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?

Quote of the Day (William Tecumseh Sherman, on Running for President)

“If forced to choose between the penitentiary and the White House for four years, I would say the penitentiary, thank you.” —Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman (1822-1891), letter to Gen. Henry W. Halleck, September 1864, in The Oxford Dictionary of American Quotations, Second Edition, edited by Margaret Miner and Hugh Rawson (2006)

In Sherman’s time, it was virtually unthinkable that an occupant of the Oval Office might end up in both the White House and the penitentiary. But then again, Sherman served under a Republican nicknamed “Honest Abe” who sought to preserve the nation from its internal and external enemies, whereas now…

Oh, never mind.

Quotes of the Day (The Fall of Atlanta, Seen by Gen. Sherman and Scarlett O’Hara)

"The next morning [Confederate] General [William J.] Hardee was gone, and we all pushed forward along the railroad south, in close pursuit, till we ran up against his lines at a point just above Lovejoy's Station. While bringing forward troops and feeling the new position of our adversary, rumors came from the rear that the enemy had evacuated Atlanta, and that General [Henry W.] Slocum was in the city. Later in the day I received a note in Slocum's own handwriting, stating that he had heard during the night the very sounds that I have referred to [explosions]; that he had moved rapidly up from the bridge about daylight, and had entered Atlanta unopposed. His letter was dated inside the city, so there was no doubt of the fact. General [George] Thomas's bivouac was but a short distance from mine, and, before giving notice to the army in general orders, I sent one of my staff-officers to show him the note. In a few minutes the officer returned, soon followed by Thomas himself, who again examined the note, so as to be perfectly certain that it was genuine. The news seemed to him too good to be true. He snapped his fingers, whistled, and almost danced, and, as the news spread to the army, the shouts that arose from our men, the wild hallooing and glorious laughter, were to us a full recompense for the labor and toils and hardships through which we had passed in the previous three months.”— William Tecumseh Sherman, The Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman (1875)

“Then a strangely incongruous sight struck her [Scarlett O’Hara’s] eyes….Men, women and children, black and white, hurried, hurried with straining faces, lugging packages and sacks and boxes of food — more food than she had seen in a year. The crowd suddenly gave a lane for a careening carriage and through the lane came the frail and elegant Mrs. Elsing, standing up in the front of her victoria, reins in one hand, whip in the other. She was hatless and white faced and her long gray hair streamed down her back as she lashed the horse like a Fury. Jouncing on the back seat of the carriage was her black mammy, Melissy, clutching a greasy side of bacon to her with one hand, while with the other and both feet she attempted to hold the boxes and bags piled all about her….Scarlett screamed to her, but the tumult of the crowd drowned her voice and the carriage rocked madly by.

“For a moment she could not understand what it all meant and then, remembering that the commissary warehouses were down by the railroad tracks, she realized that the army had thrown them open to the people to salvage what they could before the Yankees came.”—Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (1936)

The destiny of the United States changed utterly on this day in 1864 when the mayor of Atlanta surrendered his city to Union forces. Only 10 days before, Union armies had appeared so stalled on all fronts that Abraham Lincoln felt obliged to compose a message detailing how he intended to cooperate to preserve the Union with former General George B. McClellan if, as it seemed increasingly likely, “Little Mac” and the Democratic Party defeated Lincoln in the fall Presidential election.

The day after this transportation hub of the Confederacy capitulated, though, General William Tecumseh Sherman had written Gen. Henry Halleck, the de facto army chief of staff, “So Atlanta is ours and fairly won.”

So, it soon became apparent, was Lincoln’s victory. Writing this past weekend in The Wall Street Journal, historian Fergus Bordewich notes that Lincoln’s running mate, Andrew Johnson, botched Reconstruction when he succeeded to the Presidency after the Great Emancipator’s assassination, but that the consequences would have been “momentous” if their ticket had lost in November 1864:

“Although he expressed a willingness to continue the war if necessary, in practical terms McClellan's victory in the election would likely have led to European recognition of the Confederacy, Southern independence, and the forcible return to slavery of the hundreds of thousands of former slaves who had fled to the Union armies for safety.”

For all the many—and enormous—differences between the two passages above, they are united in one feeling: astonishment. Sherman is jubilant that the three-month siege of Atlanta is over, that it’s all ended now—both the foot-by-foot, thrust-and-parry campaign of maneuver against  wily, defensive-minded Confederate’s Joseph E. Johnston and the pitched battles of the latter’s offensive-minded but recklessly brave replacement, John Bell Hood .

Astonishment of a different sort underlies Scarlett O’Hara’s feelings about the fall of the city in the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gone With the Wind. With a news blackout existing in effect, most city residents had little idea of the progress (or lack of same) of Confederate arms. Now, it appears, for Scarlett and thousands of others, Armageddon is at hand.

Besides the different perspectives of victory and defeat (not to mention nonfiction and fiction), these passages are also marked by different perceptions of order. For Sherman, a peacetime banker whose world was profoundly darkened by the Panic of 1857—and whose wonderful subsequent appointment as superintendent of the Louisiana Military Academy had come to an end because of secession—the victory, he thought, meant the consolidation of the prewar order.

Scarlett, however, senses that disorder is at hand, in the cry repeated throughout this chapter: “The Yankees are coming!” A city that had, in a real sense, gained much of its influence throughout the war as the site where so many had fled from Union troops in Tennessee and Mississippi was now experiencing its own refugee crisis.

Neither the capital of Georgia nor even its largest city, Atlanta had leveraged its position as a railroad hub, so that by 1863 its population had reached 20,000, making it the 12^th-largest city in the Confederacy. As Sherman had pressed harder in the spring and summer of 1864, however, the population had fallen back to roughly 3,000. That was the state of affairs when Sherman issued one of the most controversial orders of the war.

The Union general believed that Confederate refugees had acted as a drag on the advancement of Union armies in Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez and New Orleans. Now, foreseeing that “sutlers and traders” were about to descend on Atlanta, too, he decided to take a step that even his dispassionate explanation a decade after the events in his memoirs failed to mitigate: “to remove the entire civil population, and to deny to all civilians from the rear the expected profits of civil trade.”

Sherman’s relocation order worsened an already perilous refugee crisis. Moreover, the steps taken by his troops to cripple the South’s war effort—machine shops, foundries, railroads, depots—blended in the mind of the region with the destruction left by Hood. (To ensure that the Union captured nothing of consequence from the city’s railroad stock, the latter blew up over 80 railroad cars filled with ammunition, in the process wrecking homes whose losses would later be ascribed to the Yankee and his men.)

There is another aspect of Margaret Mitchell’s evocation of havoc. The chaos seems at first to affect everyone the same, both black and white. But  Mrs. Elsing’s black mammy, Melissy, proves as utterly incompetent at protecting her mistress’s precious food supply as Scarlett’s maid Prissy is in assisting Melanie Wilkes’ childbirth. Melissy's failure also prefigures Mitchell’s (and the racist white South’s) belief that blacks will be even more irresponsible in running state governments during Reconstruction.

Mitchell’s gripping narrative of the fall of Atlanta laid the marker for perhaps the most vivid scene in the 1939 film adaptation. But, like Sherman, she never realized the pathos of the African-Americans who were also swept up in the maelstrom engulfing Atlanta in September 1864—and who would find themselves with even less protection from the storm when the federal government withdrew its troops from the South beginning in 1877. 

(For more on the movie Gone With the Wind and its treatment of blacks, the Irish, and Reconstruction, see this earlier post of mine. See this link for another post describing, in more detail than the current one, Sherman's unrelenting four-month campaign to take Atlanta.)

Photo of the Day: General Sherman Monument, Central Park, NYC

Several weeks ago, on a bright, mid-spring afternoon, I took this photo of the monument to William Tecumseh Sherman standing at Grand Army Plaza, on the southeast periphery of Central Park. Little did I know that this would probably be one of the last times that I—or, indeed, anyone in the vicinity—would see the 24-ft. high equestrian statue for awhile. According to David Dunlap’s article in The New York Times yesterday, officials of the Central Park Conservancy need to make changes in it very soon because of hairline cracks—less than a year after it had been regilded at a cost of $500,000.

I didn’t notice the so-called “crazing,” or cracking, when I was taking this picture. Mostly, I was just trying to find a good vantage point from which to shoot, since so many people were milling around the statue. Part of the reason why there was such a crowd was because it was such a nice day. But I’m convinced another, equally plausible reason is that sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens created a masterpiece.

That latter fact is why the Central Park Conservancy is going to such lengths to preserve the statue—and why, undoubtedly, so many like me will be there when work is done for good on it this time.

Quote of the Day (Ambrose Bierce, on Death in Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign)

“Successive scores of rifles spat at him [Lieutenant Herman Brayle of the Union Army] viciously as he came within range, and our line in the edge of the timber broke out in visible and audible defense. No longer regardful of themselves or their orders, our fellows sprang to their feet, and swarming into the open sent broad sheets of bullets against the blazing crest of the offending works, which poured an answering fire into their unprotected groups with deadly effect. The artillery on both sides joined the battle, punctuating the rattle and roar with deep, earth-shaking explosions and tearing the air with storms of screaming grape, which from the enemy's side splintered the trees and spattered them with blood, and from ours defiled the smoke of his arms with banks and clouds of dust from his parapet.”—Ambrose Bierce, “Killed at Resaca,” in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891)

Today marks the 150^th anniversary of the opening battle in Union General William T. Sherman’s campaign for Atlanta: the Battle of Resaca, Ga. The clash between Federal and Confederate forces mirrored what was happening hundreds of miles north in Virginia, where Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee’s game of probing, parry, and continual maneuver was yielding startling losses. The duel between Sherman and rebel commander Joseph E. Johnston was not quite as deadly, but at least initially, it seemed just as dispiriting to Federal troops, with seemingly little appreciable ground gained. Ambrose Bierce, a Union veteran of this Western theater of operations, is best known to readers for his cynical Devil's Dictionary and his mysterious disappearance in 1914. But he recorded decidedly modern, disillusioned impressions of the madness of the Atlanta campaign in particular and all wars in general, in this classic war story.

When the butcher’s bill came due from the 48 hours of fighting, the Union and Confederate armies had lost about 2,800 men each, with the latter showing that they could slow, but not stop, their foes’ advance upon the Rebel industrial center of the Deep South. The fighting was marked by the usual incompetence and folly even on this first day of battle, when the Federals lost precious time coordinating assaults because a commander was drunk.

The results of the battle might have been inconclusive for Sherman and Johnston, but they confirmed Bierce in what critic Edmund Wilson has called his “obsession with death.” The young man saw all the war he could ever want at Shiloh, Corinth, Stones River, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, and Franklin. Like the narrator of “Killed at Resaca,” Bierce was a topographical engineer who knew better than to make insinuations about any spots that afforded protection.

Not so with the force behind “the best soldier of our staff”: Lieutenant Herman Brayle, who takes constant chances with his life in the face of the enemy: “He would sit his horse like an equestrian statue, in a storm of bullets and grape, in the most exposed places--wherever, in fact, duty, requiring him to go, permitted him to remain--when, without trouble and with distinct advantage to his reputation for common sense, he might have been in such security as is possible on a battlefield in the brief intervals of personal inaction.”

Inevitably, Brayle is shot by the enemy. In going through the effects of the bravest man he ever knew, the narrator discovers a motive for his complete disregard for safety: a letter from the dead man’s sweetheart, advising him of a “rumor” she had heard that “at some battle in Virginia…you were seen crouching behind a tree….I could bear to hear of my soldier lover's death, but not of his cowardice."

In the story’s stunning conclusion, Bierce—a decorated veteran himself, forced out of the fighting because of a head wound—vents his frustration with the vast incomprehension of soldiers’ experiences, as well as his pronounced misogyny. His narrator visits Brayle’s girlfriend, a remarkable beauty who, upon receiving her stained letter to the dead man, tosses it on the fire because she can’t stand the sight of blood. Then, trying to overcome this impression of her callousness, she asks how Brayle died.

The short, bitter reply that ends the story evokes far more than it can begin to suggest: “Bitten by a snake.” It implies everything about the faithlessness of women—something in which Bierce believed in wholeheartedly in his personal life. (His marriage collapsed because he wrongly believed his wife was guilty of adultery. Then, as if to confirm that he was not completely crazy about female perfidy, his son Day’s fiancée left him for another man, leading Day to shoot both before his own suicide.)

The story’s ending brings the reader up short, in the same manner as Ernest Hemingway’s famous final line of The Sun Also Rises: “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?” In fact, the relation between the two authors’ war fiction and lives is instructive.

As Roy Morris notes in his biography of Bierce, both men (Bierce, of course, in the Civil War, and Hemingway, as an ambulance driver, in WWI) carried wounded soldiers, at enormous risk to their own safety, back to their own lines, only to see the men die anyway. It only seemed to confirm their belief in war’s absurdity.

I don’t know why Hemingway praised Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage as "the first great American war story" while ignoring Bierce’s contribution. Crane had not witnessed a minute of combat before he wrote his masterpiece; in fact, he was born six years after the Civil War ended, so he had no firsthand knowledge of the conflict. In contrast, Bierce’s work was informed by what he saw, and he made no attempt to make it less ugly for readers.

If Bierce’s work was every bit as realistic as Crane’s, then how could Hemingway have ignored it? I think it has to do with two factors: Bierce’s frequent resort to supernatural or fantastic fiction, and his lack of a consistent, compelling single figure.

Whether it’s called horror, supernatural or fantastic fiction, this genre deals overwhelmingly with altered interior states, the breakdown of the self. And few phenomena on earth accelerate such psychic disorientation and disintegration as much as war.

Thus, the experience of battle might have confirmed Bierce’s disbelief in a rational God, the increasingly thin line between life and death in war led him to write eerie pieces in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, including the much-anthologized “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” In contrast, Hemingway might have felt haunted by a world without God, but he desperately tried to believe in a deity—just as tenaciously, in fact, as Lt. Frederic Henry struggles to hold onto reality after his convulsive wound gives him what feels like an out-of-body experience in A Farewell to Arms. He felt greater affinity for Crane’s naturalistic style than for Bierce’s occasional resort to ghosts and vague life-after-life in his stories.

Second, with Henry Fleming, Crane found a single youthful figure whose struggles would parallel the novel and short-story characters who served as stand-ins for himself: Lt. Henry, Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises, Robert Jordan of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Paul Krebs of “Soldier’s Home” and Nick Adams in a whole slew of stories. Lt. Brayle and other characters in Bierce’s stories might be easy to visualize, but the author offers little about their thinking. The greatness of his short fiction rests not on psychological exploration, but on unsparing, exact descriptions of “the rattle and roar” of war.