Compromise – U.S. to 1877

November 20, 2013

Antebellum Southern Stubbornness

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The decade leading up to the Civil War featured tenacious animosity between politicians. Southern proslavery figures constantly butted heads with their Northern counterparts, and politicians pushing for compromise had extremely limited success in appeasing both groups. In both Davis’s and Wilentz’s accounts, slavery legislation seemed to favor the South. The North appeared willing to allow slavery to continue where it already existed and simply wanted to slow or halt its expansion. The proslavery South, however, never seemed satisfied and continually pleaded for more slavery. The repeated threat of disunion revealed excessive Southern discontent and lack of adaptability.

The South came out of the Missouri Crisis with Missouri as a slave state and even maintained the possibility of more slave states in the future despite growing criticism of the institution. This criticism was even limited by the proslavery gag rule. Nonetheless, the South kept battling for more slave states, best evidenced by the blatant disregard for the Missouri compromise in the debate of Kansas’s status. David Brion Davis provided a hilarious consequence of overly aggressive pursuits for more slave influence by Jefferson Davis. Jefferson Davis’ push for “federal protection of slave property” alienated the North and split the Democratic party (293). This split allowed for Southerners’ worst nightmare to come true as Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election as the first outspoken opponent to slavery.

Southern resistance to popular sovereignty, essentially the only proposed compromise, marked the South as more stubborn. In addition, no Northern legislature prior to 1860 infringed on slaveholders’ right to own slaves. The Fugitive Slave Act, however, significantly affected and altered lives of antislavery proponents in the North. It was no surprise that this Act stirred up the strongest opposition, as it inherently imposed Southern ideals in the North. Not to mention its inhumane principles. The North seemed much more open to compromise, but this policy clearly crossed the line.

The South came off as ungrateful and greedy in antebellum politics. It had enjoyed prolonged dominance and still maintained its most prized possession, slavery. Whether its vigor stemmed from Anglophobia, as WEKING suggests (http://sites.davidson.edu/his141/a-great-experiment-british-abolition-and-southern-paranoia/), racism, or sheer greed, the South should have been content with the continuation of such a controversial and widely hated practice.

November 20, 2013

Wilentz, Ch. 21-22: Angles of the Argument

Sherwood Callaway

HIS 141, Blog Post 10

I was interested in the different angles used in arguments preceding the Compromise of 1850. Clay suggested a compromise in eight parts, which seemingly favored the southerners, but left the fate of new territories to northerners. His legislative angle kicked off the discussion, and most parties followed suit.

Calhoun also described the issue as a legislative one, in which the north had repeatedly gained favorable national legislation at the expense of the south. As examples, he cited the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which brought an expanse of free northern territory into the Union, and the Missouri Compromise, which restricted the majority of the Louisiana territory from becoming slave-affiliated in 1820. Wilentz adds that, “tarrifs and internal improvements had enriched northern business at the direct expense of the South”, blatantly hinting towards the Tariff of 1828, or the Tariff of Abominations, as it was called in the south (345). These restrictions made manufacturing more profitable in the north, and consumer goods more expensive in the south. Calhoun seemed to believe that the north had negotiated legislation with unfair aggression.

Webster encouraged a legislative compromise, and suggested that legislative taunts such as the Wilmot Proviso be stopped, out of respect for the southern position. Better than other northerners (he was from Massachusetts), Webster seemed to understand the southern predicament—being entrenched economically and culturally in a slave system. He demonstrated that “some sort of compromise was required to keep the nation from falling apart”, deviating from the unreasonable inflexibility he had once shown as a supporter of the Proviso (346). Like Clay and Calhoun, Webster saw the issue from a legislative angle.

But then there’s William Henry Seward, an antislavery northerner who argued on different terms—ideological terms. He was against compromise altogether, “condemning out of hand Clay’s compromise, and any such sectional deal” (346). Furthermore, he attacked the moral foundations for slavery, as “an oppressive and undemocratic institution”, and invoked language from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (346). Listeners interpreted his speech as arguing that “the forces of antislavery were above the law” (346). Personally, I respect Seward’s values and determination, but feel that pragmatism would have been a more effective way to disarm the situation. In fact, it seems as if Seward was hardly interested in disarming the situation at all, but in confronting the problem at its root. Maybe Seward’s direction was best, though; as my classmate MIHAN writes, “the truce of 1850 was [ultimately] fruitless, for it once again avoided the question of slavery instead of trying to solve it”.

I think that southerners were most afraid of unbending northerners like Seward because they represented the type of northern aggression that Calhoun had described. It was unreasonable and unsympathetic to make such demands of the south, when the south was so deeply a slave society. Whether or not Calhoun considered the institution of slavery morally defendable, he knew it was integral to southern economy and culture, and thus could not be removed without uprooting southern society itself. Legislators like Clay and Webster recognized this, and subsequently proposed compromises instead of making demands. I can imagine that Seward, and other inflexibles like him, made southerners feel as if backed into a corner. But maybe his approach was necessary, and just poorly delivered?

November 19, 2013

The Road to Emancipation

After multiple compromises between northern and southern Whigs and Democrats, President Fillmore falsely assumed that, “Congress had achieved a final settlement of sectional discord” (Wilentz, 349). Wilentz emphasizes how the truce of 1850 was in fact fruitless, for it once again avoided the question of slavery instead of trying to solve it. One of the compromises included a much more stringent Fugitive Slave Act, which inadvertently led to intensifying tensions between northerners and southerners. “By denying the fugitives jury trials, it attacked the most democratic aspect of American jurisprudence…and brazenly violated the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause” (353). Slavery had marred the reputation of the Democratic Party, challenging the egalitarian doctrine and democratic principles that the party was originally founded upon. In the Republicans’ eyes, a true democracy could not exist where the institution of slavery existed and denied people their basic human right of freedom.

Wilentz also highlights a different side of the 1850’s nativist movement, one that opposed the expansion of slavery and the bloody consequences of the Kansas-Nebraska conflict. Based on our class discussion and the online article about Charleston’s Irish laborers, the main reason poor Irish immigrants supported the slave system was because they were no longer stuck at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. The massive influx of Irish immigrants during the 1850’s led to increased antipathy towards both free and enslaved blacks by immigrants who wanted to fit in to slave-societies. I believe that nativism, in a way, helped reduce the number of pro-slavery Irish in the South who would eventually side with the Confederates in their fight for slavery.

Davis links the British emancipation of slaves to the growing paranoia of southerners over abolitionism. The southern slaveholders’ defense was that the British were the ones who tried to oppress the American people, and the emancipation of slaves had greatly reduced profit from colonies in the Caribbean. However, the British were also the ones who took the initiative in freeing hundreds of thousands of slaves in the West Indies, which was undeniable evidence that the abolishment of slavery in the United States would be the ultimate test of American freedom and democracy. Britain’s emancipation of slavery confirmed the southerners’ senseless fear of northerners allying with Britain to ensure the destruction of slavery in the South. “The overreaction of Southern extremists had made it much easier for moderate Northerners to rally in a political campaign against a home-grown tyranny that threatened the very survival of democracy in America” (Davis 286).