Union from stem to stern, had gained favor at the White House.* Calhoun's plan, while the war lasted, was to keep the territory we wanted- - Texas, California, and New Mexico by drawing a military line in front of it, letting other invasion alone.† But there were ardent Southerners who wished all Mexico annexed or subjugated. Polk's pious plan of sharing the new territory between slavery and freedom did not pacify a divided Congress. On the nation's anniversary, scarcely two suns July 4. before this message was read, had been laid on a tract of land between the executive buildings and the Potomac, the corner-stone of a national obelisk of colossal design, dedicated to Washington. The weather was bright, and listeners applauded. Winthrop, the Whig Speaker, delivered the felicitous address of this occasion, whose beautiful peroration adjured the maintenance of the Union as Washington's fittest monument. Quitman, fresh from his Mexican laurels, marshalled the imposing procession. But blocks of white marble. could not bury a sectional strife which peace with Mexico precipitated. News crossed the ocean of riots in Paris, an abdicated king, and "four days of blood" for a free republic and rights of man. There had been excitements, even in this placid city which bore Washington's name; forebodings of the intestine strife which this immense national acquisition brought with it. Mount Vernon's vicinity and the slipshod town of Alexandria had ere this been ceded back to Virginia, and the original ten-mile square of the Federal district reduced to that Maryland half which lay north of the Potomac, embracing Washington and Georgetown. What remained was equally slave soil with that relinquished. Some seventy slaves owned in Georgetown tried to make their exodus in a April. General Quitman was one of those who advised the President to occupy Mexico fully, with a view to annexing the whole republic. 2 Claiborne's Life of Quitman, c. 14. † Calhoun's Speeches, 1847-1848. 1848. RUNAWAYS FROM WASHINGTON. 95 schooner bound from Washington to Philadelphia. A head wind compelled the captain to cast anchor near the mouth of the Potomac, where the vessel was overtaken by a swift steamboat despatched in pursuit, and the trembling fugitives were brought back and cooped in the Washington jail, pending their transfer through brokers, to be sent farther south. The callow residents of the District were in great commotion. A mob gathered about the printingoffice of the National Era, an abolition sheet, broke the glass windows, and threatened serious mischief, which the police barely prevented. When John P. Hale introduced in the Senate a bill for the better protection of property against rioters, senators from the slaveholding States denounced him rudely, even Calhoun in a moment of excitement calling him "a maniac." It was here that Foote, of Mississippi, a dapper little senator of red-hot convictions, whose eloquence, equally red-hot, had first brought him into notice in a speech which spouted a long Latin passage and misquoted Byron, gained the unpleasant nickname of "Hangman Foote.” He gave Hale plainly to understand, in course of the debate, that should the latter ever visit Mississippi the orator would be happy to assist in elevating him to the nearest tree. Not less angry was the longer altercation of words in the House, where Palfrey resented an indignity offered to Giddings by the Washington mob, by raising the inquiry whether new laws were needful in this District to protect members of Congress from violence. Such was a Washington episode of these times during passion week.* July. By the time peace brought her territorial trophies, the Wilmot Proviso was deeply offensive to Southern minds. Not one iota was Southern ambition disposed to recede; the rights accorded to slavery where it had been already planted were not enough. The rallying cry at the North-"no more slave territory, but all new territories for freedom" was philanthropic and * Congressional Globe; newspapers of the day. in just accord with the Constitution and its interpretation by the parties of both sections. But this cry dismayed the South and drew them more strongly together, Whigs and Democrats. They had grown to associate the Union with compromise on moral as well as economic questions. They had been accustomed to demand imperiously when the crisis came, and then to make a magnanimous show of yielding some advantage for the sake of harmony. Fighting qualities were not what they looked for in the prosperous and money-seeking North. Nor, on their own part, fond as so many were of the Union and passionately attached to a sentiment, were Southerners ready to sacrifice their system for it. Slavery and the South were, by this era, believed inseparable. Loyalty to their institution and to one another had become of more consequence to their minds than loyalty to the Union. A new race of slaveholders had grown up, dictatorial, impatient of modern philanthropy and modern agitation, poisoned with preferences for State pride, revolutionists against the world's opinion. Southern statesmen of the younger and bolder type, gentlemen on whom Calhoun's genius had impressed its image, were not to be satisfied with the external tolerance of slavery as confined to its present limits; for the star of destiny guided them onward. Slavery on this continent, as they regarded it, was to be an active, a growing, even a moral and educating force, to the confusion of European theories and the nineteenth century. Tyler, the ex-President who had done so much to promote the ends of this younger school, stated with triumphant confidence the great plantation interest which predominated in his section, giving confidence in its ultimate ends. "The monopoly of the cotton plant was the great and important concern. That monopoly now secured, places all other nations at our feet."* The glory of the Mexican War was the glory of the South, like the Texan conquest before it. That section 2 Tyler's Tylers, 483 (April, 1850). 1848. SLAVERY SEEKS PREPONDERANCE. 97 feared, and not without reason, the danger of antislavery agitation to their system. To add largely to the area of slavery by annexations from Mexico was regarded by slaveholders as a necessary means of strengthening their power against Northern encroachments; which, as a candid writer has stated, was the more hazardous mode of meeting anti-slavery agitation because it placed the South in the position of seeking such preponderance while the North was not seeking preponderance at all.* It was the exposure of that ambition to preponderate which startled the North to its assertion of the Wilmot Proviso and gave the moral agitation a force which Garrisonians could never have inspired. But now that the vast Mexican spoliation was ours, the first stumblingblock to slavery consisted in the fact that this comprehensive territory came into our possession free territory. The Louisiana purchase, under far different circumstances, brought soil into the Union polluted already by French and Spanish slave codes; and hence the logical necessity, since we failed to expel the curse, of admitting new slave States in turn, contaminated with the disease which had spread from centres like New Orleans and St. Louis. But native decrees of Mexico had long since dedicated our present conquest to freedom, and this whole vast acreage, but thinly inhabited, came into the wardship of the conquering republic, virgin soil, chaste and unpolluted. Calhoun perceived the disadvantage his section was under in this last respect; and before the transfer of territory had been effected at all, he spun his cobweb in a series of resolutions which artfully proclaimed this acquisition the property of the several States in common, and that slavery spread into the new soil at once by force of the Constitution, there to remain unless dislodged by positive law. The bold hypothesis was brushed aside by Webster, the only debater now in the Senate who was fit to cope with him; and the combat of their mighty * See 1 Curtis's James Buchanan, 580. VOL. V. -7 intellects on abstractions like this afforded one of the intellectual treats of the present Congress, particularly towards its close.* Webster was thought to have had the better of his keen antagonist; but Calhoun gained the effect that to him was of most consequence, - to inculcate the Southern mind. Surely there was little hope that Congress, in these hot midsummer months, when impatient to disperse and take part at home in the Presidential canvass, would dispose of these territorial perplexities off-hand and without giving popular expression an opportunity on such a subject. The President's recommendations were unheeded. But our Whig House went boldly forward to hurl a harmless thunderbolt. The time had fully come, as both parties confessed, to organize Oregon as a territory. Some had hoped to arrange a bill out of this very necessity large enough to hold Oregon, California, and New Mexico together. That, however, was impossible. The House, on the 2d of August, passed a bill for August. organizing Oregon alone as a territory.† To this bill was tacked the Wilmot Proviso, by a section which extended the ordinance of 1787, or slavery prohibition, over the whole territory. In the Senate, upon the report of its committee on territories, explanatory words were added to this proviso, alleging as the reason that Oregon lay north of the Missouri Compromise line. This was the artifice of Douglas, now a senator from Illinois, and too far advanced in honors to think he could ever be distanced by humble Abraham Lincoln. The House August negatived that amendment by a decisive vote, 11-13. and the Senate at a late hour receded and passed the bill with its own explanatory language stricken out. President Polk did not sign his approval * Congressional Globe. By 129 to 71. The Senate vote stood finally 29 to 25. Dix, Dickinson, Houston, Benton, and Douglas were among those who voted to recede. Congressional Globe. Houston's vote was unexpected; that of Dickinson nearly as much so. |