The Census and the Civil War 1

Running Head: THE CENSUS AND THE CIVIL WAR

The Census and the Civil War The Hidden Trigger

David C. Church

Northwest Missouri State University

THESIS APPROVED

Thesis Advisor Date

Dean of Graduate School Date

The Census and the Civil War 1

Running Head: THE CENSUS AND THE CIVIL WAR

The Census and the Civil War The Hidden Trigger

David C. Church

Northwest Missouri State University

THESIS APPROVED

Thesis Advisor Date

Dean of Graduate School Date

The Census and the Civil War 1

Running Head: THE CENSUS AND THE CIVIL WAR

The Census and the Civil War The Hidden Trigger

David C. Church

Northwest Missouri State University

THESIS APPROVED

Thesis Advisor Date

Dean of Graduate School Date

The Census and the Civil War 1

Running Head: THE CENSUS AND THE CIVIL WAR

The Census and the Civil War The Hidden Trigger

David C. Church

Northwest Missouri State University

THESIS APPROVED

Thesis Advisor Date

Dean of Graduate School Date

The Census and the Civil War 2

Abstract

The Census of the United States of America automatically redistributes political power in the nation every ten years. In doing so, the Census triggers a major political crisis every time it is taken. This paper examines the impact of the Census on the first eighty years of the nation’s history, culminating in its role in unleashing the social forces which resulted in the American Civil War.

THE CENSUS AND THE CIVIL WAR THE HIDDEN TRIGGER

A THESIS PRESENT TO THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY, HUMANITIES, PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL SCIENCE IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF HISTORY

BY DAVID C. CHURCH

NORTHWEST MISSOURI STATE UNIVERSITY MARYVILLE, MISSOURI June 2011

Copyright © 2011 by David C. Church All rights reserved

Will you make war upon us and kill us all? Man for man, you are not better than we are. And there are not so many of you as there are of us.

-- Abraham Lincoln, Cincinnati, 1859

Contents

Map of the Northwest Territory v

INTRODUCTION: “You may go to your trashy Census books…” 1

Chapter 1. The House Is Divided 8

Chapter 2. Three Enumerations, Three Reapportionments, Three Secession Attempts 28

Chapter 3. Destiny Manifests Itself 40

Chapter 4. Mister Clay Compromises, Mister Polk Conquers 51

Chapter 5. Cotton is King 61

Chapter 6. No More In Bondage Shall They Toil - Let My People Go 80

CONCLUSION: The Decennial Revolution 92

BIBLIOGRAPHY 94

Thomas Jefferson’s 1784 plan for the Government of the Western Territories proposed a ban on slavery throughout the United States and its territories from Latitude 32˚N (black line across northern British-held Florida) to take effect in the year 1800. The Northwest Ordinance passed by the Confederation Congress in 1787, and again by the First Congress of the United States under the Constitution in 1789, banned slavery immediately north to the Ohio River (blue line) and omitted eliminating slavery in any state or territory where it already existed.

v Introduction

“You may go to your trashy Census books, full of falsehoods and nonsense…”

In the spring of 1858, there was fresh talk of the irresistible force that would soon take its toll on the powers that be. The representatives of every state in the union were intimately aware it was coming. The future of the nation and their days in office were hostage to it, regardless of whether the voters in their home districts approved or disapproved of the job they were doing in Washington City. Irrevocable, and to those ousted from power, unacceptable changes in American government would follow in the wake of the Census of the United States of America for 1860.

The Census, with its automatic reallocation of each state’s votes in the House of

Representatives and the Electoral College, is the source of all political power in the

United States. As such, this essential, impartial mechanism of democracy triggered a national political crisis each of the seven times it had been taken since 1790.

On March 8, Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina arose from his seat to address the upper house. Ostensibly he was to speak in support of the admission of Kansas to the union under the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution. Instead, in the hall where renowned men of the republic met for six decades to express the sovereign will of the people, Hammond declared “Cotton is King.” In a litany of facts and figures taken from the economic information gathered by the Census, finally delivered to Congress in

1853, he made the case that the South’s financial wealth, built on the backs of the slaves who brought in the crops which only the South could grow, was responsible for the

1

financial health of the entire nation. He also cited the Census itself, beginning with the

above quote, as the generator of the false doctrine that the strength, power and prosperity

of the nation were derived from its rule by the majority of the people.1

In the history texts used every year by millions of students from elementary to

graduate school, and in popular histories by such noted authors as Bruce Catton, Shelby

Foote and James McPherson, the initial secession of the seven cotton states from

December 1860 to February 1861 and the subsequent outbreak of civil war in America is

presented as the direct, but unwanted and unplanned reaction to Lincoln’s election.

Virtually all historians who have ever dealt with the subject are careful to point out the

long string of divisive political events in two decades prior to the Civil War which

contributed to the national breakup. None point to the decennial U.S. Census, with its

constitutionally mandated reapportionment of political power, as the actual triggering

mechanism of the bloodiest conflict in American history.

This seeming oversight by historians is understandable. The Census is not a cause

of the Civil War, or any other change in the social order its taking unleashes every ten

years. Causes imply human devotion to a point of view. The Census is only the

mechanism which insures the political will of the majority of the people in the United

States of America become laws binding on all.

To be sure, American historians do cite the twenty-three decennial Enumerations

taken since 1790.2 Indeed it is almost impossible to find any book on any era of

1 James Henry Hammond, On the Admission of Kansas Under the Lecompton Constitution , Speech before the United States Senate, March 4, 1858, Teaching American History, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documment=1772 (accessed December 11, 2010).

2 For the purpose of clarity Census and Enumeration are capitalized when they refer to the decennial enumeration contained Article 1, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution.

2

American history which does not cite data directly from the period’s decennial Census.

According to Peter Novick, Frederick Jackson Turner developed his famous Frontier

Theory of American History from a statement in the 1890 Census which said it was no

longer possible to plot a frontier line on a map of the continental United States.

Likewise, Charles Beard was able to deduce from the economic data reported in the 1860

Census that for every one person in the free-states with assets of a million dollars, there were twenty-two persons in the slaves-states who could rightly call themselves a millionaire.3 The impact of these discoveries in the Census data on American historical

thought is incalculable.

However, all demographic surveys, whether the population polled consists of pet

owners, or eligible voters who did not participate in the last election, are undertaken

solely for the predictive powers of the data they yield. Since its inception in 1790, social

strategists working for America’s political and economic elite have used the Census

exclusively for this purpose. They would have been remiss in their duties had they not

done so. These are the raw numbers which add up to the nation’s destiny. Like a ledger,

they mathematically project future redistributions of the nation’s political and economic

power. Moreover, Article One, Section Two of the Constitution of the United States

decrees precisely when and how the transfer of power will take place.

Knowing for certain who is in an audience enables politicians to appear before the

voters as leaders who share their values and best represent their interests. The data each

Census provides enables businesses to identify geographic areas where new products and

3 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream – The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 93, 98.

3

technologies, such as Cyrus McCormack’s reaper in the 1840s, will enjoy the most

immediate acceptance and success.

In contrast to social strategists working in the public and private sectors,

historians do not usually utilize census data for its accurate predictive power. Instead the

data collected at the beginning of each decade is used to confirm, or deny specific social

and economic information for the event they are examining. While this provides

evidence from an irrefutable primary source in support of an author’s assertions, it

obscures the constitutionally mandated impact of each decade’s Census in determining

the subsequent course of the nation. No event bears this out more than the American

Civil War. Understanding how the accumulation of the nation’s demographic statistics at

the beginning of each decade set in motion the dissolution of the “more perfect union”

and its swift descent into the nation’s most horrific war, is the purpose of this

investigation.

It begins with a question: Why did the leaders of the nation’s slave-states wait until 1860 to quit the political union of the United States of American? Starting with the

Compromise of 1850, all the legal stumbling blocks to the perpetuation and promotion of slavery throughout the United States and its territories had been dealt with in the preceding decade. Its provisions set in motion the elimination the artificial boundary of the Missouri Compromise which limited the geographic spread of slavery to U.S.

Territory below Latitude 36˚ 30’N.

The first use of the will of the majority to determine whether a territory entered

the union as a slave or free state, was the Kansas/Nebraska Act of 1854. Though

4

“Bleeding Kansas” was the grizzly result, the way remained clear to add new territory to

the United States which would be far more conducive to southern crops and slave-based

plantation agriculture than the Great Plains.

In 1856, the South’s planter aristocracy, in combination with their northern

business partners in textiles, shipping, and banking funded the presidential election of

James Buchanan. Buchanan was a northerner who had previously demonstrated his

devotion to the slave-owners’ interest in acquiring land suitable for plantation

agriculture.4 With a central plank in the 1856 Democratic Party platform calling for

Cuba be added to the United States, Buchanan won in a landslide election with sixty

percent of the Electoral College vote. Republican John C. Fremont, whose campaign

slogan was “Free Soil, Free Men and Fremont,” split the remaining forty percent with

other third-party candidates.5

In 1857, the Supreme Court handed down a definitive ruling on slavery in Dred

Scott v Sanford. To the dismay of the advocates of free soil and abolition, the court’s

decision, written by Chief Justice Taney himself, established the legal precedent that any

local, state, or national prohibition or limitation on slavery was unconstitutional and

therefore void. This included the voiding of the Northwest Ordinance of 1789, the

Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854, allowing the will

of the people, popular sovereignty to determine a territory’s status upon entering the

union as a slave or free state.

4Alexander Johnston, “The Ostend Manifesto,” American Political History- 1763-1876, Part II, The Slavery Controversy, Civil War and Reconstruction, 1820-1876 (New York & London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons The Knicherbocker Press, 1905), 138,139.

5 Ibid, 198-200. Each state receives two votes in Electoral College for its two senators and one vote for each seat in the House of Representatives allocated to it by the most recent decennial Census.

5

By 1858, when Hammond delivered his “King Cotton” speech, the proponents

of slavery had gained every legal concession, vote and decision needed to maintain and

perpetuate the labor system and the staggering personal wealth it produced for the

plantation owners of the Deep South for the foreseeable future. This unbroken string of

political victories, achieved in the most profitable years the planters had ever known,

makes the unilateral decisions of the seven “Cotton States” to leave the Union within two

years almost inexplicable.6 The only logical reason for doing so was a widespread belief

in both the North and the South that a force was at work which virtually guaranteed the

Southerners’ seventy-one-year dominance of the federal government was coming

abruptly to an end. It was an end which predictably included the eradication of slavery

itself within a decade. That force was the constitutionally mandated re-apportionment of

Congress in 1862, in accordance with the final population tallies of the Census of the

United States of America for 1860.

Certainly, the causes of the American Civil War have been debated by

historians, politicians, and the people of the United States since before the war started.

Today the latest round in the debate is generating a plethora of new works. Ever building

on the scholarship of the past, these new visits to the era are providing fresh perspectives

as to the personal motivations of the participants who propelled the country headlong into

the deadliest war the nation has ever endured. No matter the author or the interpretation,

the core issues are invariably those which fueled the most rancorous and violent debates

in Congress in the decades leading up to the war. Slavery tops the list. Whether an

6 The secession of the southern states which comprised the Confederate States of America occurred in two phases. The first phase, led by the seven “Cotton States,” South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, took place from December 20, 1860 to February 2, 1861. The second phase of four more states, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas occurred in the wake of the firing on Fort Sumter from April 17, to June 8, 1861.

6

historian is a traditionalist, or some type of revisionist, the Civil War’s causes always

come back to the constitutionally protected existence of slavery in the nation supposedly

founded on the principle that “all men are created equal.”

Even so, most historians make strong arguments that slavery was by no means the only issue dividing the North from the South.7 What is less recognized is the fact that by

1860, the elected representatives of the people of the United States were divided into

these two opposing camps by the meanderings of Ohio River from Pittsburgh,

Pennsylvania to Cairo, Illinois. The true cause of the secession triggered by the Census

of 1860 was the unanimous passage of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, by both the

House of Representatives and the Senate in the First Congress of the United States under

the Constitution in 1789. Together these two regulatory mechanisms, one assuring that

the majority of the people remained sovereign in all matters of government, the other

banning the use of slave labor in the new territory above the Ohio River, led inexorably

to the Civil War.

7 Kenneth Stampp, Ed., The Causes of the Civil War, 3rd Revised Edition (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991). Stampp present a compendium of the broad spectrum of opinions on the subject in the form of essays by the actual participants and noted historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

7

Chapter 1 The House Is Divided

When the basic cause of the disunion in 1860 was set forth in law, the will of the

people, or even the will of the majority of the national electorate was not the foundation

of American government. Indeed the direction of government was based exclusively on

the will of a tiny minority of the citizenry composed entirely of the most successful and

accomplished men in America. On January 14, 1784, the Confederation Congress met in

Annapolis, Maryland, to ratify the Treaty of Paris ending the War for American

Independence. Two weeks later, mindful of the angry mobs of unpaid Pennsylvania

militiamen who had driven the Congress from Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson introduced

a plan which promised the financial salvation of the nation through the sale of land.8

8 Henry Bamford Parkes, The United States of America—A History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 124.

8

The Government of the Western Territories called for all the territory ceded by Britain to

be broken up into ten individual districts from which future states would be created.

Under Jefferson’s plan once a district had a counted population of twenty thousand, it

would be admitted to the national confederation with all of the rights and privileges of the

thirteen original states. In keeping with the author and public sentiment at the moment,

Article V of the document stated:

After the year 1800 of the Christian era, there shall be neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude in any of the said states, otherwise than in punishment

of crimes whereof the party shall have been convicted to have been personally guilty.9

That the slave-owner Jefferson would propose such a prohibition is strong

evidence that he, along with an overwhelming majority of his contemporaries, firmly

believed the system of forced labor should be banished from the American republic as

quickly and painlessly as possible. This was not Jefferson’s first attempt to rid the new

nation of slavery. The draft of the Declaration of Independence presented to the Second

Continental Congress for debate and approval specifically named the introduction of

slavery into the colonies as one of the Crown’s “repeated injuries and usurpations.” At

the urging of the southern delegates, this passage was edited out of the document signed

on July 4, 1776. But by 1784, Jefferson’s strong sentiments of equality and liberty for all

men infused America’s social ideology. Slavery was an anathema to that credo. Adding

to the moral argument against it was the belief among many of the nation’s elite citizens

9 Thomas Jefferson, “Government for the Western Territory, March 22, 1784,” The Thomas Jefferson Reader (Old Saybrook, CT: Konecky & Konecky), 192.

9

that slavery would soon die on its own. Large planters, such as the men who represented

their states in the Confederation Congress, had long known once virgin land was cleared

and planted, slaves with their life-long maintenance requirements of food, clothing,

shelter and health care became an ever increasing drag on profitability. The

overwhelming acceptance of Jefferson’s plan for The Government of the Western

Territory by the Confederation Congress on April 22, 1784, confirms that the general

consensus among the nation’s foremost men was that slavery was on the way out.

Certainly fifteen years allowed plenty of time to clear the new lands west of the

mountains before the ban took effect. However, South Carolina voted against the bill’s

Article V. One of the greatest weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation was that all

major bills before Congress required the unanimous approval of the delegations present.

Article V was dropped from the final draft.10

Another seemingly subtle change from Jefferson’s original proposal had a dramatic effect on the area the bill covered. Whereas the plan Jefferson submitted on

March 1, cited the thirty-first parallel of latitude north of the Equator as the southern boundary, the Land Ordinance signed into law on April 23, 1784, cited the Ohio River four hundred and seventy-five miles northward as that boundary.11 Though passed in this modified form, implementation of the Land Ordinance of 1784 was not pressed. There was little need to do so. As yet Congress had not established parameters for selling the

10Land Ordinance of 1784 (Library of Congress Archives); available from http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/bdsbib:@field (NUMBER+@band(bdsdcc+13401)): - (accessed January 29, 2011).

11 Ibid.

10

government’s land in the western territories. To remedy this oversight, the following

year the Confederation Congress passed the Land Ordinance of 1785 which stipulated

land above the Ohio River would be sold at auction in accordance with the township

system Jefferson devised for no less than a dollar per acre in sections of 640 acres, the

equivalent of one square mile. This was the maximum amount of land a single person

could purchase as it was figured to be the maximum amount of land the most industrious

of families could successfully farm on their own. While not barring slavery north of the

Ohio, the limitation on plot size to one square mile was most likely Jefferson’s intent. In

the cash strapped post-war economy of the time, few people had that kind of money and

ultimately the sections would be sold in much smaller parcels by companies which

bought huge tracts of land for resale.12

Land below the Ohio River, extending down the Mississippi to Spanish Florida,

was not included the Land Ordinance of 1785. The reason for the omission was simple.

This territory was already in private hands. It had been claimed, bought and sold in plots

considerably larger than 640 acres by Americans of all economic classes in the young

nation’s first real estate boom. Beginning in the midst of the Revolutionary War, this

land rush reached unprecedented heights after the publication of The Discovery,

Settlement and present State of Kentucke by John Filson in 1784. Filson’s book included

a detailed map of Virginia’s trans-Appalachian territory along with a compelling

narrative extolling its virtues. The book also made Daniel Boone a familiar name in

12 Ordinance of 1785 United States History, from http://www.u-s- history.com/pages/h1150.html (accessed May/15/2011).

11

households throughout the eastern seaboard. His virtues, so eloquently described by

Filson, and his first hand knowledge of the Kentucky Territory made Daniel Boone the

perfect choice to act as real estate agent for the foremost men in the nation, including

George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin.13

A month before the “shot heard round the world’ was fired on a village common

outside of Boston, Daniel Boone set out on behalf of his employer Judge Henderson to

establish the infrastructure needed to settle the land denied to Anglo-Americans by the

Treaty of Paris ending the French and Indian War in 1763.14 Dubbed the Wilderness

Road, it was a fortified supply route cut primarily by crews of slaves from what was then

western North Carolina through the nearly impenetrable forests of the Appalachians,

over the Cumberland Gap and down to Boonsboro, a hastily constructed stockade on the

Kentucky River.15

The year before Henderson purchased a dubious title from the Cherokees on the

seaboard side of the mountains to settle on land in the virgin forests along the Kentucky

River to where it flowed into the Ohio. This route of invasion into the forbidden territory

was deemed best, as it kept American settlers as far as possible from Britain’s bastions of

military power on the Great Lakes. During the ensuing seven years of war Henry

13 Paul O’Neal, The Old West - The Frontiersmen (Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1977), 45.

14 George Tindall and David Shi, America-A Narrative History, 6th Edition, Volume One (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1984), 322.

15 Paul O’Neal, The Frontiersmen, 52, 62-65.

12

Hamilton, the British Lieutenant Governor of Canada at Detroit, was content to fight the

colonials by proxy. He armed the Indian nations pushed northward out of their Kentucky

hunting grounds by the flood of illegal American settlers. These allied tribes used the

broad expanse of the Ohio River as a natural moat safeguarding their homes and hunting

grounds. With British logistical support, they could gather men and material unobserved at any point on its northern bank to make raids into Pennsylvania and Kentucky. At no point along the six hundred mile arc of the river, from Fort Pitt to its juncture with the

Mississippi, were American homesteads and stockades safe from these predatory attacks.

Nor did the coming of peace in January of 1784 change anything on the frontier. The

British retained their garrisons at Detroit and Niagara and continued to provide their

Native American allies with the munitions and supplies needed to maintain the lucrative

fur trade and the tribes’ sovereignty over the territory north of the Ohio.16

When the Confederation Congress took up the Land Ordinance in 1785, the only

land unencumbered with titles of private ownership and claims of state sovereignty west

of the Appalachians was north of the Ohio River, where no American settlements existed.

As the only potential source of revenue Congress controlled, the selling of these lands

was deemed imperative for the government’s continued existence. After the battle of

Yorktown, contributions to the national treasury from the individual states fell drastically

below the already meager allocations. The growing emigration into the region south of

the Ohio did nothing to pay down this debt. Adding to these financial woes the

16 James M. Morris, History of the U.S. Army (North Dighton, MA: World Publications Group, 2002), 39-40.

13

Confederation Congress had promised a great deal of the new territory to pay off the

pensions of veterans of the Revolutionary War.17

The post-war economies of the thirteen independently sovereign American states were in equally dire straits. Efforts to raise state revenues to pay their own massive war debts and current operating expenses led to thirteen separate approaches to the fiscal crisis. Virginia and the other southern states which retained their western claims below the Ohio River, sold titles to as much territory as they could. They also joined the states which had no open land to sell in levying tariffs on goods coming in from out of state, raising property taxes, and denying relief to returning veterans who found the farms they left for the duration of the war in foreclosure.18

Rhode Island’s government, which democratically sided with those deep in debt,

printed currency far in excess of assets in order to spur inflation. The Rhode Island

legislature then ordered merchants and money lenders to accept the nearly worthless bills

at their face values. This enabled farmers to pay off mortgages and other debts incurred

before and during the war with paper currency that would not purchase a loaf of bread.

Creditors fled to neighboring Massachusetts. There the fiscally conservative government

choked off the supply of currency in order to protect its value and the creditors residing

within the state’s borders. Such conflicting policies in all thirteen states caused violent

polarizations among the people. The climax of these social, economic and political

17 Roy M. Robbins, Our Landed Heritage: The Public Domain, 1776-19 (1942) 2010, available at http://www.ditext.com/robbins/land1.html (accessed February 17, 2011).

18 George Tindall and David Shi, America-A Narrative History, 268-277.

14

upheavals was Shays’ Rebellion in western Massachusetts. Angry mobs shut down civil

courts to stop foreclosures, tarred and feathered tax collectors, and attempted a takeover

of the national armory in Springfield to support their secession movement in western

Massachusetts. 19

In February, determined to develop a functional government before the United

States dissolved into anarchy, the Confederation Congress issued a call for a

constitutional convention of delegates from all thirteen states. In March, the Reverend

Manasseh Cutler arrived in Manhattan to lobby Congress on behalf of The Ohio

Company of Associates. The Boston-based real estate consortium proposed to buy

1,500,000 acres of land above the Ohio River for a million dollars, primarily in certificates of indebtedness to Revolutionary War veterans. Cutler’s offer was viewed as a godsend.20

To speed its approval by Congress, Treasury Board Assistant William Duer and

President of the Confederation Congress Arthur St. Clair worked directly with Cutler to draft the new land bill.21 The proposed ordinance established townships as the basis of political organization, provided for public schools, set the size of landholdings which could be acquired, and established the governing procedures and population levels by which all future states would be eligible to transition from unorganized territory to statehood. More importantly, as befitted New England’s sensibilities, the Northwest

19 Ibid, 277, 278.

20 Ibid, 270. The authors’ reference is Cutler, William Parker, and Julia Perkins Cutler, eds. Life, Journals, and Correspondence of Rev. Manasseh Cutler, LL. D. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987).

21 James M. Morris, History of the U.S. Army, 39. Arthur St. Clair became the first Governor of the Ohio Territory with the enactment of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.

15

Ordinance stipulated that the ban on slavery Jefferson proposed for all the western

territories in 1800, take immediate effect north of the river. While historians routinely

state that the new law embodied most of Jefferson’s ideas, in fact the Northwest

Ordinance was an entirely different proposition with an entirely different impact on the

future of the United States.22

Just as the Ohio Company’s proposal was being debated in New York City, in

Philadelphia the Constitutional Convention was considering how the people of the United

States would actually exercise their newly won sovereignty in government. Veterans of

the Annapolis Conference the previous September, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton,

George Read, and Edmund Randolph gathered in early May. Washington joined them on

the fourteenth. Their collective purpose, just as it had been when they met at Annapolis

the previous September, was to construct a real government. As a result of their prior negotiations with the other attendees as they arrived in Philadelphia, the first day of the

Convention the delegates agreed that they would not be merely amending the Articles of

Confederation.

The Articles of Confederation were originally presented as a procedural

companion to the Declaration of Independence in the first days of July in 1776. The

22 The equating of Jefferson’s ban on slavery in all of the western territories by 1800, to territory only above the Ohio River appears to be nearly universal. It can be found in works as diverse as Henry Bamford Parkes in his The United States of America- A History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953) on page 122, George Tindall and David Shi in their America-A Narrative History, 6th Edition, Volume One (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1984) 268-278, the Ohio Central History, http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?rec=1747, and the biographical introduction of The Cutler Papers contained in Harvard University Gray Herbaria; http://www.huh.harvard.edu/Libraries/archives/CUTLERMA.html .

16

Articles of Confederation was a contract which stated that Congress had been given the authority to coordinate cooperative activities among the thirteen state governments, primarily through the Continental Army and the various state militias, and to act on the states’ behalf as a collective bargaining agency with all foreign nations. By the time the

Treaty of Paris was formally ratified in January of 1784, delegates to the Confederation

Congress knew it could neither coordinate civil activities between the states, nor deal effectively with the hostile Native American nations occupying the western territories.

From the earliest times, Anglo-Americans believed their government ought to protect them from the reprisals of Native Americans, whose land they had taken. But

Britain was too far away to provide the kind of immediate military assistance the colonists needed. The organization of local militias to deal with the hostile Algonquians of the Powhatan Confederacy of the Virginia Tidewater, the Abenaki and the Pokanokets of Massachusetts Bay and the Mohegans and Pequots of Connecticut was the colonists’ logical and timely response. Since the original human inhabitants of the continent were not constantly on the warpath, despite colonial propaganda to the contrary, these paramilitary organizations evolved (women in the colonies believed devolved) into social clubs in which men from all levels of society hobnobbed on a regular basis. Over the next seven generations the militias’ weekend drills occurred as often as weather and circumstances permitted. These regular frontier festivals infused colonists with an expanding sense of community and the common belief that all those who were willing to shed blood for the commonwealth had earned the right to have a say in governing it.23

23 Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs – Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 277-280.

17

By 1770 the right to vote and participate directly in each colony’s government was accorded to virtually all free white men.24 When the colonies’ representatives to the

Second Continental Congress declared them to be free and independent of Great Britain, the people of the thirteen individual and sovereign states of the new United States of

America had been governing themselves for nearly two hundred years. Therefore all of the plans of government, from Madison’s broadly democratic Virginia Plan to Hamilton’s limited monarchy were based on the individual adult male citizen having a direct vote for those who would be representing the peoples’ sovereign interests in legislative branch of the new government.25

According to historian Henry Bamford Parkes, “The central factor in the internal political development of the United States during the Revolution, and for a long time afterwards was the interplay between two opposing movements.” Parkes calls the movements the Democratic Tendency and the Aristocratic Tendency. The ideologist and foremost proponent of the democratic movement was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson and his followers, including Madison, believed that government should be controlled by the majority of the people, that its powers should be strictly limited, and that its laws, when necessity forced their enactment, protect the interests of all citizens rather than just the interests those of the wealthy class.

Parkes’ embodiment of the aristocratic tendency was Alexander Hamilton.

Supported by merchants and land owners, Hamilton believed “the majority of people in

24 Though property qualifications limited voter eligibility in most of the colonies and later the states until the well into 1820s, the land required to meet those property qualifications was so readily available, it was believed at the time any white adult male could exercise his unquestioned right to vote if he chose to.

25 Henry Bamford Parkes, The United States of America—A History, 117-119.

18 the United States were too ignorant to be entrusted with political power, and that outright majority rule would lead to the robbery of the rich by the poor.”26

All of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were well acquainted with the varying philosophical views on Man in the State of Nature and Social Contract

Theory. Whether one sided with Hamilton and Hobbs, or Madison and Montesquieu, a strong new government by the consent of the governed was going to be the Constitutional

Convention’s outcome.

That the foremost proponents of the Constitution’s ratification by the American public should be Madison and Hamilton makes perfect sense. It is in the Constitution that Parkes’ democratic and aristocratic tendencies are balanced by compromise and specific safeguards. Article I of the Constitution is clearly a nod to the pure ideology of

Jeffersonian democracy. Under the rules of governance set forth, it is the outcome of the

Census which determines the allocation of all political power in the United States of

America. Indeed, in whom this power is to be vested and how it is to be distributed are the first two issues dealt with in the new national compact.

Article 1, Section 1 All legislative Powers herein granted shall be

vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a

Senate and House of Representatives.

Article 1, Section 2 The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States and the electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature. No Person

26 Ibid.

19

shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the

several States which may be included with this Union, according

to their respective Numbers. The actual Enumeration shall be made

within three Years after the first meeting of the Congress of the

United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years,

in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand,

but each state shall have at least one Representative.

Taken every ten years since 1790, its constitutionally ordained purpose makes the

decennial Census unique among all the government tallies of people taken throughout recorded history. No government had ever changed its leadership and the rank and file of its organizational structure as a direct result of counting the number of inhabitants residing within its boundaries. Prior to 1789, and for more than a century after the world’s other nations were ruled by a minute percentage of their total populations. Shifts in political power were achieved only when one faction among a nation’s social elite gained dominance over the others by force of arms. Blood was spilt and the machinery

of government was duly turned over to the new regime. Specific leaders changed but the

exclusive social class in power did not.

To be sure, the men who led thirteen of Great Britain’s North American colonies

to war and independence, held the same positions in American society that the royally

20

anointed nobility did in nations such as England and France. The difference was that

America’s leaders believed their rise to prominence was solely based on their own

individual efforts. They had proven, to themselves at least, that people regardless of the

circumstances of their births possessed sufficient reason to successfully govern their own

lives and the affairs of a modern nation. For them the postulations of Europe’s

Enlightenment philosophers were not abstract concepts. They were realities lived and

therefore expressed with a distinctly American twist in their Declaration of Independence

from Great Britain. By dropping “property,” meaning real estate from Locke’s 1688

trinity of the natural rights of free men, in favor of “the pursuit of happiness,” Jefferson

literally made universal suffrage, for white adult males, the foundation upon which the

new nation’s government was to be built.27

Ratification of U.S. Constitution by those eligible to vote in each of the thirteen states made this revolutionary political philosophy the first law of the land. Indeed the document’s first sentence unequivocally declares that “We the People” are sovereign in all matters of government. The “Enumeration” called for in Article I, Section 2, was the mechanism which insured that the interests, whatever they might be, of the majority of the nation’s people were fairly represented in that government for the foreseeable future.

Of course this was not true for those who were not free. In Philadelphia, the delegates stepped down from ideology to practicality, arguing as to whether slaves were to be counted in determining representation and direct taxation for each state.

Southerners wanted all of their slaves counted for representation, but not for taxation.

27 Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), vi-vii.

21

Northerners wanted no slaves counted for representation, but did not mind having all

slaves counted for the apportionment of direct taxes.28

In New York City, the subject before the Confederation Congress was the

banning of slavery on one side of the Ohio when it was not banned on the other. The soil

and climate on both sides of the river are the same. The only difference in 1787 was that

no Americans who dared to settle on the north bank of the river had lived.29

The financial pressure on the Confederation Congress to pass the Northwest

Ordinance was severe. As soon as military operations could be mounted to protect

potential settlers at strategic points along the northern bank of the Ohio River, the

remainder of the vast territory extending to Lake Superior would be indisputably the

property of the United States of America.30 The Ohio Company’s deal took care of the

immediate problem of paying off the back-pay and pensions owed to the veterans of the

War for Independence. These angry citizen-soldiers had driven the national government out of Philadelphia, to Trenton, New Jersey, to Annapolis, Maryland and then to its final meeting place, New York’s City Hall on Wall Street.31

The relatively small amount of cash to be paid to the government by the Ohio

Company was reckoned sufficient to form a military force to establish and protect the

28 Henry Bamford Parkes, The United States of America-A History, 131.

29 Paul O’Neil, The Frontiersmen, 63-77. The military activities of George Rogers Clark and the Kentucky Militia north of the Ohio did not constitute settlement. These extensive campaigns were undertaken solely to prevent further assaults on American settlers in the Ohio Valley by British supplied Native American tribes after the Revolution.

30 Gregory Evans Dowd, Arthur St. Clair (American National Biography Online, February 2000) http://www.docstoc.com/docs/6150117/Arthur_St_Clair (accessed April 18, 2011).

31 Henry Bamford Parkes, The United States of America—A History, 124.

22

early beachheads on the Ohio’s northern shore and then expand them to the Great Lakes

and the headwaters of the Mississippi. When sold to land hungry Americans at a dollar

an acre, this territory could conceivably fund all of the operations of the U.S.

Government, without the need to ask the states for money for foreseeable future.32

The possibility of an autonomous national government was tantalizing. It might even end the need for the government-making process going on ninety miles away in

Philadelphia.33 Unfortunately, the fastest way to secure the territory so it could be sold was to use Kentucky as the staging area and employ the slaves living there to clear the fields and construct the stockades, homes, and docking facilities. The ban on slavery was also problematic in that it denied American citizens engaged in perfectly legal endeavors

the right to use their property for its intended purpose to cultivate land, work in a

business, or even to staff a residence on the northern shore of the Ohio River. Cutler and

his allies in Congress were adamant that the ban be put into immediate effect, or there

would be no deal with the Ohio Company of Associates.34

Aware of the stage the Constitutional Convention had reached in its deliberations,

Members of the Confederation Congress suggested a solution everybody could live with,

whether the government continued on under the Articles of Confederation, or began

operations under the new Constitution being forged in Philadelphia. The Southern

Delegates in Congress would unanimously support passage of the Northwest Ordinance

32 Henry Bamford Parkes, The United States of America-A History, 125.

33 George Tindall and David Shi, America-A Narrative History, 268-269.

34 Ohio Company of Associates (Ohio History Central, July 1, 2005 http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?rec=945 (accessed February 12, 2011).

23

with its ban on slavery intact if the Northern Delegates to the Constitutional Convention

would count slaves for the purpose of determining representation in the proposed national

legislature. The formula was one Congress had previously proposed to determine the

amount of taxes the states should collect from their citizens for the maintenance of the

national government.35

On July 13, 1787 the Confederation Congress in New York unanimously passed

the Northwest Ordinance. In Philadelphia the following day the delegates agreed to the

precise wording of the third paragraph of the first article of the proposed constitution:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included with this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years and, excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other Persons.”36

Southerners quickly accepted these two intertwined measures because they earnestly believed they had gotten the better end of the bargain. Their position that all slaves should count for purposes of representation in the new government rested on extremely shaky philosophical ground. Rationally, slaves could not be “farm equipment” and persons at the same time. That the delegates of New England and the Mid-Atlantic

states would accept counting them as three-fifths of a person was a major victory.

35 George Tindall and David Shi, America-A Narrative History, 282-283.

36 The italicized section is infamous Three-Fifths Clause which was deleted from the Constitution with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.

24

Even without counting slaves, Virginia had the largest population of the thirteen original states. It was believed by the delegates from North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia that their states, each with claims to large tracts of wilderness stretching to the Mississippi, would soon have larger populations than the northern states as well.

Their reasoning was based on the fact that territory of the United States of America, from twenty miles inland of the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River was a vast primeval forest. As Kentucky had already proven, those settlers with slaves to clear the land and put it under cultivation would head south of the Ohio River before the expected ban on the institution took effect. Those who took exception to the use of slave labor were welcomed to settle north of the Ohio River, once it was pacified, on their expensive government-dictated one square mile plots in the middle of dense woodland they would have to clear with their own hands.

As a matter of course, the Northwest Territory’s population growth and the political power it generated were going to be limited far into the future. By acceding to

Northern wishes to eliminate slavery due west of the states which were already banning the practice, Southerners secured an advantage they believed would lead to permanent control the House of Representatives and their choice of President of the United States.

With these issues settled to everyone’s satisfaction in both New York and Philadelphia, the convention delegates quickly signed the final draft of the new Constitution and presented it to the public on September 12, 1787.37

37 James Madison, The Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, which framed the Constitution of the United States of America, reported by James Madison, a delegate from the state of Virginia, Edited by Gaillard Hund and James Brown Scott (Oxford University Press, 1920, Avalon Project Yale University, 2008, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/constmad.asp (accessed September 16, 2010).

25

Ratifying the U.S. Constitution was the first exercise of the majority’s sovereign

powers in America. It could not go into effect until the majority of the white adult male

voters in at least nine of the thirteen original states approved. The two years the

ratification process took bore out the Southerners’ predictions of population growth north

and south of the Ohio. The Census of 1790 shows 73,677 people living in Kentucky, of

whom 15,147 were free males over sixteen years of age and 12,430 of whom were

slaves.38 The Southwest Territory, which was to become the state of Tennessee in 1796, had 35,691 people, of whom 6,271 were free males over the age of 21 and 3,417 who were slaves. This first census lists no Americans as permanent residents in the Northwest

Territory, even though both Marietta and Cincinnati are officially documented as having been established the year before.39

When the Northwest Ordinance came to the floor for a vote in September of 1789,

American inroads into the Indian-held territory were so insignificant, and there was so

much virgin land still available south of the Ohio, there was little motivation for anyone

in Congress to contest the ban on slavery north of the river. However, there were ample

reasons to do so.

The land purchased by the Ohio Company of Associates in 1787 barely covered

one county in the future state. The rest of the land was a vast, primordial forest of proven

fertility, stretching west from the headwaters of the Ohio River to the Mississippi and

38 The 1790 Census was delivered to Congress, minus South Carolina’s return, October 27, 1791, eleven months late. South Carolina’s Census data was added to the Census books in May of 1792. U.S. Census-1790, www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1790m-01.pdf. (accessed November, 6, 2010).

39 The establishment of these town-sites in the Northwest Territory seems to have been more a matter of filing the paper work as a prelude to settlement, than actual settlement. On Census Day, April 1, 1790, locals on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River would have been well aware of anyone residing permanently in either township.

26 north to the shores of Lake Superior.40 Though the term was yet to be coined, to bar access to the Northwest Territories to some American citizens because they happened to own a specific kind of legal property surely must have struck some members of that very first Congress as “unconstitutional.”

Then there was the Northwest War. To insure their hunting grounds and families were safe from the predatory Americans south of the river, an alliance of the Miami,

Shawnee, Delaware, and Potawatomi conducted a continuous, successful campaign of cross-river raids which had escalated into all out war. In the two years after the

Northwest Ordinance became law, the uncelebrated Northwest War claimed the lives of fifteen hundred American civilians. Most of those slain were Kentuckians. Had the lands north of the river been open to settlement by slave owners on the same terms as those south of the Ohio, stockades garrisoned by Kentucky militia and burgeoning settlements of those who missed out on the Kentucky real estate boom would already be in place. Even more important to the fledgling national government, which had added all of the states’ war debts to those it incurred under the Articles of Confederation, the land north of the river was virtually unencumbered by deeds of private ownership and conflicting state claims. Quick settlement of the Northwest Territory was still the fastest way financial solvency for the national government.41 But no protest on these reasonable grounds was heard.

40 As Lincoln noted in 1859, the quality of the land and climate north and south of the Ohio River are the same. Therefore, any agricultural activity pursued south of the river, including converting timber to lumber, could have been carried on with equal success north of it. 41 George Tindall and David Shi, America-A Narrative History, 298.

27

On August 7, 1789, both houses of Congress affirmed, with minor modifications in deference to the new Constitution, the 1787 bill listed on the Congressional Docket as

An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States, North-West of the

River Ohio. This vote was a seminal moment in the life of the new nation. Had the

Southern Congressional Delegations baulked at the ban on the use of slaves in so vast a wilderness, it is highly unlikely the division of the nation into two precisely designated geographic entities would have come about.

It is this act cleaved the shared experiences, beliefs and allegiances born in the

Revolution into the two distinct societies of Americans necessary for a civil war. In 1789 most Americans looked upon the division of the nation into geographically distinct slave territory and free territory as a temporary condition. Section 9 of Article I of the

Constitution spells out eight specific limitations on the powers of Congress. First among these was:

The migration or importation of such persons as any of the states

now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the

Congress prior to the year 1808, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such importations, not exceeding 10 dollars for each person.

“Imported persons” in Section 9 was the accepted euphemism of the day for slaves from

Africa or the West Indies. After 1807, it was expected that Congress would enact a ban on the importation of “such persons.” In the meantime, Section 9 did not bar Congress from passing of a series of laws beginning in 1794 prohibiting Americans from engaging in the international slave trade. In 1800, Congress prohibited the building and outfitting of ships to engage in the international slave trade. In 1803, it enacted a law preventing

28 slaves from being imported into any state or territory of the United States in which slavery was prohibited. Finally in 1807 Congress did pass the law which actually banned the importation of slaves anywhere in the United States, or its territories as of January 1,

1808.42

These laws demonstrate the seriousness of the government and the majority of people in ridding the nation of slavery, with the least disruption to the national economy.

They also demonstrate that the will of the majority in the new government could no longer be thwarted by the minority as it had been under the Articles of Confederation.

Chapter 2 Three Enumerations, Three Reapportionments, Three Secession Attempts

By the design of the framers of the Constitution, the first U.S. Census triggered the first Congressional reapportionment in 1793, impartially redistributing political power among the fifteen states of the union according to the number of people living in each one. The Vermont Republic, which had abolished slavery within its borders in 1777, was the first new state added to the original thirteen in 1791.43 Kentucky, the first new state added to the union in which slavery was prevalent, entered in 1792. Both states were given two seats in the House of Representatives as their populations warranted under

42 Alexander Johnston, American Political History-1763-1876, 23, 24. 43 Upon its admission to the union, Vermont displaced Massachusetts as the first state to formally abolish slavery.

29

Article I, Section 2 of the new Constitution.44 The Constitution’s original 1789

apportionment of representatives in the House allotted sixty-five seats. The mandated

reapportionment following the first Census added forty more. The thirty-six remaining,

after accounting for Vermont and Kentucky, went to the Congressional Delegations of

the thirteen original states in the union, except Georgia which lost one.45 Nearly all of

those added seats were due to population increases to the west of the Atlantic seaboard.

Along with the westward drift of the population, the will of the majority was changing as

well. With the issue of civil rights settled by passage of the Bill of Rights, and the

divisive issue of slavery temporarily settled by passage of the Northwest Ordinance and laws leading to the eventual termination of the practice, the course of the government changed. For the next forty years American government was dominated by issues and personalities arising from the transfer of people and political power from the eastern coastline to the western frontier.

In the last decade of the eighteenth century, most Americans still lived within twenty five miles of the Atlantic Ocean. Their shared values had produced the most

socially and politically egalitarian nation on earth. With forty thousand slaves counted in

the first Census as living north of the Chesapeake Bay, the institution was certainly not

nearing extinction in the Mid-Atlantic and New England states. Vermont and

Massachusetts had outlawed the practice and the Census showed no slaves living in either

state. The rest of the northern states all counted slaves among their inhabitants with New

44 Martis, Kenneth, The Historical Atlas of United States Congressional Districts, 1789–1983 (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1985), 4–6.

45 With Georgia’s loss of a seat in the House of Representatives in reapportionment of 1792, the Census of 1790 patently demonstrated the fact that the decennial Enumeration takes political power as readily as it gives it.

30

York reporting 21,324 and New Jersey accounting for an additional 11,423. However,

with so many fresh arrivals from Europe and the high survival rates of the indigenous

white population, there was no shortage of willing day laborers. The pay-as-you-go work force had the added benefit of being dispensable whenever it was not needed, which was frequently in the rapid boom and bust business-cycle of the decades following the

Revolution. For the farmers, merchants, mechanics, artisans, and sea captains of New

England and the Mid-Atlantic states, the labor of free men who were paid wages for only the work they performed was more cost-effective and therefore more profitable than the high costs of purchasing and then maintaining slaves for life. What is more, the region’s political and religious leaders deemed the existence of slavery in America as an immoral abomination as well.46

By contrast, from the Chesapeake Bay south, slavery was viewed as the still

economically necessary social evil.47 The early plantations of the Virginia Tidewater and

Maryland’s Eastern Shore owed their very existence to the introduction of slavery in

1619. Survival rates for whites living on the Chesapeake Bay, as well as the Atlantic coast of the Carolinas and Georgia, were abysmally low. Of the 8,000 Europeans to

46 Alexander Johnston, American Political History-1763-1876, 30-36.

47 This outweighed the immorality and political hypocrisy of its existence in the nation founded on the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Even Jefferson could not bring himself to free all of his slaves for fear of the adverse economic impact it would have on his heirs. Thomas Jefferson, Last Will and Testament (Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia-Monticello, 2000) http://www.monticello.org/site/research- and-collections/last-will-and-testament (accessed October 17, 2010).

31

immigrate to Virginia between 1607 and 1624, only 1,300 survived.48 Most died within a year of their arrival. Over the next two centuries these European toeholds on the continent evolved into luxurious manorial fiefdoms.49 What began as a temporary

solution to the severe shortage of labor in the hot, humid, mosquito infested coast of the

Virginia Tidewater, turned into the way to wealth for the eight generations of white

Americans who were personally fit enough to survive the Southern environment.

Tobacco, hemp, rice, timber, indigo and, after Whitney’s invention of the ‘gin’ in 1793,

cotton were grown primarily by slave labor on land cleared primarily by slave labor.

After the Revolution, it was the children of these planters who were sent into the

west south of the Ohio River. Supplied with plenty of slaves to clear all the wilderness

land they could, this next generation of planters quickly replicated every aspect of the

social culture of their parents and grandparents. Wide, slow moving rivers made much of

the region’s interior directly accessible by boat. The benign nature of these rivers made it

possible to use large barges to float harvests downstream to markets on the Gulf and

Atlantic coasts like New Orleans, Mobile and Charleston. As a direct result of using

slave labor, the most fertile ground available throughout the territory south of the Ohio

River was claimed and put under cultivation by a small percent of the region’s white

population. Unlike the territory north of the Ohio, there were generally no limitations,

other than one’s purse, as to the amount of land an individual could buy. Even with its

clever mechanism to redistribute political power every ten years, the new Constitution

48Mary Beth Norton and David M. Katzman, A People and a Nation-A history of the United States (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003), 29.

49 The restored colonial plantations of the Tidewater, as well as Mount Vernon and Monticello are testament to the lifestyle of America’s southern founding fathers.

32

was no match for the economic and political clout of the South’s embedded planter

aristocracy. No citizens in a Southern community were likely to go against the wishes of

the owner of the area’s biggest plantation. His interests reflected the interests of every

other plantation owner. The livelihoods of local merchants, artisans, and craftsmen were

dependent on being in the good graces of the plantation masters. If the master wanted to

be the Congressman, or wanted his son or nephew to be the Congressman, who were they

to question it?50 Even if they did property qualifications for voters in most Southern states, which remained in force until the 1820s, kept the rolls of eligible voters as low as twenty percent of each state’s total adult white male population.

In the North the situation was quite different. Beginning in 1620, the survival rates of newcomers arriving at American ports north of the Chesapeake Bay were radically higher than those who arrived at any southern port. Five times as many immigrants survived their first years in New York or Massachusetts, than did immigrants to Virginia or Georgia. More babies in the Mid-Atlantic and New England colonies survived to see adulthood and even old age as well.51 As a result, farms in New England

and the Mid-Atlantic colonies were passed on to the first born sons, who passed them on

to their first born sons. In every generation there were plenty of surviving second and

third-born sons to work “the place” until they too set out to have a family on a farm of

their own. This kept farms small and forced each generation to migrate into the interior

just beyond the established settlements of their parents.52

50 Alexander Johnston, American Political History,1763-1876, 30-36.

51 Ibid, 36.

52 Mary Beth Norton and David M. Katzman, A People and a Nation-A history of the United

33

Higher survival rates were not the sole factor in the North’s soaring population figures. In the South slaves performed the most onerous and menial jobs in society. In the North those jobs were available to be filled by those just arrived from Europe.

Everyone could find something they could do to gain food, clothing and shelter, no matter how difficult, dangerous, immoral, or nauseating it might be. Folks in the ‘old country,’ where things were often much worse, would follow the path of those who had gone before.

These differences in migration patterns and survival rates North and South, exacerbated by the existence of slavery, had political ramifications as well. Despite governments which were in all essentials the same for all the states, in the North political power continued to be shared among the various segments of society, reflecting the evolving needs and wishes of the majority of the region’s residents as the population grew and slowly moved west. In the Southern states, settlement of each succeeding territory west of the Appalachians was initially far more rapid. This was due in large part to the advantages slavery gave the planters in clearing huge tracts of forest land and bringing it under cultivation. As a direct result real political power was gradually concentrated into the hands of the region’s most affluent families. When their children moved west, they naturally replicated the social order, economic practices, and political views that were the Southern way of life east of the Appalachian Mountains.

While the first Census plainly presented the growing disparity of slave ownership rates in the North versus the South, the startling information it produced was how rapidly

States, 36, 37.

34

the nexus of political power was shifting to the interior of the continent. In 1793, the

pattern of a regional secession crisis following in the wake of each Census first

manifested itself.

Washington’s two terms as president reflected the existing conservative economic

values and political will of the inhabitants of the Atlantic Seaboard. Only in his dealing

with the Whiskey Rebellion did the concerns of Westerners take precedence over the

Eastern elites’ desires for fiscal and political stability. The Whiskey Rebellion was to the

new government under the Constitution what Shays’ Rebellion had been eight years

earlier to the government under the Articles of Confederation. Secession was once again

the hue and cry of the Whiskey Rebels. The danger in this instance was immeasurably

greater. If the rebels in Western Pennsylvania succeeded in seceding, they might very

well take the entire Western Territory with them.53

During the War for Independence supplies of sugar and molasses from the British

West Indies to make rum were cut off by the Royal Navy’s blockade. Ever adaptive,

Americans changed their preferred alcohol to whiskey made from grains, usually corn.

For the farmers of western Pennsylvania this was a financial godsend. Converting corn

into whiskey reduced the bulk of what they were shipping to market by ten-fold and

increased the profit on each shipment another ten-fold.54 So much money was being made in this manner that the new federal government, under the guidance of

53 William Hogeland, The Whiskey Rebellion -George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America's Newfound Sovereignty (New York, Scribner, 2006), xi.

54 George Tindall and David Shi, America-A Narrative History, 319.

35

Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, decided this was the ideal source of revenue to help pay off the debt assumed by the Federal government from the

War of Independence. Hamilton convinced Congress to pass a tax on alcohol which differentiated between large and small producers. Small producers, like virtually all those west of the Appalachians, were to pay nine cents a gallon. Large producers like

George Washington, the nation’s largest whiskey distiller at the time, paid only six cents a gallon. In choosing this means of attaining fiscal balance, Hamilton permanently alienated Westerners and unwittingly doomed the Federalist Party as a political force in the United States.55

If the Federalist government thought they could get away with imposing any tax, especially one as unfair as the whiskey tax on poor farmers on the frontier, they needed to think again. These pioneers had already fought for their freedom from a distant, aristocratic government which sought to impose taxes without popular consent and won.

Now the government created out of that victory turned against their interests. The solution was simple. They declared they would once again take matters of government into their own hands.

The Whiskey Rebellion marks one of the few occasions in history in which a nation’s leaders demonstrated what they had learned from their past mistakes. Whereas

Shays’ Rebellion exposed the national government’s powerlessness, the Whiskey

Rebellion evaporated the moment word reached Pittsburg that Washington himself was coming with a massive force of twelve thousand militiamen. In the end, Washington

55 Henry Bamford Parkes, The United States of America-A History, 142.

36

pardoned the only two individuals found guilty of insurrection among the thousand or so

rebels. Hamilton was opposed to letting the rebels go scot-free, but Washington paid him

no mind. He knew these men represented the future of the nation. The Census figures

which Jefferson delivered the year before causing Kentucky to be admitted to the Union

with Tennessee soon to follow told him so.56

The results of the election of 1800 clearly indicated that the Census being compiled would reveal a large number Americans had already moved west over the mountains, taking the political power the Census conferred with them. The Federalist

Party of Hamilton and Adams was strong only in the major port cities of the Mid-Atlantic

States, New England, and Charleston, South Carolina. Jefferson’s Democratic

Republicans were strong everywhere else. Taken during one of the most contentious

presidential elections in America’s history, the Census of 1800 reveals a thirty-five

percent increase in the national population in just ten years. 5,308,483 people were living

in the United States, 893,602 of who were slaves. Nearly a million of the population

increase of 1,400,000 lived west of the Appalachians. Ohio, which was not counted in

the Census of 1790, showed 45,365 persons living in the territory. Even though it had

not surpassed the 60,000 inhabitants required by the Northwest Ordinance, it was

reckoned that the population was growing so rapidly that the required number would

soon be reached. Ohio entered the union by President Jefferson’s proclamation with one

Congressman in 1803. With farmers and planters on both sides of the Ohio sending their

harvests down river to New Orleans, Jefferson had a number of worries. The western

United States, including the new state of Tennessee and the rapidly growing Mississippi

56 Paul O’Neil, The Frontiersmen, 63-77. As a leading investor in western real estate Washington was well aware of how rapidly the populations over the Appalachian Mountains were growing.

37

Territory, only had access to the sea via Spanish-held New Orleans. Spain had formally returned Louisiana to France in 1800 to placate Napoleon, who at the time was dreaming of reacquiring the French colonial empire lost in the Seven Years War. However the

Spanish remained in control of the territory awaiting the arrival of French troops.

Fearing Napoleon more than the Spanish, Jefferson dispatched Robert Livingston to buy the port city. To his surprise, Livingston returned to the United States in 1803 with the deed for the entire Louisiana Territory in his pocket for only five million more than

Jefferson’s majority in Congress had authorized him to pay for the city alone. For a paltry fifteen million dollars, the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United

States.57

The Federalists in Congress showed how out of touch they had become with the new majority by complaining that the Constitution did not allow for the purchase of land.

Their fear was that the land Jefferson had sent Lewis and Clark to survey would only add to the political power Jefferson was already wielding with such a devastating effect on

New England’s maritime-based economy.58

Jefferson’s treatment of the Federalist strongholds on the Atlantic seaboard was economically brutal. Depending on the prevailing diplomatic winds swirling around

Napoleonic Europe, Jefferson’s administration placed a series of trade sanctions on either the British, or the French, or both. The Federalists who had run the country with an iron grip for twelve years did not have enough support in Congress to prevent the passage of any of these bills. Jefferson’s actions were so disastrous for the local economies of the

57George Tindall and David Shi, America-A Narrative History, 347.

58 Ibid, 351.

38

Eastern seaboard they set off the nation’s second serious secession crisis involving New

England and New York with Jefferson’s own Vice President, Aaron Burr being

considered for president of the new nation. Burr’s killing of the Federalists’ leader

Alexander Hamilton put an end to talk of New England’s secession for the time being.

However, the westward movement and the steady transfer of political power away from

the East Coast over the next decade meant it was only for the time being.59

Madison took office as Jefferson’s successor in March of 1809. Though he

allowed the Embargo Act with its prohibition on trade with any foreign country to lapse,

he asked Congress for a new Non-Intercourse Act prohibiting trade with Britain and

France. When this act expired in 1810, Congress replaced it with a bill which reopened trade with both nations. Macon’s Bill Number 2 stated that should either France or

Britain desist from violating America’s maritime rights, the president could suspend

American trade with the other. When France agreed to abide by this stipulation in 1811,

Madison immediately suspended all trade with New England’s major trading partner,

Great Britain.

The Census of 1810 recorded a twenty-eight percent jump in the national population in just ten years. The results ironically confirmed Madison’s contention in

Federalist 51. In a land where the majority rules, the minority has to fear for their rights.60 New England’s maritime industry was the font of the region’s wealth. For most

59 George Tindall and David Shi, America-A Narrative History, 351.

60 The United States Census of 1810 shows 7,239,881 people living in the United States of which 1,191,362 were slaves. The 1810 Census included one new state: Louisiana. U.S. Census of 1810 (Census of Population and Housing – 1810) http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1810.html (accessed January 23, 2011)

39

of the first decade of the nineteenth century the British Royal Navy had maintained a

close blockade of Napoleon’s continental Europe, seizing American ships, cargos and

over six thousand sailors to fill out the depleted crews of its warships. Under the guise of

concern for the losses the devout Federalists of New England had suffered, the trade

policies of both Jefferson’s and Madison’s administrations did the utmost to destroy New

England’s shipping and financial industries altogether.61 When the War Hawks in

Congress (all of whom were southern or western Democratic-Republicans) started

demanding war with Britain for confiscating American ships and cargos and impressing

American sailors, New England’s Federalists were aghast. The War Hawks actually had

designs on seizing Canada and Florida while the British Army and the Royal Navy were

completely engaged in Wellington’s Peninsular Campaign in Spain and Portugal, and

blockading the entire coast of Continental Europe. When Madison asked Congress to

declare war on Britain for their abuses of American rights on the high seas, not a single

Federalist voted “Aye.”62

The war did not go at all as the War Hawks had predicted. Though American

forces on land and sea did see some limited success, they failed to win any of the

important battles which took place. The Royal Navy’s domination of the sea was so

overwhelming they were able to execute raids at will all along America’s coast, including

61 J. Van| Fenstermaker, John E. Filer, “The U.S. Embargo Act of 1807: Its impact on New England money, banking, and economic activity,” Economic Inquiry, January 01, 1990 (Farmington Hills, MI, The Gale Group, 2003). Smuggling goods to either Britain or France was so profitable, New England’s ship owners made far more money during the period, despite their losses, than if there no restrictions on their ‘freedom of the seas’ at all.

62 Mary Beth Norton and David M. Katzman, A People and a Nation-A History of the United States to 1877, 151.

40

burning Washington D.C. in June of 1814. By December of that year, New England’s

Federalists had enough. A convention was called in Hartford, Connecticut. The subject

was secession from the union. If New England’s maritime interests were unable to see

their rights protected from the tyranny of the majority, the only solution was to establish a

United States of New England to protect them. However, before the Hartford

Convention could bring the issue to a vote news arrived that the Treaty of Ghent had

ended the sorry affair. Even worse for the Federalist cause, news of the outcome of the

Battle of New Orleans arrived in tandem with the news of the peace treaty. The Battle of

New Orleans was such a resounding victory that the vast majority of Americans,

including those in New England believed the United States had won the war. Federalist

Party members were immediately branded traitors. The party of Washington, Hamilton,

and Adams was dead. Even John Quincy Adams, John Adams’ politically ambitious son,

became a Democratic Republican in 1809. In 1817, he became James Monroe’s very

able Secretary of State, overseeing the purchase of Florida and the extension of the

border between Spain and the United States to the Pacific Northwest. He also negotiated joint occupation of the Oregon Territory with Britain and set the 49th Parallel as the

eventual boundary between the United States and British Canada west of Lake Superior.

Then he capped his term by authoring the Monroe Doctrine barring further colonization

in the Americas by European powers.63

63 Sterling Stuckey and Linda Kerrigan Salvucci, Call to Freedom-Beginnings to 1877 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2001), 368-370.

41

Chapter 3

Destiny Manifests Itself

In the aftermath of the War of 1812, America’s settlement to the banks of the

Mississippi and beyond began in earnest. Mississippi, Alabama, Indiana, and Illinois all joined the Union before the decennial Census of 1820 was taken. The Census of that year reveals a total population of 9, 625,734 people of whom more than a million and a half were slaves. By happenstance rather than design, eleven of the states in the Union had large slave populations, the other eleven states had relatively few or none. While the number of slave states versus free states in the union had not previously been an issue, the proposed admission of Missouri made it the only one that mattered in 1820. The

Census, which was the first to use the designations “Slave State” and “Free State,” reveals why. The populations of those states and territories where slavery was prevalent were growing at a much slower pace than those states and territories where it was banned, or regarded as economically unfeasible. As an example, Kentucky, which entered the union with two congressmen in 1793 and had nine after the Census of 1800, experienced little growth from then on. In 1822’s reapportionment, Kentucky was again allocated

42

only nine representatives. Ohio, which joined the union with one congressman in 1803,

had thirteen congressional districts up for grabs in elections of 1822.64

In exposing the growing population disparity between the Northern and Southern

regions of the United States, the Census of 1820 created a divisive new sectionalism

which had not really existed before. Prior to 1820, sectional friction had been almost

exclusively between the established east coast and the western frontier. In the false belief

that slavery would soon die of its own accord, Congress had ignored it after the first

Congress under the Constitution reaffirmed the Northwest Ordinance.

What nobody had foreseen was the renewed economic vitality the mechanization

of the textile industry would give the labor system from 1790 on. In that year Samuel

Slater open the first small American textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. In 1793,

Eli Whitney traveled from his home in Massachusetts to Mulberry Grove, the plantation

of General Nathanael Green’s widow on the Georgia coast.65 Cotton was a luxury fiber

and grown almost entirely on the Sea Islands and shores of South Carolina and Georgia.

Production was only a million and a half pounds annually due to the climate and soil

requirements of long-staple Egyptian cotton. Short-staple American cotton could be

grown over a much broader range, but the difficulties of cleaning it of seeds and debris,

even by slave labor, made it utterly unprofitable to grow. The cotton gin Whitney

invented during his brief stay at Mulberry Grove changed that.66

64 Apportionment by State (United States Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives, http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/house_history/congApp/bystate.html (accessed April 17, 2011)

65 George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, America, a Narrative History, 445

66 Ibid, 445-447.

43

By 1800 American cotton production was up to thirty-five million pounds annually and represented seven percent of the nation’s export revenues. By the Census of

1810 cotton’s annual production reached eighty-five million pounds and twenty-two percent of exports. These phenomenal leaps in production produced equally phenomenal leaps in wealth for cotton’s big planters. Mills in Britain and France were rapidly switching over to producing cotton thread and cloth, demanding more raw cotton each year. In addition dozens of new mills were going into business in New England, further increasing demand. With all the wilderness land yet to be cleared where cotton could be grown, Southerners in Congress had to reconsider whether they could afford to bar of the importation of additional slaves into the United States in 1808. Jefferson succeeded in convincing his fellow Southerners to follow through on the promise made twenty years before, if only to avoid giving New England another reason to secede.67

By 1819, with cotton production up to 160 million pounds annually, accounting

for thirty-two percent of export revenue, there truly was a North of free labor states with

105 seats in the House of Representatives and a South of slave labor states with but 81

seats. Southerners did not have to wait for the next year’s Census to realize that control

of the House of Representatives was all but lost to them.

To protect themselves from a tyranny of the majority in the House of

Representatives, Southerners sought a majority in the Senate. They began pushing hard

for the admission of Missouri as a slave state. Northern Congressmen were equally

adamant that the Southerners would not gain a majority in the Senate. If they did the

67 Thomas Jefferson, “The Sixth Annual Message to Congress, December 2, 1806,” The Thomas Jefferson Reader, 373.

44

Southerners would be able to block all legislation which they believed benefitted only

Northern industries and interests. The list included protective tariffs on imported

manufactured goods, funding for internal improvements such as the National Road and

canals to aid in settling the remainder of the Northwest Territory, homesteading acts

covering the rest of the Louisiana Purchase, and possible new territorial acquisitions

farther west.

Congressman Tallmadge of New York introduced a resolution which stipulated

Missouri could be admitted to the union with two conditions. First, no new slaves could

be introduced into the territory. Second, after Missouri’s admission to the union, children

born to any of the ten thousand slaves already in the state would be freed at age twenty-

five. The arguments in the House and Senate immediately reached a rancorous pitch not

seen since 1800. Once again the division of the nation by secession rose as an option.

However, unlike six years before, this time it was proposed by Southerners. 68

The Massachusetts delegation, whose constituents included mill owners and

textile workers whose livelihoods depended on low cost sources of raw cotton, as well as

ship owners whose vessels carried the crop to the mills of New England, Britain and

France, proposed a compromise. The state of Maine would be created out of territory

ceded by Massachusetts for the purpose of keeping the Senate in balance. Massachusetts’

allocation of seats in the House would be reduced from the twenty granted to the state by the 1810 Census, to thirteen after 1820’s Enumeration.69 Maine entered the House as a

68 Glover Moore, The Missouri Controversy, 1819-1821. 1953. Reprint (Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1967) www.senate.gov/vtour/mizoo.htm (accessed March 21, 2011).

45

free state with Massachusetts’ missing seven seats. Missouri entered the Union in 1821

as a slave state, without the Tallmadge limitations. Once two-fifths of the slave

population was deducted from the state’s total population of just over sixty thousand,

Missouri had but a single seat in the House of Representatives.70

This did nothing to redress to redress the growing imbalance in the House of

Representatives, but the bill crafted by Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C. Calhoun of

South Carolina did establish the precedent that for every free state admitted to the union there would have to be a slave state as well. The compromise also established a new national policy regulating slavery in new territories. Slavery could not be established in the Louisiana Territory above 36°30' N, except of course in the proposed state of

Missouri which used that latitude for its southern border. It was unclear if this geographic prohibition on slavery extended to the Pacific Ocean. However, the idea that the United States of America would eventually extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific had been an article of national faith since the return of the Lewis and Clark, long before the expression Manifest Destiny was coined in 1845 by New York columnist John

O’Sullivan.71

Andrew Jackson, Westerner, Indian fighter and hero of the War of 1812, was

denied the presidency in the election of 1824 by what he and his supporters deemed

69 Office of the Clerk of the House of Representatives: http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/house_history/congApp/bystate.html (accessed March 17, 2011). Twenty is the highest number of Congressional Representatives the state of Massachusetts has ever had.

70 Glover Moore, The Missouri Controversy, 1819-1821. 1953. Senator Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois presented the Missouri Compromise on February 17, 1820, in order to avoid potential voter resistance to the measure in Massachusetts. 71Thomas Jefferson, “The Sixth Annual Message to Congress, December 2, 1806,” The Thomas Jefferson Reader, 372. John O’Sullivan, Democratic Review, July-August, 1845 (Civics Online, 2008) http://www.civics-online.org/library/formatted/texts/manifest_destiny.html (accessed, March 7, 2011)

46

political chicanery in the House of Representatives, and outright treachery by Henry

Clay. But there was no doubt the man from Tennessee was going to beat Adams of

Massachusetts in the election of 1828. In joining the new National Republican Party

which had risen from the ashes of his father’s Federalist Party, President Adams was a

turncoat. In response, Jackson dropped the word “Republican” as now tainted from the

Democratic Party name. With a donkey as his symbol and a public persona which

appealed to voters south and west of Quincy Massachusetts, Jackson won in a landslide

in both the Electoral College and in the popular vote.

In 1830 the Census focused only on counting of the number of people living in

the United States. In the 1810 and 1820 Enumerations the government attempted to

gather economic information as well as its mandated population count. This slowed the

compilation process so much that the quest for economic information was scrapped for

the 1830 Census. With a total population of 12,858, 670 to count, an increase of over

3,200,000 from 1820, the U.S. Marshalls and their assistants still had plenty to do.72

Arguably Jackson’s most enduring legacy as president was to dispossess the

Native American tribes still residing east of the Mississippi River of their land. This

opened huge areas for settlement by white Americans in the existing states of the union.

However, the white Americans who settled the lands of the Creek and Cherokee south of

the Ohio were limited to those with the money to buy large tracts of land and bring in

gangs of slave labor to clear and work them. As a result there was no large influx of

white migrants into Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, or the Carolinas take up the land

72 U.S. Census of 1830- Population and Housing- Abstract of the returns of the Fifth Census, U.S. Census 1830, http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1830.html (accessed May 3,2011).

47

Native Americans were forced to abandon. In fact the reverse was true. With no affordable land available in their home states, during the next two decades over 200,000 white Southerners became the vanguards of America’s westward movement. Once again they followed the lead of Daniel Boone into Missouri taking their slaves with them.

Many quickly moved on to the new Republic of Mexico’s Territory of Texas. The

Census of 1830 reflects the immediate effect of this exodus of Southern whites; slaves now accounted for fifty-four percent of South Carolina’s population of 581,185.73

While the white population of the Southeast was declining, cotton production doubled between 1820 and 1830 to 331,000,000 pounds a year, representing forty-one percent of the nation’s export revenues. Nearly all of this cotton was now carried to

Southern ports on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts by steamboats, which swiftly returned the wealth the fiber generated upriver in the form of luxury goods, usually manufactured in

Europe. Steam driven riverboats began regular operations between Pittsburgh,

Pennsylvania and New Orleans, Louisiana in 1811. By 1834 there were 234 paddle wheelers on the Mississippi and several hundred more on the Ohio.

By a quirk of geography, the Ohio River has few navigable tributaries into the interior on its northern bank. By contrast the southern bank includes the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers which form the Ohio’s headwaters in Pittsburgh, and the Kentucky,

Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers in Kentucky. This made shipping costs for

Southerners to and from New England, or Europe via New Orleans as much as a hundred times cheaper than shipping rates for the same imports and exports overland. To insure their viability in the U.S. domestic market, Northern manufacturing interests were intent

73 U.S. Census of 1830- Population and Housing- Abstract of the returns of the Fifth Census.

48 on instituting protective tariffs and spending the funds generated on internal improvements like the National Road from Maryland to Indiana, and the extensive canal systems of Ohio connecting Lake Erie to the Ohio River by four separate canals crossing the state from north to south. This system also connected New York City via the Hudson and the Erie Canal to the farthest reaches of the Great Lakes and the new town of

Chicago as well.74

Southern plantation owners despised these protective tariffs which increased the costs of all the finer things of life they bought from Europe, as well as the simple woolen cloth which they used to clothe slaves. They also tended to block the federal government from spending money on internal improvements such as roads, canals, and the new railroads which for the most part were not essential to the economic development of southern states. The Nullification Crisis of 1832 arose because in 1828, at the conclusion of the Adams administration, 105 of the 199 Congressmen present in the House voted in favor of the highest tariff rates ever imposed on imported manufactured goods. Cries against “the tyranny of the majority” rang through the halls of Congress, mostly from the congressional delegations of South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Of their fifty-three Representatives in the House only three voted in favor of the bill tagged the “Tariff of Abominations.”75

74 Ohio and Erie Canal, Ohio History Central, July 1, 2005, http://www. Ohiohistroycentral.org/entry.php?rec=778 (accessed May 3, 2011).

75 Henry Bamford Parkes, The United States of America-A History, 244-246.

49

Ironically, what would turn into open defiance of federal authority was led by

incoming President Jackson’s vice president, John C. Calhoun. To insure no protective

tariff bill of any kind was passed in 1828, Senator Calhoun of South Carolina prevailed

upon his Democratic colleagues in the House Ways and Means Committee to pack the

new tariff bill with such high tax rates on imported goods, the powerful maritime

interests of New England and the Mid-Atlantic states would force their representatives in the House to vote against it. The bill narrowly passed in both the House and the Senate, with its heaviest support coming from the congressional representatives of the people living in the Ohio River Valley.

In December South Carolina’s legislature adopted Calhoun’s Exposition and

Protest in which he declared that it was a state’s sovereign right to nullify any act of

Congress that was not in the state’s best interest. South Carolina’s nullification did not take immediate effect. With Calhoun taking office as Vice President of the United States the following March, and likely to be Jackson’s future successor, they adopted a wait and see attitude. Relations between Jackson and Calhoun quickly soured. By the time the tariff bill of 1832 passed in July, Jackson had replaced Calhoun with Martin Van Buren

as his running mate for the election the following November.

While the tariff of 1832 did lower the tariff rates of 1828, it did not lower them

enough to satisfy the South Carolinians. The state’s nullificationists called a convention

expressly for the purpose of declaring that the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were not binding

on the officials and citizens of South Carolina. President Jackson responded that

nullification was secession and therefore treason by another name. Calhoun resigned

50

from the vice presidency to continue the fight from South Carolina. Ultimately the tariffs

were significantly reduced, at Jackson’s request under a program designed by his

personal nemesis Henry Clay, allowing South Carolina and Calhoun a face saving way

out of the crisis. But this was not before Congress passed a bill which authorized Jackson

to use military force to make South Carolina submit to the authority of the national

government, which itself rested solely on the will of the majority.76

One of the central worries expressed by Southerners in the nullification debates was the fear that the new majority could abolish slavery just as easily as they had imposed the outlandish and unfair Tariff Bill of 1828.77 The vote on the tariff reflected

that the direction of the cultural and political division of the nation was changing. The

triumph of the West over the East embodied by Jackson’s elevation to the presidency was

based entirely on the westward shift of America’s population recorded in each successive

Census up to 1830. The new sectionalism evidenced by the seemingly schizophrenic

voting pattern of the Tariff of 1828 was the first actual cultural clash between the low

population slave states and high population free states. Unlike the Missouri Compromise

eight years earlier, which was primarily a heated ideological debate, the Nullification

Crisis was about dollars and cents. The way Southerners saw it, the Tariff of

Abominations proposed to take money out of their pockets and put it into the pockets of

Northerners. The slim majority by which the bill became law and the lengths the

president went to enforce it brought to light how vulnerable the South’s greatest

76 Frederick Jackson Turner, Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1906), 314-332.

77 Alexander Johnston, American Political History, 183-185.

51 economic asset, slavery, was to the will of the majority above the Ohio River. It also completely polarized major issues, which on the surface had nothing to do with slavery, into a Southern position or a Northern position. Prior to the Nullification Crisis, partisans for the national bank, internal improvements and protective tariffs could be found north and south of the Mason Dixon Line. Calhoun himself was the foremost example. He and

Henry Clay had been political allies since 1811. Both avidly supported what became known as Clay’s American System to bind the country together. Through the 1820s,

Calhoun’s support of this nationalist agenda faded in favor of the point of view of his most influential constituents who hated tariffs, needed easy credit to expand their holdings, and had their own dock for the riverboats which took each successive year’s record harvest to the world’s markets.78

While none of the events in Jackson’s two terms, other than the Presidency itself, were directly triggered by the shifts and increases in population revealed in the

Enumeration of 1830, one non-event was. Jackson and his successors, Martin Van

Buren, William Henry Harrison, and John Tyler were unable to admit the Republic of

Texas into the Union as a slave state.79 Just as Texas was applying for admission by annexation, Arkansas joined the Union as a Slave State in June of 1836 and was balanced by the admission of Michigan six months later. But none of the other territories above the 36°30´ N Parallel were growing fast enough to provide a Free State to maintain the political equilibrium needed in the Senate under the Missouri Compromise.80

78 Alexander Johnston, American Political History, 179.

79 Ibid, 189. Having died as a result of contracting pneumonia making his inaugural address, Harrison had no opportunity to consider the question.

52

80Henry Bamford Parkes, The United States of America-A History, 307.

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Chapter 4

Mister Clay Compromises, Mister Polk Conquers

The sixth Census of the United States records that as of June 1, 1840, the resident

population of the United States was 17,069,453. This was an increase of 32.7 percent

over the 12,866,020 persons enumerated in 1830. To those who had weathered the

political chaos earlier decennial Enumerations set in motion, the numbers were terrifying.

The Census would once again give political power to the poor and unread masses

teeming on the western frontier, thereby taking it away from people who had served the

republic since its founding days. Though the numbers meant Congressional seats would

be given some of the older states, particularly those with rising cities, the geographic size

of Congressional districts were shrinking. What was worse, there was absolutely nothing

that could be done about it. Under the original formula for representation in Article I,

Section 2 of the Constitution, the reapportioned House of Representatives meeting in

December of 1842 would have 517 members, including 33 for three-fifths of the

Southern states’ 2,487,355 slaves.

After viewing the year’s raw census data, Senator Henry Clay, all so known as

The Great Compromiser, introduced a bill which limited membership in the U.S. House

54

of Representatives to 235, and reset the number of inhabitants each Congressman

represented upwards to a base of eighty thousand people.81

As a former Speaker of the House, Clay knew how unruly the Lower House could

be. He feared that doubling the size would make it impossible, even for a man of his

skills to manage as he had in the political chaos generated by the 1810, 1820 and 1830

Enumerations. Very little has been written about this precedent-setting change in

America’s government, other than Clay’s involvement in the process as cited in the

Garfield Commission’s Report to Congress on the Census in 1870.82 Apparently it was an easy sell. Though the higher base-population per congressional district cost seventeen congressmen their seats, it permitted the rest to continue serving the same geographic area they had previously, despite the far higher population densities in most districts revealed by the Census of 1840. Under the original formula the physical size of many of these congressional districts would have been cut in half. As a result of the bill’s swift

81 The resident population of the United States on April 1, 2010, was 308,745,538 an increase of 9.7 percent over the 281,421,906 counted during the 2000 Census. Using the original formula the reapportioned U.S. House of Representatives would have 10,292 seats in 2012. With the current limit on House membership set at 435, today each U.S. Representative serves nearly 710,000 people. This would not have sat well with the lawyers who drafted the Constitution of the United States of America. They were intent that the political power wielded by individual members of the House of Representatives would be as limited and as close to identical as possible. To achieve that end, each member would represent the interests of the 30,000 to 59,000 people in his home district. Districts which each decade’s census revealed had grown to 60,000 or more inhabitants would be reapportioned. In this way it was hoped that the diverging interests of each state’s city dwellers and rural inhabitants would be balanced. In the upper house, the divergent interests of the various states, particularly those with a minority of the population, would be safeguarded by each state having two senators. Thus it was by design that the United States of America would be a nation governed by compromise.

82 Carrol D. Wright and William C. Hunt, The History and Growth of the United States Census, (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1900), 50.

55

passage, for the first time since 1789, the number of seats in the House of Representatives

dropped, from the 240 mandated by the Census of 1830, to 223 in 1842’s

reapportionment. The limitation to 235 seats also meant that for every new state added to

the union, states already admitted would have to give up seats based on a straight

comparison of respective populations. The net effect was to increase the political power

of each sitting member of the House of Representatives in 1842, while assuring that all

future conflicts of interest would most likely be decided at the expense of those states

with the lowest populations. This had serious repercussions in the decade immediately

ahead.

The good news the Census delivered to Southerners was that the pro-slave territory of Florida and the Republic of Texas would at last be admitted to the union. The territories of Iowa and Wisconsin, the last territory regulated by the Northwest Ordinance of 1789, would soon have populations sufficient to apply for statehood.83

The issue of slavery, which had previously cropped up in connection with states

being admitted to the union, or as secondary to other issues, became the focal point of

American politics. In the wake of the congressional reapportionment of 1842, the issue

of the annexation of Texas led by Tyler’s Secretary of State, John C. Calhoun was

soundly defeated in 1843. Northern opposition in Congress held that the Republic’s

83 Henry Bamford Parkes, The United States of America-A History, 311-315. U.S. Census of 1840- Population and Housing- Abstract of the returns of the Sixth Census, U.S. Census Bureau, 2010, http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1840.html (accessed May 9, 2011);

56

admission to the union was solely to bolster what they began to call “Slave Power” in the

government.

In 1844, the two leading candidates for President, Henry Clay of the Whigs and

Martin Van Buren of the Democrats rejected the idea of admitting Texas, as it was surely

the road to civil war. Both did this before the nominating conventions of either party

took place. The Whigs had no difficulty supporting Henry Clay’s stand. Jackson and

the southern wing of the Democratic Party dropped Van Buren immediately. After nine

ballots the Democratic Party picked a highly successful Tennessee planter and politician,

James K. Polk.

Polk’s agenda was pure expansionist. Texas would be admitted to the Union and

the border with British Canada would be “Fifty-Four, Forty or Fight!” This gave

Americans north and south of the Missouri Compromise Line reason to prefer the

Democrats’ “dark horse” candidate to one of the most renowned Americans of the time.

Clay again lost the presidency by a slim margin in the popular vote. However, voting

170 to 105, the Electoral College was firmly behind the candidate of Manifest Destiny.84

Virginian John Tyler was so emboldened by the election results he was

determined, as his presidential legacy, to get the Florida Territory and the Republic of

Texas admitted to the Union as slave states before Polk took office. With the Census

results promising the admission of Iowa was close at hand, Florida was admitted to the

Union on March 3, 1845. Using the Census data to predict Wisconsin would meet the

84 George Brown and David E. Shi, America: A Narrative History, 555.

57

60,000 residents requirement for admission in 1848, Tyler was also able to secure by a joint resolution of Congress, the admission of Texas the following December.

With half his pre-election agenda accomplished by his inauguration, Polk turned immediately to settling the border question with Britain in the jointly occupied Oregon

Country, and obtaining the rest of New Mexico and California from Mexico to achieve what he and most Americans believed were the nation’s rightful boundaries. Americans had been following the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails out of Missouri for over two decades.

In all three sparsely populated regions they were growing into majorities. Like Texans, they too wanted to be under the American flag. What their glowing reports of the fertility of these distant American outposts brought to light was just how finite good farmland was west of the Missouri River, particularly land suitable for plantation agriculture.

Desert predominated for a thousand miles, replaced by high mountains, more desert and more high mountains all the way to within a hundred miles of the Pacific Coast. If previous American settlement patterns held, Southerners with their slaves could sweep across the western half of the continent, scooping up large tracts and end up with all the land worth having.85 After Polk induced Congress to declare war on Mexico,

Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot introduced a bill which proposed that all new

85 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis-Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), 148-206. In his chapter entitled “The Wealth of Nature: Lumber”, Cronon points out that the movement west from New England to the Pacific Ocean was preceded and then supported in large part by the lumber business which devastated the virgin old growth forests of the entire continent. Nowhere does he indicate that the jobs of lumber jacks and millworkers could not have been done just as effectively by slaves if the labor practice had not been barred north of the Ohio River. Prior to the Civil War, slaves worked in deep forests as lumber jacks and mill hands. They worked in mines and in iron and steel foundries as well as agriculture and dozens of other semi and skilled trades. The bar to slavery in the north was largely in the minds of white northern and southern businessmen.

58

territories added as a result of that war would be forever slave free. In this moment the

Free Soil movement was born.86

The Free Soil movement, like the Progressive movement sixty years later, was not

the product of a political party though its simple ideology was espoused by the Liberty

Party, the Whigs, and the Democrats alike. Unlike Abolitionism which never gained

much traction with most Americans, Free Soil was about making sure the remaining high quality virgin farmland in the nation did not end up in the hands of the few who already owned most of the land in the fifteen Slave States. One could with a clear conscience

vehemently oppose the extension of slavery, without having to accept a single one of

William Lloyd Garrison’s ideas of emancipation and social equality for blacks. In fact

leaving the institution intact in the states where it already existed made it exclusively a

problem for the Slave States to deal with. Many an advocate of Free Soil’s policy of

barring slavery from the new territories being opened in the West also voted for Black

Codes in their local districts barring Blacks from entering their townships, whether they

were free men and women, or runaway slaves.

Not for the first and certainly not for the last time, politicians in both major parties

were relatively slow to pick up on what the majority of the national electorate was telling

them via the ballot box. Young Abraham Lincoln, in his single two-year term in the

national government before becoming president, whole heartedly supported the Wilmot

Proviso claiming to have voted for it in the House “as good as forty times.”87 This was

extremely popular with his constituents in southern Illinois. At the same time, in his

86 George Brown and David E. Shi, America: A Narrative History, 612. 87 Ibid, 612.

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“show me the spot” campaign the freshman Whig Congressman vehemently denounced

as immoral and unconstitutional the war that was securing that territory. There was a

reason Lincoln was not returned to office by the voters and it is hard to credit it to the idea put forward by a number of his biographers that it was “not his turn.”88

Nationally known figures such as former President Martin Van Buren were no better at correctly gauging the mindset of the slaveless majority. Professional politicians opposing slavery in the Democratic Party and National Republican (Whigs) Party latched on to Free Soil and the Wilmot Proviso as the foundation for the new Liberty Party for the elections of 1848, with Van Buren as their candidate for president. In doing so they encumbered the simple Free Soil doctrine which had such broad and instantaneous appeal to voters with their abolitionist-tainted rhetoric. Most voters turned to Democratic candidates who shared their lust for open land and seemed to be able to get it. Whether they supported the Wilmot Proviso would be unimportant if there was no new territory to be had.

Just as opposition to the Louisiana Purchase and the War of 1812 led to the extinction of the Federalist Party, opposition to the Mexican War, which added five hundred thousand square miles to the United States, killed the Whigs in the eyes of the majority of the voters north and south of the Ohio. For the next decade, while the new

88 Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals; The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Goodwin delves most deeply into this matter and still the argument is unconvincing.

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northern-based Republican Party coalesced out the most unlikely of political bedfellows, the United States was ruled by a Democratic Party deeply divided on the issue of slavery.

Throughout the 1840s, the farther south of the Ohio River one traveled, the more

the publicly the sentiment for secession was expressed. From the nation’s founding, cries

for secession and the formation of a new national government were heard every time the

people in one region of the country felt their “inalienable rights” were no longer being

protected. The Census mandated that control of the government be passed to outsiders

and newcomers. As a result, the national union was no longer recognizable as the

government for which they or their parents or their grandparents voted. The only

solution was to dissolve the union and create a new smaller nation out of a region with

like interests which would protect those ancient rights. By the mid-1840s, this drastic

remedy for a future tyranny of the majority was discussed so frequently by the South’s

leaders it was not considered the least bit radical.89 In writing to constituent Charles

Searle in 1847 regarding the incessant reintroduction of the Wilmot Proviso in the House

of Representatives, Jefferson Davis’ statement on secession is almost cavalier:

The position recently assumed in a majority of the non-slave holding states has led me to fear that it might become necessary to unite as southern men, and to dissolve the ties which have connected us to the northern Democracy.90

89 Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Volume 1(New York: Da Capo Press, 1991) 65-67.

90 Jefferson Davis, The Papers of Jefferson Davis, Volume 3, 225-26, Transcribed from the Vicksburg Weekly Sentinel, October 6, 1847.University of Michigan, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/ACP3590.0001.001 (accessed May 16, 2009).

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A year and a half later, on May 7, 1849, in a speech delivered in Jackson, Mississippi,

Davis returned to this theme. In an interesting example of mid-nineteenth century journalistic convention, a local paper covered the speech using the third person:

He was gratified to observe the vigilance and unanimity of the people as displayed in this assemblage, upon a question that involved both the feelings and interests of the whole community. He had not come here so much to express his own indignation at the wanton aggression of the North, as to receive fresh instruction at the hands of the people.

There had been a war of seventeen years standing against the institutions of the South, a war whose weapons were both wounding and insulting. An opinion had been formed, authorized by our long supineness on this subject that we have no sufficient feeling to perceive or to resent the attacks made upon us.

Men of another section are loud in their advice that there is no danger--that action now would be hazardous or useless, and that the generosity and philanthropy of the North will always prove a sufficient safeguard to Southern rights; but such advice is the lulling of the vampire fawning the victim which he will destroy. Every compromise has been to our loss, as witness that of the North-western territory and that of Missouri. We have yielded thus far and the results have been that upon our tame submission is now based the demand that we yield the remainder. The equality left by our fathers is to be destroyed. Give to the North what is now demanded, and soon we shall find a preponderance of three-fourths against us; the constitution of the United States will be changed and all that is now promised to the South will be forgotten.

Submit to the loss of this territory, and we shall have next to submit to the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and soon the constitution will be changed and slavery abolished.91

91 Jefferson Davis, The Papers of Jefferson Davis, Volume 4, 19-21, Transcribed from the Vicksburg Tri-Weekly Whig, May 10, 1849.

62

The rhetoric of the opposing sides had a new dimension. The Jackson,

Mississippi address was fairly typical of the time. Davis decried “the North’s wanton aggression” in “a war of seventeen years” duration against the people of the South.

Every sentence plunged deeper into sanguinary illusions as to the inhumanity of the

Northern enemies of all that Southerners hold sacred. This constant reference to bloodshed infused the language of both sides of the slavery issue and would continue to do so in ever increasing volume and vehemence until South Carolina seceded in

December, 1860.92

Davis is certainly not alone in characterizing his opposition as “vampires” feeding off the blood of others who must at all costs be stopped, even if it means a catastrophic civil war. In fact it is almost as if no peaceful division of the nation could be conceived by America’s political leaders, whether they hailed from above or below the Ohio River.

Fourteen of the states wanted out of the Union if the popular majority would not guarantee to continue the special advantage slavery gave the privileged minority in claiming and clearing new land. No consideration was given to the seventy-five percent of the free Southern population who had no financial interest in slavery and, if given a chance, might oppose it. Majority rule had long been moot below the Ohio. Davis ended this telling speech with the planter politician’s greatest fear:

The equality left by our fathers is to be destroyed. Give to the North

92 James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992) 40.

63

what is now demanded, and soon we shall find a preponderance of three- fourths against us; the constitution of the United States will be changed and all that is now promised to the South will be forgotten.93

Then the unexpected happened. On a river in California, where Americans under the leadership of Captain John C. Fremont were already demanding entrance into the

Union as a free state, the discovery of gold triggered the greatest single migration of have-nots in human history. When Davis was speaking in Vicksburg an estimated thirty thousand people, mostly single young men, had just departed for the gold fields on foot, or horseback from Independence, Saint Joseph and Council Bluffs. Thousands more took ships from the Gulf and Atlantic ports, sailing around the Cape Horn to San Francisco.

These Americans were joined by an additional thirty thousand souls from around the globe. It was a population that arrived in California just in time to be counted in the

Census of 1850.

93 Jefferson Davis, The Papers of Jefferson Davis, Volume 4May 10, 1849.

.

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Chapter 5 Cotton is King

The Census of 1850 counted 23,191,876 people as living in the United States of

America and its newly expanded territories. However, where previous enumerations began with a concise summary of the vital data for reapportioning the House of

Representatives and the Electoral College, the format of the Census of 1850 buried the number of free persons and the number of enslaved persons under page after page of charts which only occasionally mix relevant information with data that is unnecessary to the function of the government. The statistics gleaned from the U.S. Marshals’ reports

65

on each person living in the United States and its territories are grouped by state, white or

colored, age, sex, rural, urban, region, occupation, political affiliations, voting patterns,

and percentage of the total population each of these segments represents in comparison to

each other. It is difficult to discern if the cause of the impedimenta camouflaging the

enumeration’s constitutional purpose is merely federal statisticians run amuck, or an

attempt to hide the truth the Census of 1850 revealed. In either case it was not good news

for the planter aristocracy of the slave states. 94

More than thirteen million Whites lived in free states. Little more than six million lived in the slave states. This tidbit of information is merely a footnote on page sixty under a chart listing the number, age and sex of “Insane and Idiotic White People.”

From this point the Census presents pages of charts parsing the “Colored Population,” with one important additional category. On page 82 the number of slaves in the United

States as of August 15, 1850 is revealed to be 3,204,313.

Most of the information reported in the Seventh Census was well known to

Washington’s political office-holders long before the U.S. Marshals began making their

data collection rounds in January of 1850. On March 4, of that year, too ill to deliver the

speech himself, the leader of the Southern cause, John C. Calhoun watched Virginia

Senator James M. Mason read his final address to Congress. The subject was disunion.

But rather than being a moral or economic justification of slavery, or a rail against radical

abolitionists, the speech concentrates on the Census and its interaction with the

Northwest Ordinance as the primary cause of the division of the nation.

94 U.S. Census of Population and Housing-1850, Statistical view of the United States, embracing its territory, population—white, free colored, and slave—moral and social condition, industry, property, and revenue (U.S. Census- 1850, accessed May 11, 2010); available from http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1850.html.

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Calhoun insisted:

If they had not existed--if the South had retained all the capital which has been extracted from her by the fiscal action of the government; and if it had not been excluded by the Ordinance of 1787 and the Missouri Compromise, from the region lying between the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers, and between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains north of 36°30' N --it scarcely admits of a doubt that it would have divided the immigration with the North, and by retaining her own people would have at least equaled the North in population under the census of 1840, and probably under that about to be taken.95

Calhoun's address was billed as a rebuttal to a series of measures introduced by

Henry Clay to settle all of the questions which had arisen out of the massive territorial

expansion of the nation during the four years of the Polk Administration. The first of

these measures was the admission of California to the union as a free state. However, as

Calhoun made evident with simple arithmetic, once California was admitted to the Union

none of the other concessions to slave owners much mattered:

The Census is to be taken this year, which must add greatly to the decided preponderance of the North in the House of Representatives and in the Electoral College. The prospect is, also, that a great increase will be added to its present preponderance in the Senate, during the period of the decade, by the addition of new States. Two Territories, Oregon and Minnesota, are already in progress, and strenuous efforts are making to bring in three additional States from the Territory recently conquered from Mexico; which, if successful, will add three other States in a short time to the Northern section, making five States, and increasing the present number of its States from fifteen to twenty, and of its senators from thirty to forty.

95 John C. Calhoun, The Clay Compromise Measures, Speech before Congress March 4, 1850, The National Center, http://www.nationalcenter.org/CalhounClayCompromise.html (accessed April 15, 2011).

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There is not a single Territory in progress in the Southern section, and no certainty that any additional State will be added to it during the decade. This great increase of senators, added to the great increase of members of the House of Representatives and the Electoral College on the part of the North, which must take place under the next decade, will effectually and irretrievably destroy the equilibrium which existed when the government commenced.96

With scarcely a mention of California or slavery in the entire address, Calhoun

made the fear Davis voiced the year before in Jackson, Mississippi, palpable for every

Southerner in his audience. As soon as three-fourths of the congressmen and senators represented free states, the Constitution would be changed and slavery abolished. The only acceptable option for Southerners was to dissolve the union and let the two sections go their separate ways, peacefully if possible.

The immediate effect of Calhoun's address was the resounding defeat of Clay's compromise. But the address was not meant to be a temporary restraining order.

Calhoun meant it to be the South’s Declaration of Independence. His death four weeks later is the primary reason it was not. Without his unifying leadership and clear perception of the immediate future, too few of the slave states’ representatives were prepared to give up on a government which Southerners, at least for the time being,

continued to dominate.

Clay's omnibus bill was broken up into a series of separate bills sheparded

through a contentious Congress by Stephen Douglas. The Compromise of 1850, though

allegedly structured to placate the slave-owning planter elite, gave Southerners little in

96 Ibid.

68 the way of compensation for passing the first bill, allowing the admission of California and permanently losing control of the federal government.

The second bill of the Compromise settled the Texas boundary and assumed all of the State’s debts in connection with achieving independence from Mexico and subsequent annexation by the United States. But returning the Texas treasury to a positive cash flow did little for any other state.

The third bill granted New Mexico the status of U.S. Territory. More importantly it set the stage for repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The people in the Territory of

New Mexico, which today also encompasses all or parts of Arizona, Nevada, Utah and

Colorado, were to determine for themselves whether the states carved from the region would be slave or free. No reference to Missouri’s southern boundary, Latitude 36°30' N was made in the bill, though clearly much of the territory was in some measure above it.

But as Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky said in 1846, “the right to carry slaves to

New Mexico or California is no very great matter. No sensible man would carry his slaves there if he could.”97 Thus all but the most ardent Abolitionist or Free Soiler could justify compromising on the issue since there was no likelihood the majority of settlers would chose to live in a slave state. Even so the New Mexico Territory Bill did establish the precedent all future territories would be open to slavery by the will of the majority people who lived there. A gentlemen’s agreement to gain the bill’s passage also put a stop to the constant reintroduction of the Wilmot Proviso in the House of

Representatives.

Under the fourth bill, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 was significantly strengthened, and for the first time federally enforced. But the Census Record of

97 James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 85.

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Manumitted and Fugitive Slaves for 1850 indicate that the problem of 1,011 runaway

slaves out of 3,200,000 was not nearly as grave as it was portrayed in the media of the

day. In fact in 1850 four hundred more slaves were given their freedom throughout the

South than took the Underground Railroad to achieve it. The Fugitive Slave Act was the

single most effective tool available to those actively seeking the dissolution of the union.

No other act in the Compromise of 1850 so enraged abolitionists in the North, or

highlighted the South’s helplessness against a rapidly growing slaveless majority.

The final bill of the compromise halted the slave trade in Washington D.C., though slavery itself was not prohibited.98 This was intended to mollify the hard line

abolitionists in the Northeast, since slavery was no longer banned from territories where

it was financially unviable. Most certainly the fifth bill of the compromise was a very

public slam at the hypocrisy of allowing the institution of slavery to exist in the capital of

the nation founded on the principle that all men are created equal.

That Southerners would accept the Compromise of 1850 in any fashion after

Calhoun’s speech is quite remarkable. They may have been heeding the old War Hawk’s

parting advice on how to successfully part the nation:

It is a great mistake to suppose that disunion can be affected by a single blow. The cords which bind these States together in one common Union are far too numerous and powerful for that. Disunion must be the work of time. It is only through a long process, and successively, that the cords can be snapped until the whole fabric falls asunder. Already the agitation of the slavery question has snapped some of the most important, and has greatly weakened all the others. If the agitation goes on, the same force, acting with increased intensity, as has been shown, will finally snap every cord, when nothing will be left to hold the States together except force.

98 Sterling Stuckey and Linda Kerrigan Salvucci, Call to Freedom, 456-462.

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But surely that can with no propriety of language be called a Union when the only means by which the weaker is held connected with the stronger portion is force. It may, indeed, keep them connected; but the connection will partake much more of the character of subjugation on the part of the weaker to the stronger than the union of free, independent, and sovereign States in one confederation, as they stood in the early stages of the government, and which only is worthy of the sacred name of Union.99

As his last act in public life Calhoun carefully set the stage for a peaceful disunion. His experiences in the War of 1812 and the Mexican War were proof positive that even victorious wars never achieve all their proponents think they will. Canada was still British and Mexico south of the Rio Grande to the Isthmus of Panama was not among the territorial gains of the Polk Administration. The formation of an independent union of Southern states was imperative. But above all else the secession of the slave states from the union must not result in civil insurrection by slaves, or slaveless whites.

Achieving such an internally peaceful dissolution in each state and the creation of a new confederation of all the slave states would take time, careful planning and patience.

Acquiescing to the Compromise of 1850, with suitable resistance, would give those who were ready for secession like Davis, Toombs, and Calhoun’s successor to the U.S.

Senate, James Hammond time to plan and prepare for the eventuality. The now unstoppable free state majority in Congress could be counted on to thwart the slave- holders’ every initiative to gain new land, trample on their Constitutional rights, and even renege on their promises of equal access to the newly acquired but nearly worthless western territories. Those who did not yet see the need for Southern independence would soon be convinced of its necessity by the tyranny of the majority.

99 John C. Calhoun, The Clay Compromise Measures, Speech before Congress March 4, 1850.

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The Census of 1850 was finally delivered in its entirety to Secretary of the

Interior McClelland November 10, 1853. As Superintendent of the United States Census,

J.D.B. DeBow noted in his introductory letter, it was just in time for the opening of the

new Congress in December. The compilation had been delayed by a number of

complicating factors, including the retaking of the California Census in 1852, done to

quell complaints from Jefferson Davis and other Southerners in the House and Senate

that the Bear Flag Republic did not meet population requirements for admission to the

union. DeBow also reported that of the $51,000 dollars left of the appropriation for the

Census when he took office, $23,000 remained. This DeBow reckoned to be sufficient to

publish the statistics of mortality and manufacturing gathered, if the new congress elected

to do so.100

DeBow was an interesting choice for Superintendent of the Census. He came to

the job at the beginning of 1853 to straighten out the confused enumeration process and

insure the counts were as accurate as possible. No better choice could have been made if

the politicians of the Deep South were indeed working on Calhoun’s “long process” of

secession. He was best known as the publisher of the influential journal of Southern

economics, DeBow’s Review, Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial Progress and

Resources. In 1848, he wrote an article on the danger to Southern interests of the coming

Census and the addition of even one new free state created out of the Mexican cession. It

is likely that the foundation of Calhoun’s final speech came from this widely-circulated editorial by the noted economist and statistician. From the time he began publishing his

100 U.S. Census of Population and Housing-1850, Report of the Superintendent of the Census for December 1, 1852; to which is appended the report for December 1, 1851, U.S. Census -1850, http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1850.html (accessed May 9, 2011).

72

Review in 1846, he was a consistent champion of the urgent need to diversify the

Southern economy in order to break its “colonial dependence on the North for

manufactured goods.” The boom in Southern railroad building during the 1850s and the

founding of the steel and iron manufacturing city of Birmingham, Alabama as the first

industrial city of the New South immediately after the Civil War can both be traced

directly to his influence. 101

The Census DeBow delivered in 1853 revealed the rapidly changing nature of

America’s social fabric. Blacks in South Carolina, nine thousand of whom were free,

account for fifty-nine percent of the state’s total population of 1,002,717. Blacks also

accounted for nearly half or more of the populations of Alabama, Florida, Georgia,

Louisiana, and Mississippi. These were six of the seven states which formed the

Confederate States of America between December, 1860 and February, 1861. In the

other slave states, Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Tennessee, Texas and

Missouri, black residents composed respectively from thirty-eight percent to fourteen

percent of the population totals. Surprisingly, of the 436,200 free blacks in the United

States, 238,300 lived in the slave states. The irony goes deeper than the numbers suggest.

Most of the nation’s free blacks were urbanites who generally engaged in

domestic service or unskilled labor in the North, and in skilled tradecrafts in free market

competition with whites in the South. With fifty thousand free blacks living in New York

City, the number was sufficiently high to cause working-class whites, who resented the competition for jobs and housing, to support politicians who favored, or at least did not

101DeBow's Journals, University of Michigan, Making of America on-line collection, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moajrnl/browse.journals/debo.html (accessed April 5, 2011).

73

oppose the continuance of African slavery in the South.102 In the South’s urban centers

like New Orleans, Charleston and Richmond, upper class whites relied heavily on the

free black craftsmen, artisans and seamstresses in their communities for the bulk of their

personal and household needs. These close interracial relationships in the South’s

unsegregated antebellum society undermined the prevailing idea that African slavery was

ordained by God.103

The other change in the urban landscape reflected in the Census of 1850,

particularly in the cities of the North was the impact of the famine in Ireland and the

revolutions in Europe in 1848. In three years over a million Irish and German

immigrants landed in America, primarily in the northern ports of Boston, New York and

Philadelphia. Those who could afford to move west for land or a chance of instant riches

in the gold fields of California did so. Only a small percentile settled in the Slave States.

Most of those who did were Germans who traveled directly to Missouri via New Orleans

and Texas via Galveston to settle on land they had purchased sight unseen before sailing

from Europe.104 The greatest percentage of Irish immigrants and many Germans

remained in the Northern port cities where they overwhelmed the social resources,

housing and job markets. The influx of skilled craftsmen who were willing to work for

102 James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 158-160.

103 U.S. Census of Population and Housing-1850, [Compendium] Statistical view of the United States, embracing its territory, population—white, free colored, and slave—moral and social condition, industry, property, and revenuehttp://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1850.html. Henry Bamford Parkes, The United States of America-A History, 208.

104 Henry Bamford Parkes, The United States of America-A History, 336. Theresa G. Gold, German Immigration to Texas, Hostville.com., Texas History, available from http://hostville.com/hoelscher/gertex.htm (accessed May 15, 2011).

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lower wages than their native-born counter parts further increased the already tense labor

situation between blacks and whites. Many native-born whites in New York,

Philadelphia and Boston joined the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, anti-negro American

Party, more popularly called the Know-Nothings. These contentious groups clashed with

deadly results during the New York draft riot of 1863.105

In the spring of 1854, perennial presidential hopeful Stephen Douglas dumped

Popular Sovereignty into the boiling cauldron of conflicting social forces revealed in the

just-released Census of 1850. His Kansas-Nebraska Act voided the Missouri

Compromise line. The two Territories west of Iowa and Missouri above Latitude 36°30'

N could at last be settled. A vote by the free adult male residents would decide if the

territories would be admitted to the union as a slave or free states. It was assumed by

most people that the Nebraska Territory would be settled by free soil farmers. Kansas,

directly west of the slave state of Missouri was another matter.

In Kansas, popular sovereignty, the prime concession to Southerners in the

Compromise of 1850, became guerilla warfare and introduced the terms bushwhacker

and jayhawker to the American English language. Counting on their ability to “stuff the

ballot box” with pro-slavery votes coming across from Missouri and very nearly succeeding, the Southern Congressional bloc did not count on the fact that most of the people who were really moving west were not financially equipped to own slaves.

However, for far less than the cost of a single slave, they were equipped with John

Deere’s new steel-blade iron plow for turning over the heavy sod of the Great Plains.

With a team of mules a farmer could clear more land on the prairie grasslands of Kansas and Nebraska in a day than a dozen slaves could in the thick forests and swampy bottom

105 James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 158-160.

75 lands of the southeastern United States. McCormick’s mechanical reaper and Pitts &

Avery’s threshing machine drastically cut manpower requirements at harvest time too.

So those slave owners who actually moved into the Kansas Territory needed and held too few to ever benefit from the political clout the Three/Fifths clause had given the planter aristocracy in the Cotton States.106

Of course the failure of the North to acknowledge the legality of the pro-slavery

Lecompton Constitution played right into the hands of the secessionists in the South.

Even with the support of President Pierce and President Buchanan promising that Kansas would enter the union as a slave state, its admission alone was not going to return equilibrium to the Senate. The planter aristocracy looked elsewhere for territory that could support slave-labor based agriculture. Cuba, islands in the Caribbean, Southern

Mexico, Honduras and Columbia all became likely future slave states in the planters’ eyes. Some of these lands already had thriving slave-based plantation economies developed under their European masters. But the planters’ hopes for a Latin American expansion of the Republic were never to be realized. Filibustering expeditions like

Walker’s in Central America came to nothing. So did presidential efforts to buy

Europe’s remaining colonial holdings in the Western Hemisphere.107

As a result of Clay’s 1840 bill limiting the House of Representatives to 235 members, seats which the Census of 1850 mandated go to the populations flooding west were taken by in large from the Slave States. This new Free-State majority in the House and Senate was in no mood to finance a war to add more territory specifically for slave-

106 Alexander Johnston, American Political History, 28-29.

107 Henry Bamford Parkes, The United States of America-A History, 337.

76

owners, or appropriate funds to buy it when the half a million square miles already gained

had yet to be absorbed.108

Again Davis pointed out how prescient Calhoun had been:

All who know the different composition of the two houses of Congress, and that to ratify a treaty requires two-thirds of the Senate, whilst to enact a law requires but a majority of the two houses, will have no difficulty in perceiving how much the interest of a Southern State might suffer...109

In 1857, pro-slavery proponents received a huge boost from the Supreme Court of

the United States in a decision which ironically crushed all arguments of states’

supremacy or “Rights” in favor of the supremacy of the federal government. In the

infamous Dred Scott Case, the Court ruled that legal personal property remained legal

personal property no matter where in the United States, its territories, or possessions it

was located. More importantly, the full rights of ownership were not ended in state or

local jurisdictions where such property was banned or limited. And finally such bans or

limitations by the states were in fact unconstitutional and therefore void. Since Scott was

determined to be ineligible to bring the case before the court, the decision of Chief Justice

Taney was delivered obiter dictum. This meant that it did not judicially bind the states or

federal government immediately to overturn existing slavery laws and Black Codes. But

108 James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 93.

109 Jefferson Davis, The Papers of Jefferson Davis, Volume 4,138-46. Transcribed from the Jackson Mississippian, January 3,1851. The addressees were William Barksdale, James Blair, William H. D. Carrington, Beverly Matthews, and T. Sharp, University of Michigan On-Line Collection, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/ACP3590.0001.001 (accessed March, 2009).

77 the Supreme Court’s position was that should cases with proper standing come under their review, slavery could not be barred, or banned, or in any way limited anywhere that was under U.S. sovereignty. While the Dred Scott decision infuriated abolitionists, little celebration of the event occurred in the South. Undoubtedly this is due to the fact that the spread of slavery in the United States had not been limited by law, or even moral indignation, but by the impossibilities of geography, climate and most important of all, economics.110

Though the west proved to be a financial and political bust from the Southern elites’ perspective, the 1850s were extremely good to the planters themselves. Tariffs were lowered so much that by l858 they had returned to the levels of 1816. As America’s primary market for imported manufactured goods, this delighted the South's planters and their northern business partners, the shippers and bankers of New York and New

England, almost as much as the decade long boom in the international cotton market.

While the financial foundations of a truly industrial economy were finally being laid in the North, the plantation owners of the South invested almost exclusively in more slaves to bring more land under production to produce bigger yields. This was to meet the insatiable demands of foreign and domestic textile mills. New England’s mills bought about twenty-five percent of the South’s annual production of raw cotton. Mills in

Britain and France purchased around seventy percent.

This is not to say there was no industrial development in the southern states.

Five percent of the cotton stayed in the South to feed its new textile mills. Despite the

North’s far larger rail network, the South’s rail system was growing thirty-five percent faster. Since the lower tariff rates made buying British built locomotives cheaper, the

110 James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 52.

78

separate rail lines built in the 1850s connecting all of the South’s major cities were of the

same standard gauge as well. Nor did the South’s other new industries employing slave

labor, such as iron & steel manufacturing led by the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond,

lag irretrievably behind the North’s.111

However, the pace of Southern investment in Southern industries was slower than those preparing for Southern independence would have liked. This was due to the planters’ professed indifference to anything that did not directly increase cotton yields.

In his March 1858 editorial “We Must Diversify Our Industry,” DeBow proclaimed only economic folly could result from this too prevalent attitude. He demanded that the ruling planter class divert their investments to the south’s fledgling industries in order to end the

South’s ‘colonial dependence’ on the North. DeBow also pointed a mocking finger at

those Southerners who sought to protect themselves from foreseeable downturns in the

cotton market by making “safer investments” in more established northern industries.

They were virtually the only Southerners to suffer reversals of fortunes in the devastating

economic Panic of 1857.112

A month after Debow’s widely read editorial calling for Southern industrial

independence appeared, and eight years to the day after Calhoun’s final address, James

Hammond made his King Cotton speech to Congress. It was the very public

pronouncement that Calhoun’s “long process” to sever the cords of union and achieve

Southern independence was nearing completion. He began by referring to Seward’s

111James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom 91-96. . 112 J. D. B. DeBow, “We Must Diversify Our Industry”, DeBow’s Review, Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial Progress and Resources, Volume 24, Issue: 3, New Orleans, Mar 1858, University of Michigan, 2010, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/acg1336.1-24.003. (accessed May 9,2011).

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comments on the admission of Kansas as a slave state, which was a far more incendiary

version of the “irrepressible conflict” speech Seward delivered the following October:

After what the Senator from New York has said, I think it not improper that I should attempt to bring the North and South face to face, and see what resources each of us might have in the contingency of separate organizations.113

Hammond described the Southern nation’s size and assets and asked “Is not that territory enough to make an empire that shall rule the world?” He taunted Seward directly. “You talk of putting up a wall of fire around eight hundred and fifty thousand square miles so situated. How

absurd!” He then defined the combatants in this coming war of disunion the

North had brought on itself:

At any time, the South can raise, equip, and maintain in the field, a larger army than any Power of the earth can send against her, an army of soldiers, men brought up on horseback with guns in their hands. If we take the North, even when the two large States of Kansas and Minnesota shall be admitted, her territory will be one hundred thousand square miles less than ours. I do not speak of California and Oregon; there is no antagonism between the South and those countries, and never will be. The population of the North is fifty per cent greater than ours. I have nothing to say in disparagement either of the soil of the North, or the people of the North, who are a brave and energetic race, full of intellect. But they produce no great staple that the South does not produce; while we produce two or three, and these the very greatest, that she can never produce. As to her men, I may be allowed to say, they have never proved themselves to be superior to those of the South, either in the field or in the Senate.114

113 James Henry Hammond, On the Admission of Kansas, Under the Lecompton Constitution, Speech before the United States Senate March 4,1858, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=1722.

114 Ibid.

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The language is certainly martial. However, unlike the insulting and indelicate language used by Seward, Chase and Sumner to describe their Southern Congressional colleagues and their slave-holding constituents, Hammond presented a dispassionate recitation of the assets the South would bring to the coming conflict to counter the

North’s two to one advantage in population.

Then Hammond, as Calhoun had done eight years earlier, stressed the need for a peaceful dissolution of the Union. “Who would make war on the South?” he asked, asserting that even as two separate nations, the North making war on the South would be like making war on itself. Hammond made it clear that the two regions were in diametric opposition as to what was responsible for the nation’s strength and prosperity. While the

Northerners claimed it was based on the sovereign will of the majority of the people of the United States expressed through their apportioned representatives in Congress,

Southerners knew that cotton was king.115

Hammond’s speech was the clarion’s call to the tiny minority of the populations ruling all of the Slave States. The time had come to realize what they had, and what they would lose by remaining in the Union any longer than necessary to affect a peaceful dissolution. With his caustic references to the Census he broadly hinted that the inevitable separation would come before the decennial Census could reapportion the

Congress again to the South’s disadvantage.

At midyear, Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln met in a series of seven widely reported debates. Lincoln demonstrated that he had not yet learned that the Free Soiler’s vehement opposition to slavery in the open territories did not include opposition to

115 Ibid.

81

slavery where it existed, or the desire to see blacks receive even a modicum of the civil

liberties whites enjoyed. The closer Illinois voters lived to the Ohio River the more they

voted for Douglas, with his clever Popular Sovereignty plan to exclude slavery from the

territories with overwhelming numbers. The dust was at last settling on the blood spilled

in Kansas and its destiny as a free state was assured by the will of the ever increasing

Free Soil majority.116

Though Douglas won the Senatorial race in Illinois, he effectively destroyed his

power base in the Southern states. Southerners not only saw through his Popular

Sovereignty scheme, he broke with the Democratic Party and the President of the United

States over their support of the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution. After the outcome of the November elections, Lincoln went home to Springfield repair his finances and rethink his political strategy for the presidential race of 1860. 117

1859 brought a return to prosperity in the North and relative quiet in Kansas,

which was at last reorganizing its territorial government to enter the union as a free state.

In the South another bumper crop of cotton was being harvested and, except for a bit of

agitation regarding the murderer John Brown’s speaking tour in New England, talk of the

need to secede seemed to slip from the editorial pages of South’s influential newspapers.

In August, Lincoln came out of his self-imposed seclusion and delivered the first address

in his bid for the presidency in Nebraska Territory. As little noted as this speech was

116 Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals-The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005) 200-207.

117 Ibid, 208-210.

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outside Omaha, Lincoln at last demonstrated that he knew just what his Free Soil

audiences wanted to hear. His pledge was that slavery would be excluded in the

territories and homesteaders would soon have direct access to eastern markets via the

railroads.118

In mid-October, John Brown attempted to incite an armed insurrection of slaves

of gigantic proportions. The effort had been paid for by six of the most influential people

in the new Republican Party. To the relief of most of America’s citizens, Brown’s raid

on the Federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry was quickly dealt with by the federal government

and Brown was hanged for treason on December 2, 1859. Lincoln wisely waited until the

day Brown was hanged before offering any opinion on the matter. Through their prior

statements to the press, all of the front runners for the Republican presidential nomination

revealed themselves to be abolitionists in the eyes of many voters. To distance himself

from radical wing of the Republican Party, Lincoln was in Kansas when he declared “As

right as we think him to be” about slavery, was a Brown a traitor who deserved to be

hanged. He immediately warned Southerners, none of whom were in the audiences he

addressed during his whirlwind mid-winter tour of Northeastern Kansas, that the treason

of secession they were contemplating would be dealt with the same way by a Republican-

led federal government.

The December Kansas tour was a last minute decision made by Lincoln after an

invitation to speak in New York arrived in the same week Brown raided the Federal

Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. This was Lincoln’s last dress rehearsal before Cooper’s

Union. The theme of the speech was a firm constitutional argument in support of the

118 Sheridan A. Logan, Old Saint Jo – Gateway to the West, 1799-1932, 2nd ed.(Saint Joseph, MO: Platt Purchase Publishers, 2002) 135-139.

83 right of Congress to make the territories Free Soil, and nothing more. It had resonated with large audiences above the river throughout the Ohio Valley during the summer and fall of 1859. Now that it had been blessed by the people who bled for the cause in

Kansas, Lincoln was ready to deliver its moderate message to the audiences of New York and New England. These audiences, in Atchison and Omaha, Cincinnati and Chicago, and New York and New Haven, represented the majorities Lincoln needed to be elected

President of the United States by the Electoral College, without winning a single slave state.

84

Chapter 6

“No More in Bondage Shall they Toil - Let My People Go”119

1860 began with the taking of the U.S. Census. It ended with the national

elections of the president, all of the members of the House of Representatives, one third

of the members of the U.S. Senate, and a surprisingly peaceful initial dissolution of the

union.

For the first nine decades of the nation’s existence, U.S. Marshals conducted the

U.S. Census. While the date of Census Day varied from April to August, collection of the data always began as close to the first day of January of each Census Year as weather permitted. Since the count was so critical to the government’s composition, federal law required that the U.S. Marshals post the data as soon as it was available in two public places within the district in which it was collected. This was done so it could be checked for accuracy by those who had been counted. All of this local data was then sent on to the Census Bureau for compilation into the overall report to be delivered to the government sometime later. Even though the official Census might not be available for a

119 Go Down Moses-Anonymous African American Spiritual, Negro Spirituals.Com, http://www.negrospirituals.com/news-song/go_down_moses1.htm (accessed May 25, 2011).

The song was known to be sung for a decade before being written down by a white Virginia clergyman in 1858.

85

year or more, through most of the nineteenth century everyone in Washington City knew

what the most recent national Census meant to the future composition of the Congress

within a month or two of when data collection began.120

Until 1933, congressional sessions began the first Monday in December and ran

for four months, adjourning on or about March 4. This timing placed all of the members

of the House of Representatives and the Senate in Washington D.C., when the raw data

for the Census was being posted in their home states. By 1860, virtually all of those

reporting districts were connected by telegraph to Washington D.C. and able to deliver

the latest Census data to these vitally affected gentlemen within minutes of its being

posted back home.121

The Census of 1860 reveals the seven states which founded the Confederate

States of America between November of 1860 and January of 1861, had slave

populations which amounted to between forty-four and fifty-nine percent of their totals.

The Census also showed that these three million people were owned by about twenty-five

percent of the free population. The other one million people held in bondage in the U.S.

in 1860, were scattered to greater or lesser degrees throughout the other seven slave

120 Statistics of the United States in 1860: compiled from the original returns of the eighth census / U. S. Census Office Instructions to U.S. Marshals& Assistants (New York: Arno Press, 1976) 7.

121 Tomas Nonnenmacher, History of the U.S. Telegraph Industry, EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. August 14, 2001, http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/nonnenmacher.industry.telegraphic.us (accessed May 22, 2011).

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states. Again, only a quarter of the white populations in those states claimed any

ownership of these human beings. The twenty-five percent figure is misleading. The

South’s planter class, a scant two percent of their respective states’ white populations,

owned nearly fifty percent of the four million in bondage in 1860. As a result, the Three-

Fifths Clause in the Constitution gave them control of twenty more seats in the House of

Representatives than the total number of free persons residing in their states entitled them

to.122 As a voting bloc in the House of Representatives and the Senate, the planters were

formidable. On the eve of the war the senators from the nation’s fourteen slave states

totaled 28 in the upper house. Backing up the solid bloc of ‘Slave Power’ legislators was

the judiciary branch of the government. Seven of the U.S. Supreme Court’s nine

members, including the Chief Justice were, or had been slaveholders.

This was the kind of political power the South’s planter-politicians were used to wielding in America’s government. In fact slave power had given the tiny planter aristocracy almost complete control of the Republic since the Constitution was adopted.

Of the first fifteen presidents, eight had come directly from the planter class. Of the seven Northerners, four, including then current President Buchanan had acted in office more like planters than the planters themselves.123

The agenda for national lawmakers in 1860-1861 included federal support for the construction of a transcontinental railway, the Homestead Act and the admission of

Kansas. Each had the potential to drive wedges deeper into the fracturing union.

122Alexander Johnston, American Political History, 28, 29. 123 Alexander Johnston, American Political History, 30.

87

Lurking behind each piece of legislation was the specter of the Census of 1860 and

reapportionment of the House in 1862.

Federal support for first trans-continental railway was the least controversial issue before Congress. A great many congressmen and senators from northern and western free-states wanted its eastern terminus to be the rising star of Chicago. As expected, the cotton states wanted the first transcontinental route to run from New Orleans to San

Diego. But the logical choice was Saint Louis, midway between the two cities at either end of the Mississippi River. Clenching the middle route’s position as front runner, the

Hannibal- Saint Joseph Railroad Company inaugurated daily service in February 1859.

This route gave both Chicago and Saint Louis direct access to a rail line that ran two hundred miles farther west than any other in the nation. At its western terminus lay Saint

Joseph, at the head of the California and Oregon Trails. These wagon trails, which were also used by the Pony Express and the first transcontinental telegraph line, were the most traveled roads to the Pacific coast. As a result, a network of forts and way stations every twelve to twenty miles was already in place and could provide support to the rail construction gangs as well. No other route to California had as many advantages. Had it come to a vote, the choice of the route from Saint Joseph in the slave state of Missouri to

Sacramento in the free state of California already had the needed bipartisan support for passage.124

The admission of Kansas to the union as a free state and the Homestead Act did

not. Aside from the tragic history of bloodshed which reached to the floor of the Senate

124 Sheridan A. Logan, Old Saint Jo – Gateway to the West, 59-63.

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itself, the addition of Kansas meant three more free states standing in the way of the

planters’ interests. Oregon and Minnesota became states in 1858 and 1859. The bitter

fruits of self-determination in Kansas and the reality of the west’s geography made it plain that no more slave states would be added to the Union from the territory the United

States currently held. Nor would the ever growing majority of free states in congress be willing to annex more territory conducive to the planter’s needs to rebalance the slave to free state ratio. A proposal to buy Cuba from Spain was advanced by President

Buchanan with the avid support of the Southern Democrats in Congress. The anti-slave coalition in Congress was able keep the bill from coming to a vote until after the elections of 1860 rendered it moot.125

It is small wonder that the Southern planters’ political representatives felt the

country had already been ripped out of their hands. By mid-February, initial Census

results coming in by telegraph confirmed the bleak predictions of the 1850 Census. It

was clear to anyone who could count that the 1870 Census would give the free states in

the union a majority of at least two-thirds in the House and very possibly, with the states likely to be added to the union, the Senate as well. This power would enable the free states to pass any legislation, override presidential vetoes and amend the Constitution in any way they saw fit. As Calhoun had foreseen in 1850, if Southerners wished to remain the preeminent force in the affairs of a national government, they had no choice but to quit the United States of America and establish a separate nation which would continue to serve the needs of their region, and more specifically their class.

125 James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 103-116, 193-196.

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To achieve a clean break with the union it was imperative that the man elected

sixteenth president of the United States be completely unacceptable to the vast majority

of the Southern electorate. To assure this end, it was necessary that he come from the

Republicans, the new northern political party forming out of ashes of the Whigs, in combination with Abolitionists, Free-Soilers, and Know-Nothings.

In early 1860 the radical, anti-slavery firebrands of the Republican Party considered Lincoln too moderate and not well-enough-known to be nominated for the presidency. Then, on February 27, 1860 Lincoln stepped up to the podium at the

Cooper’s Union Hall in New York City. The speech was a masterful legal brief presenting the legislative history of the Northwest Ordinance as legal precedence to bar slavery in the western territories. As for the extinction of slavery throughout the rest of the United States, Lincoln called on Republicans to bide their time and let their ever growing majority do the work of abolition:

Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation.

But can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States?

If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored.

Contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man.

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Such as a policy of "don't care" on a question about which all true men do care.

Such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance.

Such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did.

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government, nor of dungeons to ourselves.

Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.126

At this early stage of his presidential campaign it was Lincoln’s intention to sway all factions in the Republican Party to see him as the ideal running mate for their candidate.127 To do this Lincoln delivered a speech which set forth the modest goal, as it seemed to Republicans, of excluding slavery from the territories. The largest segment of the population supporting the newly-formed Republican Party was the Free Soilers. A southern newspaper described the Free Soil movement as “a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moonstruck theorists.”128

126 Harold Holzer, Lincoln At Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004) 284. The full text of the speech with annotations begins on 249.

. 127 Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals, 230-233

128 James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 197. McPherson is quoting the New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 10, 1856, which was in turn quoting a Georgia paper, the Muskogee Herald. The Muskogee Herald’s bile against common folk having a say in government was

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Most lived in the states above the Ohio, as Lincoln did, where slavery was banned.

With tracts of fertile land available for the taking west of the Missouri River, they did not

want slave owners buying it all up. They had witnessed for themselves the advantage

slave labor and money gave the planters in the unregulated territory south of the Ohio.129

The farmers and merchants of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois settling Iowa, Nebraska

and Kansas were the audiences to whom Lincoln spoke throughout 1859. None of his

speeches that year addressed the issue of slavery in the same way he had during the

Lincoln-Douglas Debates a year earlier. Free Soil audiences were generally not in favor

of emancipation, or concerned much with the morality of slavery. Before these audiences

Lincoln stood his moral ground while developing a moderate platform of limiting slavery

to where it already existed. This approach never failed to win applause and converts to

his banner including the influential audience in the Cooper’s Union Hall.130

South of the Ohio River, Lincoln’s statement “we can yet afford to let it alone

where it is,” was taken as a threat to slavery’s very existence. To Southerners already

disposed to secession, Lincoln’s Cooper’s Union address pointed out in clear terms that

echoed again in the contents of South Carolina Senator James Hammond’s King Cotton speech as demonstration of the superiority of slavery versus free-labor in providing a stable economy. How little political power the South’s white middle class of small farmers, merchants, shop owners and artisans had in the ‘Ole South’ is evident in virtually every speech southern politicians delivered and every editorial published in the newspapers and magazines of the period.

129 Ibid, 30, 31, 32.

130 Harold Holzer, Lincoln At Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President, 238

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this was the time for the slave states to secede from the union. Secession had to occur

before the shift in political power the 1860 Census demanded, enabled the majority in

both Houses of Congress to legally strip the planters of their property as well as their

rights. If Lincoln was the Republican Party’s voice of moderation then surely any

Republican would do in the coming election which, judging by their actions in the

following months, the Southern Democratic leadership intended to lose.131

The planter-politicians had two problems. First, the Democrats, the party to which

a majority of planters pledged their allegiance, had Sixty percent of the all important

census-based Electoral College behind their candidate in the presidential election of

1856. Such a lead virtually guaranteed whomever a united Democratic Party nominated

could be elected President. In view of the extremely splintered politics of the various

wings of the barely formed Republican Party, no other outcome was possible.132

The second difficulty was the public stand on slavery taken by Douglas and the

majority of Northern Democrats. It was barely discernible from that of most Southern

Democrats and Southern Whigs, who could not bring themselves to join the Republicans

above the Ohio, or the Democrats below the river. Of even more importance it was

almost indistinguishable from the beliefs of most of the Southern white male electorate,

seventy-five percent of whom had no slaves of their own.133

131 James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 200-201,213-216.

132 Ibid, 162, 216-217. 133James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 162-168. Alexander Johnston, American Political History, 141-164. Henry Bamford Parkes, The United States of America-A History, 337-346. It is plain in looking at these and other authors that the separation of the Democratic Party into its irreconcilable Northern and Southern wings was not due to philosophical differences regarding slavery and the doctrine of Popular Sovereignty. Rather it was due to the secessionist’s such as Robert Toombs’ and Jefferson Davis’

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In the North, Democratic Party members represented the interests of the nation's transportation industry, manufacturers and financiers. The Democrats could also generally count on the employees of these businesses as well as the employers.134

In the South, the Democratic Party represented not only the planter class, which gave the country a lion's share of its exportable commodities, it represented most of the region’s middle class farmers, merchants, editors and backwoodsmen as well.135 There simply was no vital cause which should have driven a regional wedge between the representatives of these mutually dependent segments of the national economy.

Therefore, the first order of business for the planter-politicians was to break the

Democrat Party in half. To this end, the South’s secessionist politicians vilified Douglas and all Northerners in terms so harsh the South’s electorate could not possibly vote for them. To placate the Southern wing of the Party, the Democrat’s presidential nominating convention was held in Charleston, South Carolina in April. With the convention barely begun the Southern Democrats walked out en masse. Reconvened in Baltimore,

Southerners again bolted from the hall. The Baltimore convention ended with the expected nomination of Douglas. To further insure there would be no possibility of anything but a Republican Party win in November, Southern Democrats nominated

Buchanan’s vice president, John Breckenridge, on a pro-secession platform at their hastily put together convention in Richmond. Their adamant stand for disunion then encouraged the formation of a fourth political party, Constitutional Union Party with the vilification of Douglas, Buchanan and Walker, Mississippian, slave owner and Governor of the Kansas Territory over the admission of Kansas to the union as a slave state under the patently fraudulent vote for the Lecompton Constitution.

134 James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 31.

135 Alexander Johnston, American Political History, 94, 95.

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slogan “The Constitution as it is, the Union as it is” to fire up voters in the states on the

Potomac, Ohio, Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.

With the destruction of the Democratic Party assuring a Republican victory in the fall, the next order of business for the secessionist politicians was to establish the trappings of government. The military was relatively easy to create through the auspices of each state’s militia. In the aftermath of John Brown’s December hanging, the rolls of the southern states’ militias swelled all through 1860 to the point that Confederate

President Davis had seventy thousand troops to command before the guns were fired on

Fort Sumter. President Lincoln at that point had only seventeen thousand officers and men in the U.S. Army, most of whom were stationed west of the Missouri River and half of whom were expected to join the Confederate forces. Since the Confederacy was going to operate under the U.S. Constitution, with a few suitable modifications, the electorate of the seven cotton states, only vaguely aware of what their representatives were planning, indirectly selected those who would be members of the new government in the course of the elections in November.136

With everything in place the only thing left for the founding fathers of the

Confederacy to do was to wait for the election to take place. Once it did the secession of

South Carolina was almost immediate. The other six cotton states followed right on

South Carolina’s heels. Their departures from the union were so rapid, Texas, the last of

136 Alexander Johnston, American Political History, 305. 306. In only three of the seven original Confederate states were the voters asked to directly participate in elections of delegates to the secession conventions. In none were the voters asked to participate in choosing delegates to the convention which established the Confederate States of America, wrote and ratified its constitution, and selected all of its interim officers, representatives and officials in the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the government.

95 the original seven, seceded ten days before the Electoral College met on February 11,

1861 to confirm Lincoln’s victory.

In two short months, all seven of the cotton states had held conventions which rubber stamped their individual secessions. In the first seven days of February 1861, they joined the new Southern union, ratified the new constitution and appointed interim executive officers, legislators and judiciary for the Confederate States of America. The armed forces of the C.S.A. also managed to seize every federal facility within the territory of the seven seceded states. The only two remaining federal holdings in the

Deep South were both off shore, Fort Sumter at the mouth of Charleston Bay and Fort

Pickens off the shore of Pensacola, Florida.

In late February of 1861, President Jefferson Davis sent two ambassadors to

Washington to see President Buchanan. They presented a letter from Davis that demanded the two forts be surrendered to the C.S.A. immediately in order to “avoid bloodshed.” Buchanan responded through his Attorney General, Edward Stanton that only Congress could order that federal property be ceded to another nation. Needless to say, Davis did not take the matter up with his former colleagues. Instead, he and his government waited for the inauguration of the man they had done everything in their power to get elected President of the United States.137

From his inauguration speech to April 12, Lincoln ignored the Confederate States of

America. He called for the Southern congressmen and senators to come to Washington to work out a compromise on the issues. He did say that the offshore facilities in the

137 Alexander Johnston, American Political History, 296-298. “Calhoun’s Programme of Cooperation” is described as executed by the first seven seceding states of the Confederacy.

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South would be maintained to collect federal revenues. Lincoln forbade the U.S. Army under Winfield Scott from making any armed intervention. He did not call for troops, or raise the size of the military establishment.138

These inactions infuriated Davis, who felt that the Confederate States of America was not being taken seriously by Lincoln. Davis feared that Lincoln’s attitude and forbearance were eroding Southern belief in the need for an independent nation and that soon the seceded states would quietly drift back into the Federal Union.139

In the North, the opposite was happening. In his first month in office Lincoln’s hands were tied constitutionally. He could not make war on his fellow Americans for peacefully expressing their opinion, or failing show up for work in Washington, even if the resources to do so had been available. Besides having only the tiny Washington army garrison at his disposal, the entire U.S. Navy consisted of 5,000 seamen and under a hundred combat-worthy ships, half of which, like the USS Merrimac were in dry-dock for extensive repairs. The rest of the navy’s ships were scattered on diplomatic missions around the globe. Most of the members of Lincoln’s cabinet recommended letting the

South go, mostly for the same economic reasons Hammond had listed in his King Cotton speech. Most of the northern electorate who put him in office felt likewise.140

In the second week of April 1861, due to his own nervousness about the

Confederacy’s future, Jefferson Davis ordered Fort Sumter's garrison of eighty men, which was due to surrender within thirty-six hours, be blasted into submission. Had he

138James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 31. 139 James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 31.

140 Ibid.

97 waited, Lincoln would not have had the constitutional mandate to suppress an armed rebellion of private citizens in the state of South Carolina. Nor would he have had the propaganda value of the helpless American soldiers being fired upon to sway the reluctant governors of the northern states to give over their state militias to the federal government. The South could have gained its independence as Calhoun, and a majority of those counted in the Census of 1860 wanted, without bloodshed.

Conclusion

The Decennial Revolution

The United States of America has endured and prospered for 235 years as a nation

“of, by and for the People” as Lincoln so aptly defined it, due to the decennial

Enumeration mandated in the Constitution. Indeed, it is by counting all the people where they live every ten years and redistributing the 435 seats in the House of

Representatives to reflect the changes recorded that the revolution in human government begun in 1776 remains constant.

Of all of the ways of establishing a stable foundation for government, surely this is the most radical ever put into practice. The power to tax the people of a nation and spend the money extorted from them by selective physical coercion was almost

98

exclusively a sovereign’s prerogative.141 Never had this power been ceded to all persons,

regardless of their social standing, residing within a nation’s boundary. Nor had any

preceding government in the course of human history required that a head-count be taken

at regular intervals to assure all persons regardless of their race, sex, age or mental and

physical condition, received their full measure of political power.142 In the New World’s

first republic there was and still is only one requirement each person must meet in order

to count among those who wield the power of kings. He or she must have a pulse.

Just as the decennial Census gives political power, it takes political power. As a result

the U.S. Census triggers a political crisis in the United States each time it is taken. The

most severe of these decennial revolutions in government was the American Civil War.

141 In the case of Great Britain, that bastion of parliamentary democracy, by 1789 the power to tax and spend had been grudgingly given over to a tiny fraction of the nation’s population, who for a variety of reason were considered socially elite.

142 All previous population counts in recorded history, including the Doomsday book of William the Conqueror and Luke 2:1-4 in the King James Bible were conducted solely for the purpose of imposing taxes in the form of money, goods or service owed to the government. While Article One mentions direct taxes, to this day the decennial U.S. Census is not an instrument of taxation. The data collected does, however give local, state and the national government ideas about where the best revenue streams are to be found.

99

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