This Day in New York History (Seward Senate Speech Marks Him as Prime Anti-Slavery Foe)

March 11, 1850—In his maiden speech as U.S. Senator, the New York Whig William H. Seward denounced the Compromise of 1850, an omnibus legislative package that eased secessionist sentiment in the decade before the Civil War. 

The phrase he coined—“a higher law than the Constitution”—thrust him to the forefront of opposition to slavery, proved a stumbling block to his Presidential ambitions, and posed an enduring question about the relevance of faith- and morality-driven action in American politics.

I doubt if one out of a thousand people who pass the statue accompanying this entry have stopped for more than a couple of seconds to think about its subject. Now in the midst of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s collective biography of Abraham Lincoln’s wartime cabinet, Team of Rivals, I’ve come to appreciate, maybe for the first time, the opponent-turned-friend of the President, and how much he contributed to the politics of his time, and even of what he means to ours.

As governor of New York in the early 1840s, Seward promoted economic and educational policies meant to open greater opportunities to African-, German- and Irish-Americans who were already forming part of the Democratic coalition. Like John McCain today, he excited a horde of noisome nativists to insane frenzies—in Seward’s case, through a proposal to divert a part of public school funds to parochial schools where Catholic immigrants would not have to worry about Protestant proselytizing. 

(Take note, today’s Republicans: the path to success lies away from fear-mongering about immigrants and the dispossessed. Take note, today’s Democrats: at least some of your “wall of separation” rhetoric about church and state derives from very poisonous roots.)

After a brief hiatus out of office, Seward came back to win a Senate seat, just in time to face the most divisive question of his time: the suddenly real possibility that divisions over slavery could spell the end of the Union.

The Compromise of 1850 was meant to forestall these questions by not giving either North or South entirely what each wanted. The North would get admission of California, almost certain to be a free state, and an end to the slave trade within Washington, D.C. Two other provisions favored the South: the creation of two territories in the Southwest, New Mexico and Utah, with no restrictions on slavery; and strengthening of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793.

The squall over the Compromise of 1850 is usually remembered as the last hurrah of the Senate’s “Great Triumvirate” of Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, all of whom would be out of the chamber they dominated, even dead, within three years. Webster’s three-hour March 7 oration in support of the package—an action that revolted his anti-slavery base and doomed his flickering Presidential chances but which also turned the tide toward enactment—was celebrated in John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, and was long memorized by generations of American schoolchildren.

However, the extensive legislative debate, I would argue, also brought to the fore a new generation of political leaders who dominated the antebellum and Civil War eras. Jefferson Davis assumed the role of Calhoun (so ill that he could not read aloud his fiery speech opposing the bills) as spokesman for the South. Stephen A. Douglas, the “Little Giant” best remembered now for his debates later in the decade with Abraham Lincoln, acted, like Clay, as legislative magician by crafting the legislation and rounding up enough votes to ensure passage.

And Seward took on the part that Webster, in his zeal to preserve the Union, had relinquished: champion of “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.” Beginning in a low voice decidedly removed from the great tolling bell that was Webster’s, he soon transfixed the Massachusetts Senator and his colleagues.

He could not support the proposals, he said. Strengthening the Fugitive Slave Law was unworthy of “true Christians or real freemen”; not just the slave trade, but slavery itself should not be permitted in the District of Columbia; and he could not abide the introduction of slavery anywhere in the new territories.

Not only the spirit of the Constitution was incompatible with slavery, Seward claimed, but “there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same purposes. The territory is a part…of the common heritage of mankind, bestowed upon them by the Creator of the universe.”

Even though he lost this legislative battle, Seward became the foremost spokesman for free-soil forces in the Senate. But he had provoked so much fierce opposition in the South that his enemies began to approach his friends in number and vehemence.

Political mentor Thurlow Weed’s confession that Seward’s speech “sent me to bed with a heavy heart” proved all too prescient in 1860. With the Whig Party dead by then, Seward sought the Republican Party nomination for President. But his long public anti-slavery record left such a long public trail that it opened the door to a relative dark-horse candidate: Abraham Lincoln.

Seward’s loyal and able service as Lincoln’s Secretary of State is how posterity fundamentally recalls him, and it’s certainly not a bad claim on our attention. But the “higher law” that this usually affable, conciliatory statesman invoked has, in one fashion or another, convulsed American politics throughout the republic.

In one sense, Seward’s appeal derives from the concept of natural law that has found advocates from Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Jefferson. It also meshes with the theory of civil disobedience formulated by Henry David Thoreau only a year before the Seward speech and perfected as a political tool by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. in the 20th century.

But a “higher law” also has the potential of angering people who might not share one’s religious faith or even notions of morality. Applied to certain issues—Prohibition, abortion—it has polarized the American electorate for decades.

And yet, it would be a mistake to call, as some have done in this election year, for the marginalizing of moral calls to action in the political arena. Refusal to appeal to morality produces consequences in the populace that necessarily reflect the Darwinian atmosphere of politics. Does anyone think that the United States would have been a better nation without the backing that the civil rights movement received from African-American ministers or that the unionists gained from the Roman Catholic Church?

This Day in Presidential History (‘Princeton’ Explosion Brings Tragedy, Romance to Tyler)

Feb. 28, 1844—An explosion on the inaugural cruise of the USS Princeton on the Potomac River killed six people (including two Cabinet members) and injured 20; unsettled American attempts at acquiring Texas at a critical juncture; threw a monkey wrench into the use of innovative military weaponry; and landed widowed President John Tyler (pictured) a new, young wife.

The accident came at a critical juncture for the administration. Tyler, having become the first Vice-President to gain the Presidency because of the death of the incumbent (William Henry Harrison), was watching his slim hopes for winning his own term slip away. 

Like Andrew Johnson two decades later, he was a disaffected Democrat rather than a full-fledged member of the winning party (in this case, the Whigs) to which his predecessor belonged. He was, in effect, a man without a party, abandoned by all but one of the original Whig Cabinet members.

That one, Daniel Webster, was now leaving after having negotiated a treaty with Great Britain. But tensions with the British Empire remained in place because of a dispute over ownership of the Pacific Northwest, as well as lingering bad memories of the War of 1812.

The Princeton was designed to be a confidence-boosting measure aimed at the greatest navy in the world: a fast, steam-driven warship sporting the biggest gun ever mounted on a vessel to that point.

Commander Robert Field Stockton, having deafened the ears of those aboard by demonstrating the new weapon, decided to fire the ironically named "Peacemaker" gun again for a salute to George Washington as the ship passed the late President’s home, Mount Vernon. 

Nobody knows if Stockton poured a bit more into the charge or if the crew did so on its own. But as the charge ignited, flames, heat and shrapnel burst in unexpected directions.

Secretary of State Abel Parker Upshur and his just-installed successor at the Naval Department, Thomas Gilmer, died in the accident (with Gilmer gruesomely decapitated), while Tyler himself—climbing up a ladder to witness the charge—avoided following his predecessor into eternity before his full term in office was finished.

Among the other dead was former New York state Sen. David Gardiner, whose 24-year-old daughter, Julia, had previously been wooed in vain by Tyler. But Tyler’s swift action in the crisis—carrying Julia off in his arms when she fainted, away from the death and destruction—so impressed her that she finally yielded to his blandishments and agreed to marry him.

The nickname applied to George Washington—“Father of His Country”—is true only in a metaphorical sense. The nation’s first President produced no offspring. In a more literal sense, the nickname applied more directly to Tyler, who fathered 15 children, seven with Julia after the couple returned to his Virginia home once his term was over. 

Other results of the accident were not so happy. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina ended up with the State Department portfolio upon Upshur’s death. 

But, as H.W. Brands recounts in Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants, the appointment came not at the wish of Tyler but through the manipulation of the President’s friend, Sen. Henry Wise of Virginia, who misleadingly told Calhoun that if he went to the White House, Tyler would be ready to name him to the post.

The appointment vastly complicated Tyler’s attempt to annex Texas before leaving office. Once in office, Calhoun’s scolding of Great Britain for advocating abolitionism abroad enraged Thomas Hart Benton. The influential Missouri Senator, who had been carefully wooed to the cause by Upshur, now saw the land transaction as a stalking horse for introducing slavery into American territories, a movement that he (correctly) feared could splinter the Union.

The annexation treaty with Texas made it through the House but, through Benton’s fulminations, stalled in the Senate. It would take the support of incoming President James Knox Polk, and a joint resolution of Congress to bring the vast territory into the Union.

As for Stockton: Though anxious to hog credit for the Princeton when it looked like it would bring about his dream of a steam-driven navy, he couldn’t divert blame for it fast enough after the accident. John Ericsson, the inventor he had persuaded to emigrate from Sweden to work on the project, was exonerated in the post-accident inquiry, but Stockton ensured that he would not be paid by the government for his patents and his supervision of the shipbuilding. It would take his design of the Civil War ironclad Monitor before Ericsson’s genius was adequately celebrated.

 

This Day in Southern History (John C. Calhoun Issues Manifesto of States Rights)

December 19, 1828—In support of eight resolutions calling the federal tariff passed that year oppressive, the South Carolina legislature also released an essay, Exposition and Protest, written by John C. Calhoun, that propounded theories of nullification and states rights that culminated three decades later in the secession movement that sparked the Civil War.

For the second time in 30 years, a Vice-President of the United States, a native of the South, had written an anonymous brief against the administration of which he was a part. 

Calhoun’s manifesto followed the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions written by Thomas Jefferson and his chief lieutenant, James Madison, which had insisted that the states could determine the constitutionality of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Along with Clay and Daniel Webster, Calhoun was one of the legendary “Great Triumvirate” of 19th-century Presidential contenders who dominated the U.S. Senate. Of the three, he was the one with the fewest personal vices—Clay was a gambler, while Webster not only freely imbibed but took bribes to represent the interests of the Second Bank of the United States.

But, for all their private failures, Clay and Webster strove to keep the Union together, while as a sectional spokesman Calhoun not only formulated a doctrine that eventually tore the nation asunder but was the guiding light of a group of politicians that took up the cudgels of states rights after his death in 1850.

In fact, the entire elaborate theory of states rights that he advocated would be used more than a century later, when Southern politicians launched protests against Supreme Court decisions on civil rights.

With the South ending up on the wrong side of history in both cases, many historians have looked askance at Calhoun’s legacy, even as they acknowledge his extraordinary mind. In The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, Richard Hofstadter styled the South Carolinian “The Marx of the Master Class” and delivered a potent witticism at his expense: 

“There is no record that he ever read or tried to write poetry, although there is a traditional gibe to the effect that he once began a poem with ‘Whereas,’ and stopped.”

In The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854, William W. Freehling may have been even more pungent than Hofstadter, contrasting Calhoun with the hot-headed Jackson: “The terror of Calhoun was his shattering mind. He seized onto careless commonplaces, squeezing them in that vise of a mentality, turning living creeds into arcane absurdities.”

Both the anonymous nature of Exposition and Protest and the stated rationale for its states-rights doctrine—i.e., a means to avoid secession--testify to Calhoun’s delicate political dilemma. In certain ways, even he did not appreciate the volatile environment in which he found himself.

Calhoun’s position was far less enviable than it was in 1824, when he became the acceptable second choice of the two factions supporting the principal contenders for the Presidency, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. He had joined the Adams administration after the contest ended up being decided in the House of Representatives.

But halfway through his term, disgusted at what he perceived as the “corrupt bargain” with Henry Clay by which Adams gained the Presidency as well as the program of taxpayer-supported internal improvements pushed by Adams and Clay, Calhoun made overtures about supporting the candidacy of Andrew Jackson in the 1828 election.

That switch of allegiance was all the more surprising considering their past history. Six years before, Jackson had caused an international incident in Florida by a) executing two British subjects for inciting Indian attacks against the United States and b) attacking Pensacola and seizing two Spanish forts.

Then-Secretary of War Calhoun led nearly the entire Cabinet in wanting to repudiate Jackson’s actions. The one exception was Secretary of State Adams, who argued with the Spanish authorities that if they couldn’t police Florida, they ought to cede it to a nation that could. The subsequent Adams-Onis Treaty not only was a major annexation for the U.S., then, but saved Jackson’s career.

That background made the Calhoun-Jackson relationship at best ambivalent. Other matters would come up in the first year of Calhoun’s Vice-Presidency under Jackson that would embitter the two men, notably including Calhoun’s authorship of Exposition and Protest.

The difficulty Calhoun faced is one that politicians with national ambitions have struggled with from the beginning of the republic: how to achieve leadership of the Congress without losing one’s own base.

In Calhoun’s case, his home state had howled earlier that year at the Tariff of Abominations signed into law earlier that year by Adams. The plantation aristocracy, which was experiencing real economic pain, was beside itself at the thought that the high tariff—passed for the benefit of the New England states—would lead British trading partners to seek other markets, given the high price of American tobacco. Some in the state even pressed for an end to the Union.

If the state yielded to these radicals, Calhoun argued, it would only cost Jackson the election, he argued. Better to wait until after the inauguration, he advised, when a triumphant and sympathetic new President would produce “a better order” in which the duties would be lowered.

Calhoun argued that the "whole system of legislation imposing duties on imports,--not for revenue, but the protection of one branch of industry at the expense of others,--is unconstitutional, unequal, and oppressive, and calculated to corrupt the public virtue and destroy the liberty of the Country."

Looking back to the original ratification process of the Constitution, he called for concurrent majorities to pass legislation—and for the right of a state to declare null and void within its borders federal legislation that was deemed unconstitutional or inimical to the state’s image.

Though his authorship remained officially anonymous, both Jackson and Martin Van Buren—the “Little Magician” from New York who had done so much to create the new Democratic Party around Jackson—became aware of his hand. 

The clash between the President and Vice-President became public in 1830, and before the next election was held, Calhoun had resigned—the first Vice-President to do so.

This Day in American History

February 22, 1819—The Adams-Onis Treaty, also called the Transcontinental Treaty, was signed between the United States and Spain, drawing a definite boundary between Spanish-held lands in North America and the United States.

In the election of 1824, supporters of Andrew Jackson claimed that John Quincy Adams secured enough votes in the House of Representatives to win the Presidency through a “corrupt bargain.” In exchange for being appointed Secretary of State, they alleged, Henry Clay threw his support behind Adams. The charge led four years later to an even more vitriolic Jackson-Adams rematch that Adams lost.

What has often been forgotten in the years since is that before their Presidential ambitions divided the two men, Adams had not only done Jackson a good turn, but had even saved his career. I’ve always felt that it was a particular blind spot that Jackson, usually loyal to a fault, did not appreciate what Adams did for him.

In a larger, more important sense, Adams converted an embarrassing international incident into a diplomatic triumph for the United States. It is just one of several achievements that have led many diplomatic historians to regard him as America’s greatest Secretary of State.

In 1817, the Seminole tribe launched raids into Georgia from Spanish-held East Florida. President James Monroe, believing that the Pinckney Treaty required Spain to restrain Native American incursions, believed that moderate pressure could eventually persuade the faded colonial power to cede the land to the United States.

Into this situation stepped Jackson, who on January 6, 1818, blithely offered the President his views on how to handle the situation: Not only could Amelia Island, an outpost for pirates, slave traders and smugglers, be taken, but East Florida as a whole could be taken to indemnify the U.S. for past outrages. “This can be done without implicating the government. Let it be signified to me through any channel…that the possession of the Floridas would be desirable to the United States, and in sixty days it will be accomplished.”

The letter received no response. Monroe, seriously ill, passed it along to acting Secretary of War William Crawford and the incoming secretary, John C. Calhoun. Six months later, the President arrived in Washington to discover a media firestorm about the general. In late April, Jackson had executed two British subjects for inciting the Native Americans against the United States, then, less than a month later, had attacked Pensacola, forcing the departure of the Spanish governor and his troops to Havana.

The Spanish representative to the United States, Luis de Onis y Gonzalez , hastened to Washington from his vacation to lodge a bitter protest. Monroe conferred with his cabinet in July to consider what to do.

Most, including, most vehemently, Crawford and Calhoun, called for publicly repudiating Jackson, believing it to be an act of war. Adams disagreed. In subsequent discussions with Onis, the Secretary of State insisted that if Spain could not restrain the Native Americans, they should yield the land to a country that could: the United States. The trump that Adams held was growing colonial unrest that sapped the Spanish monarchy’s will.

Under the treaty that Adams negotiated, the U.S. gained possession of Florida for $5 million, to be paid to Americans with claims against Spain; the boundary between the Louisiana Purchase region and Spanish Texas was set to American advantage; and Spain surrendered any claim to Oregon.

The agreement removed major impediments to U.S. expansion westward—and by persuading Monroe that Jackson need only be privately chastised for exceeding orders rather than publicly repudiated, Adams spared his boss a political mudbath and the general a possible loss of his command and the prestige he had won with the Battle of New Orleans. Not a bad piece of work, all around.