a solution that everyone had already agreed to earlier; most important of all, President Polk was prepared to swing all the weight of his office behind it. “The Missouri question had excited intense agitation of the public mind, and threatened to divide the country into geographical parties,” Polk reasoned. “The compromise allayed the excitement, tranquilized the popular mind, and restored confidence and fraternal feelings,” and he was confident that “a similar adjustment of the questions which now agitate the public mind would produce the same happy results.”17

The trouble with merely tinkering with the Missouri Compromise, however, was that a good deal of angry water had flowed under the bridge since 1820, and a quarter century later, Southerners were no longer satisfied with the spoils they had been awarded then. The new Mississippi senator, Jefferson Davis, warned that “as a property recognized by the Constitution, and held in a portion of the States, the Federal government is bound to admit [slavery] into all the Territories, and to give it such protection as other private property receives.” On February 19, 1847, the white-haired and hollow-cheeked John Calhoun rose to offer a set of resolutions arguing that “the territories of the United States belong to the several States composing this Union, and are held by them as their joint and common property.” This meant—and Calhoun explained himself with frightening lucidity—that “Congress, as the joint agent and representative of the States of this Union, has no right to make any law… that shall… deprive the citizens of any of the States of this Union from emigrating, with their property, into any of the territories of the United States.”18

By Calhoun’s logic, the territories were the common property of all of the states, not the federal government. Congress, in organizing and readying federal territories for statehood, was merely acting as a trustee on behalf of the entire people of the United States. Citizens of any one of the states had equal title to the territories, and therefore ought to be able to take any of their property, including slaves, into any of the territories. Hence, not only did Congress have no authority to enact the Wilmot Proviso, which banned the transportation of slave “property” to the territories, but it had had no authority in 1820 to enact the Missouri Compromise, which banned the transportation of slaves to some of the territories. With this one gesture, Calhoun swung the door of every federal territory open to slavery, and delighted Southern Whigs and Democrats fell in behind him, turning him into the South’s great political figurehead.

The Northern Democrats, however, were less than enthralled with Calhoun’s logic. In December 1847 one of Polk’s chief rivals within the Democratic Party, Michigan senator Lewis Cass, brought forward yet another solution to the problem of the Mexican Cession territories. In a letter published in the Washington Union, Cass gingerly agreed with Calhoun that Congress had no authority to impose a settlement of the slavery issue on any of the territories. Surely, observed Cass, the people who were actually living in each of the territories had the right to adopt a “slave” or “free” settlement for themselves. Let the slavery question in the Cession be “left to the people… in their respective local governments,” he argued, and let the sovereignty of the people defuse the confrontations in Washington over slavery and free Congress from the responsibility of solving the problem. Congressional mandates of the sort Wilmot and Calhoun were seeking

should be limited to the creation of proper governments for new countries, acquired or settled, and to the necessary provision for their eventual admission into the Union; leaving, in the meantime, to the people inhabiting them, to regulate their internal concerns in their own way. They are just as capable of doing so as the people of the States; and they can do so, at any rate, as soon as their political independence is recognized by admission into the Union.19

Cass’s “popular sovereignty” proposal appealed to the fundamental American ideological instinct that a democratic people had the right to make their own political decisions. Cass’s letter might have taken him further along the road to the presidency if he had not already managed to make a host of enemies within the Democratic Party. As it was, an unpersuaded President Polk attempted to ram the Missouri Compromise solution through Congress during the summer of 1848, and came out at the end of the session with nothing more to show for his efforts than a single bill authorizing the organization of the Oregon territory without slavery. Chronically ill and disappointed at the defections from Democratic unity by Calhoun, Wilmot, and Cass, Polk announced that he would not seek a second term as president in 1848. The Missouri Compromise extension proposal fizzled.

Worse for the Democrats was yet to come. The party’s presidential nominating convention, as might have been expected, picked Lewis Cass as its nominee. Agitated Northern Democrats wanted the Wilmot Proviso or nothing, and they suspected that if Cass and popular sovereignty were allowed to rule the future of the territories, the popular will could just as easily announce itself in favor of slavery as not. “I am jealous of the power of the South,” wrote David Wilmot. “The South holds no prerogative under the Constitution, which entitles her to wield forever the Scepter of Power in this Republic.” Wilmot added that if he could “strike an effectual & decisive blow against its dominion at this time, I would do so even at the temporary loss of other principles.”20

Wilmot got his chance in June 1848, when a group of anti-slavery Northern Democrats met in Utica, New York, to organize a splinter movement based on the principle that Congress had full authority to ban slavery from the territories. Two months later, in Buffalo, a national “Free-Soil”