New and Noteworthy---The Compromise of 1850: A Finger In The Dike?

America's Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union, Fergus M. Bordewich, Simon & Schuster, Inc., 496pp., bibliography, index, illustrations, $30.00. [April, 2012]

From The Publisher: An absorbing exploration of a crucial moment that shaped the American identity—and which has striking parallels in our own politically contentious age is a fascinating, timely account of national morality and political expediency during the yearlong debate over what we know today as the Compromise of 1850. Bordewich, a historian and journalist who has written to great acclaim on such seminal topics as the Underground Railroad and the design and building of Washington, D.C., here examines mid-nineteenth-century America at a critical juncture, bringing to life the outsized men of the age, who wrestled with slavery, sovereignty, and America’s manifest destiny.

Bordewich began to consider the great congressional debate of 1850 while researching Bound for Canaan, his magisterial book on the Underground Railroad. “How had the imperative of slavery played out against the expanding landscape of America made possible by the nation’s first imperial war in Mexico?” he wondered. “How did the men…who led the nation rationalize slavery—how did they defend the morally indefensibly—in order to keep the nation intact? How close had the United States actually come to war in 1850?”

As that year dawned, Congress seemed hopelessly crippled, as political figures jockeyed for their own advantage and that of their parties. The ensuing struggle on the floor of the Senate would encapsulate all that was good and bad about America’s politicians. It was an age of great eloquence, and “by listening in on the debate of 1850,” Bordewich writes, “we can learn much not only about what Americans thought about their new empire, about the profound ways in which slavery warped our political system, and about the creative craft of compromise, but also about how to talk politics to each other so that we can actually listen.”

Two historic events triggered the great congressional debate that would lead to compromise: the Mexican War and the California Gold Rush. With great swaths of the North American continent becoming new territories of the United States, and with some, like California, petitioning for statehood, the balance of slave states and free states, which had been politically crucial since the Missouri Compromise thirty years earlier, once again dominated debate in Congress. The architect of that earlier compromise, Henry Clay, and his arch-rivals John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster were still dominant figures in Congress, but there were new voices, too: Stephen A. Douglas, Jefferson Davis, William Seward, all sparring over their political and ideological agendas. As the year-long debate persisted, Clay tried unsuccessfully to broker a compromise.

When he failed, Douglas pushed through his own compromise, which saved the nation from collapse and staved off civil war, even as it helped make civil war inevitable. Bordewich’s indelible portraits of these complicated men bring America's Great Debate vividly to life: Calhoun, the aging “Marxist of the Master Class,” who believed incontrovertibly in the divinely imbued superiority of the white race; Douglas, who, although a northerner, was married to the daughter of a wealthy slave owner; Webster who, even with his Yankee bona fides, ardently supported the strengthened Fugitive Slave Act that was an integral part of the compromise. They and many others shaped the great debate, amalgamating personal beliefs, moral precepts, and political savvy.

“The quest for compromise amid the crisis of 1850 may offer lessons in how agreement may beachieved between the most unyielding adversaries, and also in the unintended consequences of compromise,” Bordewich writes. America's Great Debate offers an enlightening cautionary tale about the contentious nature of political discourse and the need for civility and cooperation in the halls of government. It is, ultimately, says Bordewich, “a story about the struggle for American identity.”

About the Author
Fergus M. Bordewich is the author of several books, among them Washington: The Making of the American Capital and Bound for Canaan, a national history of the Underground Railroad. As a journalist he has written widely on political and cultural subjects in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian, American Heritage, The Atlantic, and many other publications. He lives in Washington, D.C.

CWL---Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South

Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South, A Brief History with Documents, Paul Finkelman, Bedford St. Martins Press, chronology, index, bibliography, 228 pp., $13.95

One of The Bedford Series in History and Culture series, Defending Slavery places the words of Southerners in the hands of the reader. Beginning a small portion of Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia(1787)and concluding with Josiah Nott's Instincts of Races (1866), this book displays the knowledge and opinions that Southerner's held regarding slavery and blacks. In a forty-four page introduction, Paul Finkelman outlines the legitimacy of slavery in the classical world, colonial America, Revolutionary America, and the early national period. He makes the case that the first defenses of slavery that were based upon races appeared after the American Revolution and were an attempt to reconcile the Declaration of Independence with the fact of perpetual forced labor. Outlining antebellum proslavery thought, Finkelman sets forth the racial theories and ideologies promoted by Southerners. Primary documents reveal the historical and classical defenses of slavery and the religious, economic, legal, political and racial defenses of slavery.

The economic, legal, political rationales are provided by famous men in Southern and Confederate history. In an 1837 senate speech John C. Calhoun argues that slavery is indispensable for the peace and happiness of both whites and blacks. Edmund Ruffin argues that slavery treats blacks better than the North treats wage laborers. Thomas R. Cobb states that slavery is essential for blacks because there are no examples of blacks achieving prosperity outside of forced servitude. James Henry Hammond understands that wage labor and slavery are necessary for a prosperous culture which needs a mudsill people to perform onerous tasks. Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens declares in 1861 that slavery is the cornerstone of the Confederate nation and culture.

Ministers reflect upon the duties of Christian masters, the Bible's presentations of slavery, slave marriages and divine revelation. Judges and courts weigh in on the definitions of slavery and its foundation in natural law. Diseases particular to blacks, physical peculiarities of Negroes, and the instincts of the races are forcefully and bluntly states by Southern doctors and naturalists.

Finkelman's introductory essay and his selection of documents are approachable for the student, the layman and the specialist. With a clear and concise narrative style and a precise use of vocabulary, Finkleman develops both the context and the content of the Southern frame of reference for the institution of slavery.

CWL --- A Close Run Thing: California, CSA

The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War, Richards, Leonard L., Knopf Publishing, 304 pp., illus., maps, 2007.

Gold Rush! California, like Kansas in the 1850s, was caught between pro- and anti-slavery settlers. To migrating Southerners, the labor-intensive mines in the Sierra Nevada Mountains begged for slave labor. Southern slave holders, who did not migrate to California, viewed Californaia as a new market for slaves. The Mexican state of California became the U.S. state of California through intense political maneuvering, timely military presence, and impassioned hypocritical rhetoric. A 'free state' (wage labor as opposed to slave labor) California narrowly missed being divided, north to south, wage labor and slave labor.

Conversely, Northern migrants envisioned the building of ports which in turn would lead to extensive participation in the China trade. The struggle for California statehood, the divisions within the Democratic Party, the contentious spirit of the American (Know Nothing) Party, the demise of the Whig Party, and the explosive growth of the Republican Party is subperbly described by the author. Slanders, duels, law suits, graft, were a frequent occurrence. In an era when voters received paper ballots at home and then went to the polls, party organization was essential.

The author offers telling details within in the mural of the political, social and economic panorama of California. Richards opens the story with the murder of an Irish Catholic Democratic U.S. Senator and ends the book with the unmourned death of one of the conspirators 20 years later. In the middle of the work, Richards reveals that the senator predicted his own death within a next few months. Seamlessly moving from the Sierra Nevada goldfields to San Fransico, from Panama and to the halls of Congress, and then back again, Professor Richards tells a story of gold and railroads, Mexicans and Anglos, miners and politicians, frontier women and ballroom damsels.

Refreshingly, Richards draws his conclusions hestitantly. He offers no platitudes nor does he reveal an agenda. The reader draws his own conclusions and meanings regarding the Slave Power Conspiracy, Stephen Douglas' quest for a railroad for the West, James Buchanan's activism and paralysis, and John Fremont's reputation and his actual accomplishments. This reader realized how close California was to becoming North California and South California. How may have the Civil War turned out if the North had not received almost $3 million dollars a month during the Civil War from the California gold fields? How may have the war turned out if gold had been king and cotton had been queen of the South?