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Ideological Fruits of Manifest Destiny: The Geopolitics of Slavery Expansion in the Crisis of1850Author(s): Major L. WilsonReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1908-1984), Vol. 63, No. 2 (Summer,1970), pp. 132-157Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Illinois State Historical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40190861 .Accessed: 19/12/2011 15:42

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MAJOR L. WILSON

Ideological Fruits of Manifest Destiny The Geopolitics of Slavery Expansion In the Crisis of 18^0

Major L. Wilson is an associate professor of history at Memphis State University; he received his Ph.D. in United States history from the University of Kansas in 1^4. His interest is centered on the ideology of nationalism and sectionalism during the period before the Civil War and he has had a number of articles published on this general subject in historical periodicals including the Tennessee Historical Quarterly, Journal of Southern History, and Civil War History.

the need to legislate for the territories acquired from Mexico in 1848 brought the United States to a grave crisis by the end of the following year. Southern congressmen with a radical outlook threatened to resist to the last hazard the unconditional admission of California as a free state, because her entry into the Union would destroy the equilibrium of power in the Senate heretofore enjoyed by the slaveholding states. With regard to New Mexico and Utah, they claimed the right of slaveholders to take their peculiar property into these territories and to receive the positive protection of the federal government. Many southern radicals were willing, however, to accept one of the compromise proposals at the time, namely that of extending the line of 36°3o/ westward to the Pacific. They could do this because such a line would involve the recognition of their view of the Union as a partnership of equals, slave and free, and invite them to acquire new areas for slavery to the south of it.

Northern free-soilers stood in absolute opposition. They

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MAJOR L. WILSON

demanded the entry of California into the Union on its own merits, and they bitterly resisted the southern effort to make the admission of a new free state the condition for

gaining concessions elsewhere. In the organization of territorial governments for New Mexico and Utah, they insisted upon the application of the Wilmot Proviso whereby Congress specifically prohibited slavery from the area. Fi-

nally, the free-soilers dismissed as totally unacceptable the

compromise proposal for extending the 36°3o' line westward to the Pacific. To accept the line would be to admit that

slavery possessed equal rights with freedom in the Union, they argued, and would usher in a new era of slavery ex-

pansionism. "It is a question between the slavery propa- gandist and the free men of this nation," Representative William A. Sackett of New York warned, "between the friends of liberty and the friends of bondage."1

The conflict between southern and northern radicals was at last fully joined, for the free-soilers stood inflexibly opposed to the hopes of the slaveholders for moving into the new territories. To conservative Whigs of the time it seemed obvious that the crisis represented the bitter fruits of "manifest destiny." During the preceding decade they had opposed the policy of expansion-minded Democrats on other

grounds, because they feared that new territorial acquisitions would, by enlarging the national boundaries, under- mine their efforts to consolidate the Union and make it

permanent.2 They now saw in the struggle of sectional ex- tremists for control of the Mexican cession a far more dra- matic and immediate threat to the Union.

i. Congressional Globe, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., App., 229 (March 4, 1850). It should be noted at the outset that the term "free-soiler" used in this

essay carries a precise meaning. It applies to all of the northern congressmen who, in their opposition to the compromises, insisted as a matter of

principle upon the insertion of the Wilmot Proviso ban against slavery in the territories.

2. For a fuller analysis of the arguments Whigs made against expansion- minded Democrats, see Major L. Wilson, "The Concept of Time and the Political Dialogue in the United States, 1828-48," American Quarterly, XIX (1967): 619-44.

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IDEOLOGICAL FRUITS

The way in which the sectional protagonists conceived of the conflict made it even more threatening. In their struggle over the fruits of manifest destiny, they also drew upon the ways of thinking which had served to rationalize the territorial expansion of the nation as a whole. These ideas of manifest destiny, when selectively applied to sectional purposes, truly cast the conflict in irrepressible terms.

A fuller word on the geopolitical ideas involved in manifest destiny will place the ideological conflict of North and South in proper context. Expansionist Democrats professed to see in the past growth of the nation across the unsettled

spaces of the continent the true nature of its destiny. In

looking to the future, as a consequence, they wanted to make even more manifest this destiny, as former President Andrew

Jackson put it, "of extending the area for freedom." The removal of the Indians farther to the west and a more liberal land policy would enable individuals, by moving out to the safety valve of unsettled lands, to secure their freedom from the evils of population density and the oppressions of eastern "capital." In a more general way the spread of the nation across space would preserve freedom from the

danger of a consolidated central government. The increas-

ing diversity of interests that came in the wake of expansion, President James K. Polk hoped, would simply rule out the

possibility of much common legislation and compel the nation to remain true to the federative idea of the Union.8 The federative nature of the Union, in turn, uniquely suited it to comprehend where it did not control the process of

settling new and essentially self-governing communities. The advocates of a manifest destiny of expansion for the

3. Jackson to Aaron V. Brown, Feb. 9, 1843, John Spencer Bassett, ed., Correspondence of Andrew Jackson (Washington, D.C., 1926- 1935), VI: 201; Fourth Annual Message, Dec. 5, 1848, James D. Richardson, comp., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents (New York, 1913), VI: 2503-13. For a perceptive analysis of the federative idea in action see William T. Hutchinson, "Unite to Divide, Divide to Unite: The

Shaping of American Federalism," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XLVI (1959): 3-i8.

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MAJOR L. WILSON

nation did not always agree among themselves about how far the boundaries of the United States would likely go, though some of the more sanguine supposed that the flag might one day fly over the entire hemisphere. But all of them assumed that the idea of republican freedom, if not the sovereignty of the republic, must and would prevail throughout the New World.

Basic in the geopolitical thought of manifest destiny was the assumption that the very existence of freedom depended in many ways upon open and unsettled space. The advocates of expansion therefore isolated two kinds of enemies.

Internally, the foil to a fuller destiny for freemen lay in the Whig program of consolidation. In contrast to the "outward" progress of the nation across space, Whigs supported policies for a qualitative development of the nation

"upward" through time. They preferred "internal improvement," as Representative Robert Winthrop of Massachu- setts defined the issue, to "external aggrandizement."4 A

higher price for the public lands might slow down the westward movement while it supplied revenues for education and a wide variety of other improvements. A new national bank would work toward a uniform currency and promote sound investment in the future. Whigs also wanted, by a

protective tariff, to diversify economic pursuits and to create a social milieu in which the full range of human talents could find expression. Tendencies toward nativism in their ranks and a general opposition to further territorial acquisitions likewise conduced to the overall goal of greater inter-

4. Congressional Globe, 29 Cong., 1 Sess., App., 483 (March 12, 184b). The author's article "The Concept of Time and the Political Dialogue in the United States, 1828-48" deals fully with this debate between Whigs and Democrats. Two basic works on the general subject are Albert K.

Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in Ameri- can History (Baltimore, 1935) and Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation (New York, 1963). Neither does an adequate job of relating the ideas of manifest destiny to the larger political dialogue, but Merk does see the relation of the federative idea of the Union to expansion. He also discusses some of the sectional ramifica- tions of expansionism.

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IDEOLOGICAL FRUITS

dependence and homogeneity in national life. By a vigor- ous use of the executive veto, Jackson and Polk had thus sought to destroy the policies which would commit the nation irreversibly in time.

Externally, the efforts of Great Britain to stop the ex-

pansion of the United States across space were thought to

pose an immediate threat to freedom. Jackson warned that the ancient foe wanted Texas as "a Canedy on our west as she has on the north." By a timorous course in the controversy over Oregon, Representative Alexander Duncan of Ohio also feared, the nation would be "circumnavigated by British power" across the entire Pacific Coast. There was an equal danger that the British would "hem us in and encircle us with her possessions" to the south, Senator Edward A. Hannegan of Indiana thought, unless the United States acted boldly to annex Cuba and Yucatan.5 Such a cordon of power drawn around the young and growing re-

public would have the effect, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri imagined, of "a vast boa constrictor." It would close at last the safety valve of space, induce population density, throw capital and labor together in naked strife, and reproduce all of the social evils of Europe. The nation must have more room, John L. O'Sullivan thus declared, "for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." Because freedom was here taken to be a function of space, John A. McClernand of Illinois said in the House that expansion constituted "the condition of our political existence."6

In a more general way the proponents of manifest destiny saw in the hostility of European monarchs a danger to freedom all over the New World. At the time Texas was an- nexed in 1845, French Minister Guizot called upon the Euro-

5. Jackson to Francis P. Blair, May 11, 1844, Bassett, ed., Correspond- ence of Andrew Jackson, VI: 286; Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 2 Sess., APP-> J79 (Jan- 29> l845); 3° Cong-> x Sess-> APP> 597 (MaY 5> 1848).

6. Ibid., 27 Cong., 3 Sess., App., 78 (Jan. 12, 1843); Democratic Review, XVII: 5 (July, 1845); Congressional Globe, 29 Cong., 2 Sess., App., 104 (Jan. 15, 1847). 136

David Wilmot, Pennsylvania congressman, 1845-1851, and author of the controversial "Proviso"

pean concert to secure a "balance of power" in North Amer- ica for checking the further growth of the United States. Ideologically, such a balance of power involved the notion of a permanent coexistence in the New World of monarchial and republican elements. President Polk responded with an aggressive formulation of the Monroe Doctrine, which ardent supporters in Congress took to be a proclama- tion of freedom's hegemony in the hemisphere. Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan professed a willingness to tolerate the existing colonies as a vast vested interest from the past; but as he looked to the future, he stood absolutely opposed to any further penetration of European power in the Americas. By such a policy of containment, he furthermore believed, the people in the existing enclaves of monarchy in the hemisphere would at last throw off the yoke and embrace republican freedom. Then would be realized fully in the New World a monism of freedom which had been destined by God and nature.7

Thus, in the geopolitical thinking of the 1840's were strong overtones of irrepressible conflict. Because "the normal state" of the federal Union was one of territorial expansion,

7. Dexter Perkins, The Monroe Doctrine, 1826-1867 (Baltimore, 1933), 62-121; Congressional Globe, 30 Cong.,i Sess., App., 614-15 (May 10, 1848).

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IDEOLOGICAL FRUITS

the Indians, the Mexicans, and the European monarchs found it necessary in certain areas to give up their demand for coexistence. To be sure, certain aspects of the thought about manifest destiny cast the nation in the role of self- defense, for the enemies of freedom were trying to block by a cordon of power the access of freemen to the safety valve of open space. On the other hand, the ideal of monistic freedom which accompanied the national growth across space suggested in a more aggressive way the rising sense of the republic's power. Presidential vetoes of Whig domestic policies and the reaffirmation of the Monroe Doctrine seemed rather to express, as Representative Winthrop wry- ly observed, far more an impulse to dominion than to self- defense.8

In a fateful way the ideas used to justify the expansion of the nation across space now entered into the sectional debate over the right of slavery to expand across the unsettled spaces of the nation. The protagonists in the debate

understandably selected from this body of ideas only the ones suited to their sectional purposes. But the pattern of their selection was revealing, for it expressed very clearly how many Americans had come by 1850 to conceive of an

irrepressible conflict between slavery and freedom. Southern radicals, first of all, drew upon the geopolitical

thought of the preceding decade in a way that demonstrated their central concern for self-defense. They sought to maintain a "balance of power" in the Union with which to check what they regarded to be the monistic urge of the free- soilers to complete dominion. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina professed to see in the effort to admit Cali- fornia as a free state the crisis of his section's fate, because a new free state would destroy the equilibrium of power the South had heretofore enjoyed in the Senate. "The moment is critical," he wrote to James H. Hammond.

8. It was Rep. Joseph J. McDowell of Ohio who regarded expansion as "the normal state" of the Union. Ibid., 29 Cong., 1 Sess., App., 76 (Jan. 5, 1846); 28 Cong., 2 Sess., App., 293 (Feb. 1, 1845).

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MAJOR L. WILSON

"Events may now be controlled; but, it will be difficult, if not impossible to control their course hereafter." Ham- mond agreed that the South must secure an equality of

power somewhere in the common government. "If we do not act now," he said, "we deliberately consign our children, not our posterity, but our children to the flames." In telling fashion Representative John H. Savage of Tennessee com-

pared the free-soil claim of hegemony within the Union to the geopolitical threat European monarchies had posed to

republican freedom in the United States and in the entire New World. "I will confine you to your present position," he said, using the example of a British threat, "until you shall surrender the doctrine of republics, and subscribe to the divine right of kings."9

Involved in this southern demand for the permanent coexistence of social elements, slave and free, was the concept of the Union as a partnership. Calhoun invoked in 1850 his long-held view that the Union had been formed at a

particular point in time as the agent of sovereign states. Because it was designed to secure and protect all preexisting elements, it possessed no inherent power to call new interests into being or more generally to create a new national

society on the ruins of the plural state communities. On this

ground Calhoun and others of like spirit had opposed the

Whig economic policies for creating a more homogeneous nation, and they now professed to see in the intense moral nationalism of the free-soilers a new and far more deadly species of consolidation. Since coexistence constituted the essence of the Union, most southern radicals supposed that secession was a legitimate safety valve for an aggrieved partner. Within the Union, they furthermore thought, safe-

ty for the slaveholding section lay only in the possession of

9. Calhoun to Hammond, Dec. 7, 1849, Hammond to Calhoun, March

5, 1850, J. Franklin Jamesen, ed., Correspondence of John C. Calhoun

{Annual Report of the American Historical Association for i8gg, Washing- ton, D.C., 1900), II: 775, 121 1 ; Congressional Globe, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., App., 1034 (Aug. 9, 1850).

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IDEOLOGICAL FRUITS

power sufficient to check the aggressive North. Despair- ing of other expedients to that end, Calhoun in 1850 called for an amendment that would give to each section a separate executive and therefore a veto power over the national councils.10

But most of Calhoun's younger disciples expressed greater hope. They believed that the spread of the slaveholding interest into new territories could achieve the goal of defensive power. Senator Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia deemed the greatest of all "political boons" to be "that of

bringing more slave States into this confederacy - enough to preserve the old balance in this body; or if that cannot be, to approach that object as nearly as possible." No doubt existed in the mind of Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi that the areas already acquired from Mexico and others still farther south were suited to the uses of slave labor. "To the Pacific, then, I say - to the Pacific," was the call of

Representative Richard K. Meade of Virginia. A cordon of slave states stretching to that ocean, he hoped, would make the remainder of the continent to the south the "exclusive domain" of the slaveholding section.11 Many other southern spokesmen were less sanguine than Meade, for there was

disagreement among them no less than among the cham-

pions of manifest destiny, about the outward limits of future expansion. All resolutely insisted, however, upon the

right of taking slavery into new territories, even at the hazard of the Union itself. The 36°3o' line might be an acceptable alternative, but they stood absolutely against the Wilmot Proviso.

The alternative to expansion struck southern spokesmen as horrible and stark. The successful effort of the free-soilers to "coop up," "gird about," "hem in," or "confine" slavery within its present space would, in geopolitical terms, open

10. Calhoun's great speech before the Senate on March 4, 1850, covered all of the familiar ground of his theory of the Union. Ibid., 451-55.

11. Ibid., 378 (March 25, 1850); 150 (Feb. 13, 1850); 702 (June 6, 1850).

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MAJOR L. WILSON

a veritable Pandora's box of evils.12 In the first place, a cordon of free territory around the South amounted to an expanded haven for fugitive slaves. The pressure of population against the land would soon begin to induce non- slaveholding whites to emigrate in great numbers, seeking to improve their condition. A growing disproportion of whites and blacks would be left in their wake, and progress in industry and the crafts would begin to languish. The natural increase in the slave population, at the same time, meant a decline in the value of labor until the whole capital in slavery would be wiped out by forced emancipation.

The gravest of all problems - that of coexistence for un-

equal races within a free society - would then be at hand. It would present the whites, Senator David Yulee of Florida

imagined, with three harsh possibilities: they might ex- terminate the former slaves, be vanquished by them, or flee the region, "leaving in the end the graves of their sires to be trodden under the heel of the African." Jefferson Davis warned his fellows that the seminal moment of decision was at hand. Men of "the present generation are called upon to meet it," he said, "they have no right to postpone to

posterity the danger which is laid at their own doors."13 In sum, southern expansionists faced the awful prospect

that when slavery stopped spreading over new and unsettled areas it would also come to an end in the old areas where it had always existed. In other terms, they believed the free-soil effort to engross the territories exclusively for northern freemen amounted to a geopolitical tactic for de-

stroying the Union which the fathers had fashioned as a

partnership of slave and free elements. For them, the monistic urge of the free-soilers to dominion truly defined the frame of irrepressible conflict. The "great liberty of

12. These very phrases were used time and again by the expansionists of the South. Representatives Winfield S. Featherston of Mississippi, Jeremiah Morton of Virginia, and Isham G. Harris of Tennessee provided typical examples. Ibid., 258 (March 11, 1850); 114 (Feb. 6, 1850); 445 (April 9, 1850).

13. Ibid., 1 167 (Aug. 6, 1850); 150 (Feb. 13, 1850). 141

IDEOLOGICAL FRUITS

growth" for the slaveholding South, Senator Yulee conclud- ed, "is the condition of our existence."14

But there were other and more moderate voices in the South during the crisis of 1850. An overwhelming number of Whig congresssmen lent their support to the com-

promise efforts, and in doing so they explicitly rejected the

geopolitical thinking of the radical expansionists. Senator

George E. Badger of North Carolina opposed further territorial acquisitions, either for national or sectional uses, because he believed, in good Whig fashion, that "an indefi- nite extension of our limits" placed in serious jeopardy the

goal of greater harmony and homogeneity in national life. Nor was an equilibrium of power either attainable or nec-

essary, Merideth P. Gentry of Tennessee said in the House, for securing the interests of the South. This was true in large part, Representative Edward Stanly of North Caro- lina agreed, because pluralism rather than an irreducible dualism of economic and social interests characterized the life of the nation.15 Representative Christopher H. Wil- liams of Tennessee likewise dismissed as chimerical the dark and foreboding fear that the slaveholding section would meet its Malthusian doom when free-soilers cut off the safety valve of open space. He reckoned, to the contrary, that the present population of the South could live comfortably in the state of Virginia alone, and that the lands of the whole section might easily accommodate ninety million

people.16 On constitutional grounds, as well, southern Whigs re-

jected Calhoun's partnership idea. The Union, Badger protested, was a great corporation, made by the people as

14. Ibid., 1 167 (Aug. 6, 1850). 15. Ibid., 389 (March 19, 1850); 836 (June 10, 1850); 344 (March 6,

1850). 16. Ibid., 1053 (Aug. 9, 1850). For a fuller discussion of southern

thought about population density, see Joseph J. Spengler, "Population Theory in the Ante-Bellum South," Journal of Southern History, II (1936): 360-89; and by the same author, "Malthusianism and the Debate on Slavery," South Atlantic Quarterly, XXXIV (1935): 170-89.

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MAJOR L. WILSON

a whole to last forever, and not "a mercantile partnership to transact business for the pecuniary benefit of the part- ners." Stanly and Williams compared the constitution to a solemn marriage covenant and the Union to an irreversible commitment from which there could be no divorce. In their challenge to the constitutionality of the Wilmot Pro- viso, it was true, Senator John M. Berrien and Representa- tive Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia invoked the principle of absolute equality among the states. But even here, Berrien thought of the Union as a corporate entity and of secession as a starkly revolutionary, not a constitutional, right.17

By their opposition, then, southern Whigs demonstrated in another way how the extreme sectional position in 1850 relied almost exclusively upon the ideas of expansionist de- mocracy. But however expansionist and aggressive they might have sounded, the southern radicals used the ideas of manifest destiny mainly for the defensive purpose of se-

curing the coexistence in the Union of elements slave and free.

By contrast, the free-soilers drew upon the geopolitical thinking of the preceding decade in a different and far more aggressive spirit. The overall way they conceived of the relation of freedom to slavery within the republic clearly paralleled the way champions of manifest destiny had viewed the relation of the republic to European powers in the New World. In both cases there were the monistic

assumption that the whole would become all one thing or all the other and the hope that the free element would

prevail. Just as Polk and Cass, among the expansionists of the 1840's, had resisted European efforts to establish a "balance of power" in the hemisphere, free-soilers rejected southern demands for a permanent equilibrium of power within the Union.

17. Congression Globe, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., App., 1501 (Aug. 2, 1850); 345 (March 6, 1850); 292 (March 18, 1850); 205 (Feb. 12, 1850); 1084 (Aug. 9, 1850).

H3

John A. McClernand served as an Illinois congressman from 1843 to 1 85 1 and again from i8^g to 1861 before beginning his Civil War career as a brigadier general.

Ideologically, the hegemony of the republic which some expansionists claimed to see in the Monroe Doctrine found a match in the exclusive claims for freedom in the territory made by the Wilmot Proviso. Senator Cass had professed to believe that an absolute containment policy against further colonization of the New World would lead at last to the total triumph of republican freedom. With regard to the internal evil of slavery, Senator William H. Seward of New York would in like fashion "inflexibly direct the policy of the Federal Government to circumscribe its limits and favor its ultimate extinguishment."18 Other and more ex-

plicit parallels could be drawn, but it seems clear that a real ideological kinship obtained between the advocates of manifest destiny and free-soil. In geopolitical terms, both were equally disposed to accept the coexistence of free and unfree elements in the present area of settlement, to insist

upon a monism of freedom in the unsettled areas, and to believe that the whole would through time become entirely free.

There was a dual emphasis in this urge to dominion.

Speaking for most free-soilers during the crisis of 1850, Sen- ator Seward clearly expressed this ambivalence in their

18. Ibid., 1024 (July 2, 1850). Seward here anticipated his own formula of "irrepressible conflict" fashioned in 1858 and that of the "house divided" made by Abraham Lincoln in the same year.

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MAJOR L. WILSON

thought. On the one hand he announced that freedom was bound, in the very nature of things, to triumph in the contest with slavery. The southern demand for a "political equilibrium" in the Union therefore struck him as absurd, for it could never hope to repose on a "physical equilibrium" of actual power. The superior energy and enterprise of free labor had already outstripped slave labor in the march across the continent, and Seward advised the South that the accessions of strength that came with each wave of

European immigration would surely make the future even more decidedly an era of freedom. The notion of permanent coexistence, as a consequence, could simply find no support in the realities of growth and power.19

Along with these boasts of puissant freedom, however, came a second and more solemn emphasis on the moral

imperative. It was not enough to believe that freedom would inevitably triumph over slavery: Seward also felt the need to assert the absolute moral right of freedom to the triumph. With immediate regard to the unsettled territories of the nation, he placed the claims of freedom on the ground of universal right. "But there is a higher law than the Constitution," he argued, "which regulates our

authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble

purposes."20 Many supporters of compromise in 1850 ar-

gued that freedom would triumph in New Mexico and

Utah, and that no need existed for the government to pro- hibit by law the introduction of slavery there. But the free-soilers insisted upon the inclusion of the Wilmot Proviso in the territorial bills, because it would mean a solemn moral commitment for the nation.

Stated another way, this dual aspect of free-soil thought expressed a growing sense of northern power in the Union and of the Tightness of that power to shape the nation's course. "It was an assertion of the fact," Avery O. Craven

19. Ibid., 263 (March u, 1850). 20. Ibid., 265 (March 11, 1850).

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IDEOLOGICAL FRUITS

perceptively notes, "that North and West had definitely caught step with the modern world and had reached the

point where they knew their minds and their strength."21 In a similar fashion the spokesmen for manifest destiny had felt the growing power of the new nation and had looked to a future of even greater dominion.

Free-soilers during the crisis of 1850 thus captured the general tone and aggressive spirit of the geopolitical think-

ing of the preceding decade. This same emphasis can also be seen in the more particular, if often contradictory, ways in which they applied the ideas of manifest destiny to their sectional purpose.

For those with abolitionist impulses, first of all, the policy of free-soil constituted a useful geopolitical tactic. Repre- sentative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania described one

way it might combat the evil. "Surround it by a cordon of freemen that it cannot spread," he said, "and in less than

twenty-five years every slaveholding State in this Union will have on its statute books a law for the gradual and final extinction of slavery." A ban on slavery in the territories

might also enable the number of free states to increase until a three-fourths majority could be secured for amending the Constitution and abolishing slavery by direct action of the

government. With this partly in mind some abolitionists

supported a movement to acquire all of Mexico.22 More- over, a rigid adherence to the Wilmot Proviso might, by inducing the slaveholding states to secede, present the oppor- tunity for abolition in more violent ways. Once out from under the protection of the Union, Horace Mann of Mas- sachusetts taunted southern representatives, "slavery would

21. "The 1840's and the Democratic Process," Journal of Southern His-

tory, XVI (1950): 173. Craven develops this view at greater length in The Coming of the Civil War (Chicago, 1942), 175-240.

22. Congressional Globe, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., App., 142 (Feb. 20, 1850). Many abolitionists apparently believed that slavery could not really be established in Mexico. John D. P. Fuller, "The Slavery Question and the Movement to Acquire Mexico," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXI

(i934)- 3J-48.

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MAJOR L. WILSON

melt away upon your borders like an iceberg in the tropics." A war to bring the South back into the Union would also ensue, he said, and the "machinery of this Government" would forcibly emancipate slavery in the process. Because liberty followed the sword, Representative Joshua R. Gid- dings of Ohio thus rejoiced, the Union would at last be

purged of the evil.23 With the same hopes in mind, George W. Julian of Indiana condemned all compromise efforts in the House to shore up the Union as a house divided between freedom and slavery. He did not believe the Union could be dissolved, and he wanted to come to grips with "the disease in the body politic" before it was too late.24

Free-soilers of Democratic lineage brought to the cause

yet another emphasis. Whereas the abolitionists sought to close the safety valve of unsettled space against the South in order to induce emancipation, former Democrats here

professed the opposite fear that southern expansionists would engross the national territories and block northern freemen from moving out themselves to the safety valve of unsettled lands. A cordon of British power across the continent was once thought to be the external enemy, but now free-soilers saw in the slave power the geopolitical foil to freedom. Representative Charles Durkee of Wisconsin thus wanted the nation to reserve the "expansive acres" of the

public domain for "the disenthralment of the millions of Lacklanders" then living under the evils of population den-

sity and capitalistic oppression in the eastern United States and in Europe.25

Sharing this view of freedom as a function of space, Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania argued for the application of his Proviso to the national territories on another ground. Without the Proviso a cordon of slave states would reach out to the Pacific, he warned, and there-

23. Congressional Globe, 31 Gong., 1 Sess., App., 222, 221 (Feb. 15, 1850); 1 126 (Aug. 12, 1850).

24. Ibid., 578 (May 14, 1850). 25. Ibid., 744 (June 7, 1850).

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IDEOLOGICAL FRUITS

fore block the farther expansion of freemen southward on the continent in search of more room. In other words, the Democratic free-soilers wanted to continue the manifest destiny of the nation but to restrict its fruits solely to freemen. Under those conditions, Representative Chauncey F. Cleveland of Connecticut hoped the nation would find "no limit on this continent between the poles."26

Elements of Whiggery also lent strength to the cause. Free-soilers of this persuasion deemed the further expansion of slavery a profound enemy to the interests of freemen because it threatened in two ways the continuing Whig goal of internal improvement for the nation. Free labor had

already demonstrated its superiority to slave labor in develop- ing the resources of a virgin continent, Representative Henry Bennett of New York argued, and had therefore established its right to the exclusive use of the public domain. In the same vein, a colleague, Peter H. Silvester, compared pro- gressive Ohio to slaveholding Kentucky and dynamic New York to devitalized Virginia in order to demonstrate "the

withering influence" of slavery. Senator Seward furthermore contended that free labor would be unable to complete the task of national improvement without a protective tariff, land grants, bounties, and other such positive actions by the

government. But these were precisely the kinds of policies which most slaveholders had come by 1850 to oppose so

strongly. Hence, the continued spread of slavery and the admission of new slave states seemed calculated to blast future hopes for enriching the country. Representative Charles E. Clarke of New York recalled how decisive the votes of Texas congressmen had been in reducing tariff duties in 1846; and he felt especially outraged that such a power of negating constructive measures had been enhanced by the constitutional privilege of counting every five slaves as three citizens in determining representation in the House. "I look upon the toleration of a slave representation in the

26. Ibid., 511 (May 3, 1850); 508 (April 19, 1850).

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MAJOR L. WILSON

territory west of the Mississippi," he said in bitter retrospect, "as a violation of the Constitution."27

In geopolitical terms, there was obviously contradiction within the ranks of the free-soilers. Some wanted with the Wilmot Proviso to draw a cordon of freedom around the South, because they regarded the further expansion of slavery a fatal obstacle to the internal development of the country. Others would stop the spread of slavery in order that freemen might expand, for they thought of freedom as in some real degree a function of open space. Free-soilers with Whiggish sympathies thus seemed disposed to link the Wilmot Proviso with the tariff and its related policies for

giving an "upward" direction to the nation's course; while erstwhile Democrats would combine the Proviso with free homesteads and give an "outward" direction to the destiny of freemen.

But unity came to the free-soilers by virtue of their pre- occupation with the task of stopping the Spread of slavery. It was a common task, they reasoned, for the simple reason that an expansive slave power constituted at one and the same time an internal and an external enemy to freemen. Whether the nation moved "outward" to encompass the entire hemisphere or "upward" toward greater richness and

diversity within a narrower space, free-soilers here exhibited a monistic urge that the nation's course must at last reflect the handiwork of freedom. Conflict now became irrepressible because the question at issue shifted from a concern for the shape of the future to the more seminal matter of who should have the power to shape it.

Free-soilers made absolutely clear their belief that the

power to shape the destinies of the country ought to be in the hands of the numerical majority. The great question of the day, Representative Cleveland of Connecticut declared, was the contest between "seventeen millions of free

27. Ibid., 645 (May 27, 1850); 756 (June 3, 1850); 1024 (July 2, 1850);

564 (May 13, 1850).

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people and three millions of slaves" on one side and "less than five hundred thousand slaveholders" on the other. Such disparity in numbers, Representative Lucius B. Peck of Vermont agreed, served to render absurd the southern claim that the founding fathers created the government for the purpose of protecting minorities. He affirmed, to the contrary, that the right of the majority to rule was "the principle on which the Constitution is based." In regard to the unsettled territories Kinsley S. Bingham of Michigan therefore called on the House to make a rigorous application of the principle that "the will of the majority must be obeyed ; the free soil of the country must be preserved as the in- heritance of the free laborer and his children."28

The real novelty of this majoritarian claim by the free- soilers can be clearly seen in its contrast to the position and attitude of the old parties. The Whigs had favored positive action by the government on the principle that the will of the nation arose from a consensus of all interests, including the interest of slavery. The Democrats, on the other hand, had leaned strongly toward the laissez-faire

position that the true will of the nation was most justly ex-

pressed when the government left all interests alone.29 But the free-soilers would, in effect, denationalize the slaveholders in the new and unsettled part of the Union and hope that their interest would through time die out in the old part of the Union.

With regard to other policies, the right of majority rule was also asserted. The free-soilers obviously brought with them conflicting ideas about tariff and land policies, for

higher tariff duties were calculated to give an "upward" direction to the nation while a liberal land policy of free homesteads tended to promote an "outward" development.

28. Ibid., 508 (April 19, 1850); 518 (April 23, 1850); 734 (June 4, 1850). 29. For a fuller treatment of Whig and Democratic concepts of the

Union, see the author's " 'Liberty and Union' : An Analysis of Three Concepts

Involved in the Nullification Controversy," Journal of Southern History, XXXIII (1967): 331-55.

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MAJOR L. WILSON

But the opposition most champions of "slave labor" made to both of these policies served in a dialectical fashion to hasten the formation of a new consensus of "free labor." As it stood in contrast to the "one great property interest" of slavery, Representative Bennett of New York here took "free labor" to be a term as expansive as middle-class Amer- ica, one broad enough to include the interests of all non- slaveholders.30

The dynamics of the new free-soil consensus can be seen in the way old partisans moved toward it from either direction. Representative John Crowell of Ohio, a former Whig, now applied to slaveholders the same rhetoric that Jack- sonians had once used against the monied aristocracy. The old Bank of the United States, he declared, "together with the immense wealth of the Rothschilds, would be an adver-

sary quite insignificant and harmless, compared with the one which the friends of free soil now have to encounter." At the same time, the former Jacksonian David Wilmot seemed disposed to relinquish the old laissez-faire strictures

against positive action by the government whenever the government truly reflected the will of freemen. "It is theirs to

enjoy, to defend," he said in the House. "They have a right to mould it to their pleasure, to determine its policy, to direct it to the advancement of their happiness and pros- perity."31 In the Republican party platform of i860 this free-soil facility of combining the contradictory policies of a high tariff and free homesteads found triumphant expression. But again, the real issue had now shifted from the kind of policies the nation ought to adopt to the more crucial matter of who should have the power of adopting them.

Finally, the free-soilers sought an ultimate justification for their claims of hegemony by an appeal to the authority of the founding fathers. By calling the nation back to the

path of free soil, Bingham of Michigan said in the House,

30. Congressional Globe, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., App., 641 (May 27, 1850). 31. Ibid., 694 (June 3, 1850); 942 (July 24, 1850].

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IDEOLOGICAL FRUITS

"We are only walking in the footsteps of the patriots and statesmen who have preceded us." Representative Lewis D. Campbell of Ohio agreed "that one of the very designs of the founders of this Republic" had been "to prevent the extension of slavery." In his great speech before the Senate on March 26, 1850, Salmon P. Chase of Ohio gave to this

position its most systematic formulation. He began with the basic premise that the fathers had founded the Union as a monism of freedom. Slavery existed at the time, to be sure, yet the founders regarded it as a temporary evil which would soon pass away after it ceased to grow. In order to hasten the process, the fathers provided for an end to the foreign slave trade after twenty years and prohibited slavery from expanding into the Old Northwest. In legis- lating for the nation and for all posterity, Chase here supposed, the fathers had fulfilled the design of Providence by reserving the virgin continent for the exclusive uses of free labor.32

In this light, the southern demand for permanent coexistence in the Union, no less than the efforts of monarchial

Europe to maintain a "balance of power" in the New World, could only appear as ways of subverting the original and

perfect design. There was hence thought to be a need, in both cases, of reaffirming basic principles. During the preceding decade Senator Cass had wanted Congress, by a formal and solemn enactment, to give the full force of the nation's will to the monistic premise of the Monroe Doc- trine. In like fashion the free-soilers during the crisis of

1850 insisted that the Wilmot Proviso be written into the bills for organizing the territories of New Mexico and Utah. To the argument that the Proviso was not needed for ex-

cluding slavery from an area so seemingly unsuited to its uses, Representative Julian of Indiana gave a telling reply: "I would still insist on the proviso, as a wholesome and need-

32. Ibid., 733 (June 4, 1850); 179 (Feb. 19, 1850); 469-74 (March 26, 1850).

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ful reassertion, in the present crisis, of the principles on which the Government was founded and was designed to be ad- ministered." Seward also stood on principle against the

pleas for compromise. "There is a sound maxim which teaches that every government is perpetually degenerating towards corruption," he said, "from which it must be rescued at successive periods by the resuscitation of its first principles and the reestablishment of its original constitution."33

Most fatefully, many of the free-soilers linked to their

concept of monistic freedom the idea of the Union as absolute and indissoluble.34 The combination of the two ideas

truly defined the terms of irrepressible conflict, for it denied to the South either the safety valve of secession or the safety valve of expansion across unsettled space. At the very outset of the crisis in 1850, Robert Toombs of Georgia elec- trified the House with his solemn declaration that the South

ought to dissolve the Union if the Wilmot Proviso was applied to the bills for organizing the territories of New Mexi- co and Utah.35 Here he clearly implied that the only real alternative to secession was for the South to gain defensive

power within the Union by settling new areas and by bringing in additional slave states. Expansion, indeed, constituted the very condition for the section's coexistence in the Union. But the free-soilers rejected both alternatives as

they looked to the future they hoped to control; and the

33. Ibid., 1301 (Sept. 25, 1850); 1023 (July 2, 1850). 34. Seward stated most clearly how the Union, founded in the beginning

by voluntary agreement, had become through time an absolute - the crea- ture of the economic, social, and political necessities of an interdependent people. "The Union, then, w," he explained, "not because merely that men choose that it shall be, but because some Government must exist here, and no other Government than this can." Ibid., 269 (March 11, 1850). In One Nation Indivisible: The Union in American Thought, 1776-1861 (New York, 1964), Paul C. Nagel deals at length with the way the Union had come by the 1850's to be regarded as an absolute.

35. "From 1787 to this hour the people of the bouth have asked nothing but justice," Toombs noted further in a spirit of self-defense, "nothing but the maintenance of the principles and the spirit which controlled our fathers in the formation of the Constitution." Congressional Globe, 31 Cong., 1

Sess., 28 (Dec. 13, 1849).

153

Salmon P. Chase, who was elected to the Senate by the Ohio legisla- ture in February, i84Q

way they used the old ideas about a manifest destiny for the nation fully expressed this impulse to dominion.

Compromise, however, and not an effort at secession came to resolve the crisis in 1850. California was admitted as a free state, and the territories of New Mexico and Utah were organized without the Wilmot Proviso. The principle of popular sovereignty served in their organization as the

compromise formula. According to it, the power of decid-

ing the issue of slavery or freedom in a national territory was taken from Congress and given instead to the settlers in the territory. Obviously, the free-soilers could not accept the formula; for it permitted slaveholders to enter the new

territory, and it created the likelihood that slavery would become irreversibly established there. Because the compromise violated the claims of monistic freedom, in short, Julian warned that it could not last. "In the very nature of things, slavery and freedom are the irreconcilable foes to each other," he said after the settlement had been made, "and therefore their conflicts cannot cease until justice shall assert her supremacy.5536

36. Ibid., 31 Cong., i Sess., App., 1302 (Sept. 25, 1850). Three excel- lent articles demonstrate very clearly that popular sovereignty was the com-

promise formula in 1850: Frank H. Hodder, "The Authorship of the Com-

promise of 1850," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXII (1936): 525- 36; Holman Hamilton, "Democratic Senate Leadership and the Compromise

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In some ways, by contrast, southern partisans found it easier to accept the compromise. By placing the power of decision in the hands of the people in the territory, the doctrine of popular sovereignty at least allowed slaveholders to enter the public domain during the initial stages of settlement. In geopolitical terms, it recognized their claims of coexistence in the Union, and it opened to them the op- portunity of enhancing the political power of their section by converting the territory into a new slave state. There was, however, a fatal ambiguity in the doctrine with regard to the precise time at which the settlers in a territory might make the decision for slavery or freedom. The northern advocates of popular sovereignty generally supposed that a decision could be made at some point during the territorial stage of development; yet this interpretation confront- ed southerners with the unwelcome prospect of an ill-organized territorial community denying the rights of coexistence to citizens from the sovereign states. The southerners generally argued, as a consequence, that the decision could

only be made at the end of the territorial period, that is, at the moment when the people assumed statehood and full

partnership in the Union.37 This ambiguity in the principle of popular sovereignty

cast a real shadow over the prospects for the permanence of the compromise. The equivocal support some of the northern Whigs gave to the settlement in 1850 had the same effect. Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts could not

accept the doctrine of territorial sovereignty, for he believed that Congress did possess the power to act on the question of 1850," ibid., XLI (1954): 403-18; and Robert Russel, "What Was the

Compromise of 1850?" Journal of Southern History, XXII (1956) : 292-309. 37. Italics added. The different interpretations placed on the doctrine

of popular sovereignty can be clearly seen in the statements of Senator

Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and Senator Robert M. T. Hunter of Vir-

ginia: Congressional Globe, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., App., 367-70 (March 13, 1850); 1384-85 (July 18, 1850). The best single work dealing with the

ambiguities of the principle of popular sovereignty is Milo Milton Quaife, The Doctrine of Non-intervention with Slavery in the Territories (Chicago, 1910).

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of slavery in the territories. But he regarded the Wilmot Proviso as a means to the end and not as an end in itself. He therefore opposed its application to the territories of New Mexico and Utah on the practical ground that the cimate and soil of the region had already interdicted slavery and had therefore ruled out the need for a congressional ban. For this same reason Webster severely scolded the "one idea" free-soilers for their unwavering insistence upon the inclusion of the Proviso. Such a doctrinaire stand violated the spirit of compromise with which the fathers had formed the Union, he protested, and made it difficult for statesmen to achieve a consensus of all interests for promot- ing the welfare of all.38 More generally the Whigs hoped that the bitter controversy over the Mexican cession would forever kill the lust for further acquisitions. Then, Repre- sentative Elbridge G. Spaulding of New York believed, the nation might resume the old American system of policies for improving the ample homestead it already possessed.39

Only the expansionist Democrats who still looked to a fuller manifest destiny of outward growth for the nation

gave a full and unequivocal support to the compromise settlement in 1850. Under the brilliant leadership of Sen- ator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, indeed, they provided the greatest force for resolving the controversy. Ideologi- cally, they claimed that the doctrine of popular sovereignty reflected most truly the genius of the federative idea of the Union, for it extended to local communities real autonomy in shaping their domestic institutions. The people of Cali- fornia had freely determined the kind of state they wanted to have, and it was thought the people of New Mexico and Utah should be given the same freedom of choice. More- over, the advocates of manifest destiny believed that by tak-

38. Congressional Globe, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., App., 269-76 (March 7, 1850); 1267-70 (July 17, 1850). Senators Henry Clay of Kentucky, John Bell of Tennessee, and George E. Badger of North Carolina were among a number of Whig congressmen from the border slaveholding states who basically shared Webster's position here.

39. Ibid., 402 (April 4, 1850). 156

MAJOR L. WILSON

ing the debate over slavery out of the halls of Congress they would remove the most serious obstacle to new territorial acquisitions.40

But here was precisely the rub. New acquisitions of territory or the opening of existing areas to settlement could only lead to another round of controversy. The fruits of manifest destiny plucked from Mexico brought on the crisis of 1850, yet the principle of popular sovereignty by which the crisis was passed had not received a clear and unequivocal mandate. This was fatefully true in the case of the radicals from either section, for the free-soilers explicitly rejected the doctrine of territorial sovereignty, and southern partisans adduced serious qualifications. The fundamental fact remained that the sectional spokesmen conceived of the issue of slavery expansion in terms of irrepressible conflict; and much of the form to their thought had been

selectively drawn from the geopolitical ideas used to justify national expansion. The compromise in 1850 did not remove, as its leading supporters hoped it would, a major obstacle to the acquisition of new territories for the nation : it merely allayed temporarily a profound conflict over the

way all national territories should be used. Conflict thus became one of the chief ideological fruits of manifest destiny.

40. In the older studies there is the distinct tendency to give chief credit for the compromise in 1850 to Clay, Webster, and their supporters. But more recent works clearly demonstrate that Douglas and the northern Democ-

racy - with considerable aid from such southerners as Rep. Howell Cobb of Georgia, Senator Henry S. Foote of Mississippi, and Senator Sam Houston of Texas - contributed most to the settlement. In addition to the articles cited in n. 36, above, see an extended analysis of the matter in Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (Lex- ington, Ky., 1964).

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ideological fruits of manifest destiny: the geopolitics of ......basic in the geopolitical thought...

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