Ecstatic Nation Page 4

  It was therefore a measure of Clay’s success, said one historian, that extremists in both the North and the South condemned his compromise.

  On March 7, 1850, the famed Daniel Webster rose from his Senate seat. A leading statesman for thirty years, a consummate attorney, and a man committed to perpetual Union, this towering (if short) congressman from Massachusetts was already legendary for the erudite and theatrical speeches he delivered in a carefully modulated and often booming voice. Remembered and hailed for patriotic rhetoric about the “sentiment, dear to every true American heart,—Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!,” Webster had spoken out against slavery and the slave trade, which he called “odious and abominable”—shameful for New Englanders and for the country. “I hear the sound of the hammer,” he had said, “I see the smoke of the furnaces where the manacles and fetters are still forged for human limbs.”

  That day, March 7, the sixty-eight-year-old Webster wore a blue coat with gleaming brass buttons, but the shine had come off his great career. He drank too much, he was not well, he was in debt, and he had no use for antislavery agitators, as he called them. Still, in the overheated chamber, men and women were tense with excitement; what might the country’s grandest orator say?

  “I wish to speak today, not as a Massachusetts man nor as a Northerner,” Webster began, “but as an American.” That meant he spoke as a Unionist. And as a backer of Clay. He talked for almost four hours, wooing both Southerners and Northerners even as he chastised them, censuring the South for yelping about secession, declaring that runaway slaves should of course be returned to bondage, and excoriating the abolitionists of the North as silly women and sillier men.

  Someone from the crowded gallery shouted, “Traitor!” Though Webster succeeded in appeasing the Senate chamber temporarily and placating conservatives in both the North and the South, his speech wrecked what remained of his reputation in the North, at least among the antislavery groups he had mocked. The South must have offered Webster the presidency; what else could explain such perfidy? Webster had crossed the line, said Ralph Waldo Emerson, who noted with aspersion that the North was protecting its factories and capital. “The south does not like the north, slavery or no slavery, and never did,” he said. “The north likes the south well enough, for it knows its own advantages.” Theodore Parker called Webster a Benedict Arnold.

  Four days later, William Henry Seward, a former governor of New York and now its freshman senator, took the floor. Slight and slim, hook-nosed and homely, he was described by Henry Adams as having a “head like a wise macaw; a beaked nose; shaggy eyebrows; unorderly hair and clothes; hoarse voice; offhand manner; free talk; and perpetual cigar.” Often people could not hear his low and husky voice; he wasn’t by nature a gifted orator. But he was a gifted and intelligent politician. Born in upstate New York and previously a state senator, Seward had served as governor under the tutelage of the wily political boss Thurlow Weed, the editor of the influential Albany Evening Journal. He had entered the Senate in 1849 as a steady antislavery Whig who as governor had refused to return fugitive slaves, arguing that New York did not recognize slavery. He had also backed Zachary Taylor for president and, it seemed, had influenced him in the awarding of patronage positions.

  On March 11, though he began his speech in a shuffling undertone, he soon warmed to his purpose. You could almost hear a pin drop, reported a journalist, and next to what Seward had to say, Webster’s speech was humbug. For on that day, in his three-hour speech, Seward denounced not only Clay’s compromise but also the provision that fugitive slaves be recaptured, and he denounced compromise in general when it came to slavery. “There is a higher law than the Constitution,” he declared—that of inalienable human freedom—and it should supersede the Constitution’s protection of slavery.

  The notion was not new: after all, the Declaration of Independence had implied a higher law—the self-evident truths derived from the Creator. John Quincy Adams had invoked the idea of a higher law, and the transcendentalists of New England had been citing it for years. Ralph Waldo Emerson had claimed in his 1836 bible of transcendentalism, Nature, “We make fables to hide the baldness of the fact and conform it, as we say, to the higher law of the mind. But when the fact is seen under the light of an idea, the gaudy fable fades and shrivels. We behold the real higher law.” And as the writer Orestes Brownson explained it, “The law of God is supreme, and overrides all human enactments, and every human enactment incompatible with it is null and void from the beginning, and cannot be obeyed with a good conscience.”

  But after Seward spoke, Brownson took exception. “Mr. Seward had no right, while holding his seat in the Senate under the Constitution, to appeal to this higher law against the Constitution, because that was to deny the very authority by which he held his seat.” What about the law of the land? In New Hampshire, the Democratic press called the speech infamous, revolting, impious, and anti-Christian and went on to say that if Seward’s “doctrines were to be endorsed by the people at large, there would be an end not only of the Union but of every rational form of government for either section.” Even Thurlow Weed told Seward that the speech had “sent me to bed with a heavy heart.” In Georgia, a newspaper said Seward should be carted away in a straitjacket as a lunatic. In Tennessee, the Whig press called him hateful. Henry Clay oozed contempt: “Who are they who venture to tell us what is divine and what is natural law?”

  “A Kentuckian kneels only to God,” Crittenden had reportedly said when the Spanish executioner had ordered him to turn around and fall to his knees. Flying under the flag of liberty and hoping to sustain slavery, López had invoked the same authority as Seward had: a higher law.

  The Washington Republic, an organ of the administration, accused Seward of superseding the Constitution even though Seward’s speech actually mirrored part of President Taylor’s position. Taylor had warned Congress before a special session that he would quickly recommend California for statehood as soon as it applied; ditto New Mexico, even if the latter move alienated Texas, which was threatening to invade and absorb the territory. An absentee slave owner, Taylor was nonetheless a Unionist. The new states should decide for themselves about slavery—and Taylor was willing to go to war if Texas took Santa Fe.

  So rife with acrimony and suspicion were both Northerners and Southerners that when Taylor died suddenly on July 9, 1850, after an attack of gastroenteritis, it was rumored that he had been poisoned. Suspicion erupting into aggression erupting into assault: this was not new in the Senate chamber. But Zachary Taylor’s sudden death, the new presidency of Millard Fillmore, the appointment of Daniel Webster as secretary of state, and above all the inspirited and aggressive young Democratic senator from Illinois, Stephen A. Douglas—known as the Little Giant because he stood only five feet four inches tall—combined forces to pass Clay’s compromise that September.

  An enactment of Hell, abolitionists called it. And the Fugitive Slave Act was galling. (“I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes,” Abraham Lincoln would say, “but I bite my lip and keep quiet.”) The black activist author and doctor Martin Delany noted with bitterness, “A people capable of originating and sustaining such a law as this, are not the people to whom we are willing to entrust our liberty at discretion.” When Clay died just two years later, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, a former slave, remarked that the man had done more than any other to ensure the perpetuation of slavery: the Compromise maintained the balance between slave and free states and thus preserved the status quo, which was slavery itself. Conciliation bled into concession.

  Although Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware accepted the measures adopted by Congress, the fire-eaters of the Deep South were incensed, it seems, because the Compromise had stolen their thunder. By the time of their June convention in Nashville, there was but little enthusiasm for disunion, although John Quitman warned, “There is no effectual r
emedy for the evils before us but secession.”

  In Washington, D.C., the Compromise rang the city’s bells, and approving bonfires glowed in the night. The Marine Band played “The Star Spangled Banner,” and cannon were loaded and fired. Looking northward toward those cannon, the editor of the Charleston Mercury cheerlessly forecast the future: “The burning of powder may not stop with Washington.”

  THE COMPROMISED CENTER, if that’s what it was, could not hold. The era of the strong executive had passed. Taylor was dead, and the short presidency of Millard Fillmore was followed by the fumbling presidency of Franklin Pierce. What remained were a fragile coalition of states’ rights advocates in the South and nationalists in the North and a delicate truce between proslavery and antislavery forces. Continued compromise—real compromise, demanding concessions from both sides and not just a shabby makeshift of placating laws that sold out an entire people—would depend on imaginative statesmanship and far-reaching vision, qualities that the pliable Pierce and James Buchanan, the mealy-mouthed president following him, sorely lacked.

  Northerners who considered the eventual elimination of slavery to be a moral absolute could not compromise. Many Southerners were absolutists too, for they considered states’ rights and hence slavery their constitutional prerogative; to them what lay beneath it was the integral right of the white male to steer his own boat. That meant that to them the legal claim was a moral one too, writ large on the cope of heaven. As a consequence, they could secede. But they waited, for party bonds were still strong.

  There was more. The inclusion of the Fugitive Slave Act radicalized many a placid Northerner, for it permitted slave catchers to pursue escaped slaves into the free states—all the way to Maine, for instance—where federal marshals could require citizens to assist in their capture. And once captured, the alleged fugitives, denied trial by jury and the right to testify on their own behalf, did not stand a chance. All over New England vigilance committees were established to aid the fugitives. In Massachusetts, the radical minister Theodore Parker said he kept a brace of pistols in his desk, and the clergyman Thomas Wentworth Higginson counseled citizens to disobey the so-called Kidnap Act “and show our good citizenship by taking the legal consequences!”

  For black men and women, the question was not one of good citizenship; they had none. Nor was the question an academic one; it was real. They stood up when they could. As Samuel Ringgold Ward, himself a fugitive slave and the editor of The Impartial Citizen, wrote, “Let the men who would execute this bill beware.” In New York, the Reverend Jermain W. Loguen, another fugitive slave, cried out, “I don’t respect this law—I don’t fear it—I won’t obey it! It outlaws me, and I outlaw it.”

  The next year, 1851, López undertook his last and fatal journey.

  “THE NEVER CEASING song of the negroes as they raise the sugar and coffee into the ships is enough to create a slow fever,” Sophia Peabody had confided to her Cuba journal. To Peabody, the future wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Cuba was a realm of enchantment, of avocado and lime, rich in sugar and coffee plantations as well as a balmy paradise for invalid Americans who might recover there from cold winters, chronic illnesses, and industrialization. There the ailing Miss Peabody, afflicted with headaches, was soon flushed with health. Her cheeks pink, she closed her eyes to the institution of slavery that lay at the heart of the island’s wealth.

  To Lucy Holcombe Pickens, one of the Southern belles waving her handkerchief at the wharf as the Pampero was towed to sea, the López filibuster was “glorious, a holy mission,” a mission promising liberation, though not for the slave of course. (A decade later, Pickens’s pretty face would be put on the hundred-dollar Confederate bill.) And a few years after the López debacle, in 1855, she published a novel, The Free Flag of Cuba; or, The Martyrdom of López: A Tale of the Liberating Expedition of 1851, which was glowingly dedicated to John Quitman.

  Under the pseudonym H. M. Hardimann, Pickens intended to vindicate the brave mission of such self-sacrificing patriots as López and Crittenden (who was rumored to have been her fiancé). “Don’t say Filibusters! Call them by their proper names—Patriots! Liberators!” she cried, anticipating what would be known, ten years or so later, as the Lost Cause. “Young America, like a true knight, he stands ready at any moment to resume arms in a cause so worthy his chivalrous devotion.”

  That was how John O’Sullivan saw himself: as a true knight. Also a Democrat, he bristled at privileges vested in class or rank, and, as if sprung from the novel by Lucy Holcombe Pickens, he was a nationalist, a pacifist, a spiritualist, an expansionist, and a racist who cared not a fig for the slaves. During the war, as a Confederate sympathizer, he went to England to drum up support for the Southern side.

  Years earlier, in 1837, he’d founded The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, a party organ devoted not just to politics but to good literature, which attracted a band of writers of various political stripes: William Ellery Channing, John Greenleaf Whittier, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hawthorne, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Walter (later Walt) Whitman, William Gilmore Simms, Orestes Brownson, William Cullen Bryant, James Russell Lowell, and Jane McManus Storm Cazneau, who wrote under the pen name Cora Montgomery and was an outspoken backer of López. O’Sullivan was also the brother-in-law of the wealthy Cuban planter who presided over the Cuban Council in New York. Joining the campaign to buy Cuba and, if that failed, to grab it, O’Sullivan worked closely with Moses Yale Beach, whose newspaper, the New York Sun, whipped up enthusiasm for the taking of Cuba and helped print the bilingual newspaper La Verdad, bankrolled by wealthy Cuban planters. So the movement to seize Cuba had contacts in the Northeast as well as the South, and in Washington.

  To the abolitionist author Lydia Maria Child, though, the discussion of the need for a Cuban democracy was a smoke screen. The filibusterers and their allies, she felt, simply wanted to steal the island and extend the slave empire. Horace Greeley, the antislavery editor of the New-York Tribune, agreed. “ ‘The revolution in Cuba’ proposes to leave the cultivators of her soil in the position of beasts or chattels,” he wrote, “subject to be flogged, starved, sold, or tortured as the caprice or fancied interest of the landlord caste shall dictate.” Martin Delany too told a far different story from Pickens, O’Sullivan, or the mobs of people protesting the summary execution of López and his hapless men. In his novel Blake, or The Huts of America (serialized from 1859 to 1862 in The Anglo African Magazine and the Weekly Anglo African Magazine) half-naked Cuban slaves were chased at night by bloodhounds and by day surrounded by secret guards “to keep in check the disposition to rebellion.” As for the filibusters: “As soon as they got to the island, they would deny the Negros the rights they now have.”

  What should the Cuban slave or, for that matter, the American slave do? Rebel? Indeed, it was the specter of such a rebellion that scared many a Southerner most of all.

  (2)

  WHO AIN’T A SLAVE?

  Hydesville is a sleepy rural town in upstate New York, just twenty miles east of Rochester, where two young girls, ages twelve and fifteen, claim to hear odd tapping sounds in the night. Their mother decides the noise must be what Maggie and Kate say it is—the sound of the dead, come knocking. She hears it herself on March 31, 1848, after shooing her daughters upstairs to an early bedtime (the dead have been keeping her daughters awake). But Maggie and Kate did not intend to go to sleep. Instead, they tied an apple to a string and thumped it on the floor and, having learned to crack the knuckles on their toes, they also staged a whole new series of rappings.

  Ghosts rattled about the little farmhouse for a week.

  These garrulous ghosts were friendly, and when asked, they obligingly tapped out answers to all Mrs. Fox’s questions. Excited, she called over the neighbors so they too could hear the dead communicate from the world beyond. Soon a whole lot of other folks were dropping by. They came from all over, in wagons and buckboards, and a lawyer from Canandaigua decided he simply had to t
ell about these weird events in a pamphlet.

  News of the strange noises at the Fox house was traveling fast, and Maggie and Kate Fox were growing famous. Their elder sister, Leah, who lived in Rochester, brought Maggie and Kate to her house to conduct what had by now become known as seances. Crowds were flocking into Rochester; people who were desperate, scared, beguiled, and hopeful, all of them had questions for the Fox sisters, who would translate the taps into letters of the alphabet—and into answers.

  Amy and Isaac Post had asked the Fox sisters to contact their deceased daughter Matilda, and if Amy and Isaac Post actually believed the sisters were legitimate, then they should be taken seriously. For the Posts were serious people, uncompromising abolitionists, in fact, who had parted ways with many of their fellow Quakers to organize a dissident group of Congregational Friends (later called “Progressivists”) over the issue of slavery. The Posts knew Frederick Douglass, the eloquent man who had written the best-selling narrative about his escape from slavery and was now editing his abolitionist newspaper, The North Star, in Rochester, and they’d protected the runaway slave Harriet Jacobs at their home on Sophia Street, which served as a stop on the Underground Railroad. In just one night, they might help as many as fifteen runaway slaves on their journey north to Canada and freedom, and now they’d help the spirits. Isaac Post’s late mother told the Posts that the spirits were on their side. There was no slavery in the netherworld.