Part 19 (1/2)

The strangely unsettled condition of the great tract whose fate was pending, is no better ill.u.s.trated than by a second election which was held on the upper Missouri. One Hadley D. Johnson, sometime member of the Iowa legislature, hearing of the proposal of the Wyandots to send a territorial delegate to Congress, invited his friends in western Iowa to cross the river and hold an election. They responded by choosing their enterprising compatriot for their delegate, who promptly set out for Was.h.i.+ngton, bearing their mandate. Arriving at the capital, he found Thomas Johnson already occupying a seat in the House in the capacity of delegate-elect. Not to be outdone, the Iowa Johnson somewhat surrept.i.tiously secured his admission to the floor.

Subsequently, ”the two Johnsons,” as they were styled by the members, were ousted, the House refusing very properly to recognize either.

Thomas Johnson exhibited some show of temper, but was placated by the good sense of his rival, who proposed that they should strike for two Territories instead of one. Why not; was not Nebraska large enough for both?[437]

Under these circ.u.mstances, the question of Nebraska seemed likely to recur. Certain Southern newspapers were openly demanding the removal of the slavery restriction in the new Territory.[438] Yet the chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, who had just returned from Europe, seems to have been unaware of the undercurrents whose surface indications have been pointed out. He wrote confidentially on November 11th:[439] ”It [the administration] has difficulties ahead, but it must meet them boldly and fairly. There is a surplus revenue which must be disposed of and the tariff reduced to a legitimate revenue standard. It will not do to allow the surplus to acc.u.mulate in the Treasury and thus create a pecuniary revulsion that would overwhelm the business arrangements and financial affairs of the country. The River and Harbor question must be met and decided. Now in my opinion is the time to put those great interests on a more substantial and secure basis by a well devised system of Tonnage duties. I do not know what the administration will do on this question, but I hope they will have the courage to do what we all feel to be right. The Pacific railroad will also be a disturbing element. It will never do to commence making railroads by the federal government under any pretext of necessity. We can grant alternate sections of land as we did for the Central Road, but not a dollar from the National Treasury. These are the main questions and my opinions are foreshadowed as you are ent.i.tled to know them.”

In the same letter occurs an interesting personal allusion: ”I see many of the newspapers are holding me up as a candidate for the next Presidency. I do not wish to occupy that position. I do not think I will be willing to have my name used. I think such a state of things will exist that I shall not desire the nomination. Yet I do not intend to do any act which will deprive me of the control of my own action. I shall remain entirely non-committal and hold myself at liberty to do whatever my duty to my principles and my friends may require when the time for action arrives. Our first duty is to the cause--the fate of individual politicians is of minor consequence. The party is in a distracted condition and it requires all our wisdom, prudence and energy to consolidate its power and perpetuate its principles. Let us leave the Presidency out of view for at least two years to come.”

These are not the words of a man who is plotting a revolution. Had Nebraska and the Missouri Compromise been uppermost in his thoughts, he would have referred to the subject, for the letter was written in strict confidence to friends, from whom he kept no secrets and before whom he was not wont to pose.

Those better informed, however, believed that Congress would have to deal with the territorial question in the near future. The Was.h.i.+ngton _Union_, commonly regarded as the organ of the administration, predicted that next to pressing foreign affairs, the Pacific railroad and the Territories would occupy the attention of the administration.[440] And before Congress a.s.sembled, or had been long in session, the chairman of the Committee on Territories must have sensed the situation, for on December 14, 1853, Senator Dodge of Iowa introduced a bill for the organization of Nebraska, which was identical with that of the last session.[441] The bill was promptly referred to the Committee on Territories, and the Nebraska question entered upon its last phase. Within a week, Douglas's friends of the Illinois State _Register_ were sufficiently well informed of the thoughts and intents of his mind to hazard this conjecture: ”We believe they [the people of Nebraska] may be safely left to act for themselves.... The territories should be admitted to exercise, as nearly as practicable, all the rights claimed by the States, and to adopt all such political regulations and inst.i.tutions as their wisdom may suggest.”[442] A New York correspondent announced on December 30th, that the committee would soon report a bill for three Territories on the basis of New Mexico and Utah; that is, without excluding or admitting slavery. ”Climate and nature and the necessary pursuits of the people who are to occupy the territories,” added the writer complacently, ”will settle the question--and these will effectually exclude slavery.”[443]

These rumors foreshadowed the report of the committee. The problem was to find a mode of overcoming the opposition of the South to the organization of a Territory which would not only add eventually to the number of free States, but also open up a northern route to the Pacific. The price of concession from the South on the latter point must be some apparent concession to the South in the matter of slavery. The report of January 4, 1854, and the bill which accompanied it, was Douglas's solution of the problem.[444] The principles of the compromise measures of 1850 were to be affirmed and carried into practical operation within the limits of the new Territory of Nebraska. ”In the judgment of your committee,” read the report, ”those measures were intended to have a far more comprehensive and enduring effect than the mere adjustment of the difficulties arising out of the recent acquisition of Mexican territory. They were designed to establish certain great principles ... your committee have deemed it their duty to incorporate and perpetuate, in their territorial bill, the principles and spirit of those measures. If any other consideration were necessary, to render the propriety of this course imperative upon the committee, they may be found in the fact that the Nebraska country occupies the same relative position to the slavery question, as did New Mexico and Utah, when those Territories were organized.”[445]

Just as it was a disputed point, the report argued, whether slavery was prohibited by law in the country acquired from Mexico, so it is questioned whether slavery is prohibited in the Nebraska country by _valid_ enactment. ”In the opinion of those eminent statesmen, who hold that Congress is invested with no rightful authority to legislate upon the subject of slavery in the Territories, the 8th section of the act preparatory to the admission of Missouri is null and void; while the prevailing sentiment in large portions of the Union sustains the doctrine that the Const.i.tution of the United States secures to every citizen an inalienable right to move into any of the Territories with his property, of whatever kind and description, and to hold and enjoy the same under the sanction of law. Your committee do not feel themselves called upon to enter upon the discussion of these controverted questions. They involve the same grave issues which produced the agitation, the sectional strife, and the fearful struggle of 1850.” And just as Congress deemed it wise in 1850 to refrain from deciding the matter in controversy, so ”your committee are not prepared now to recommend a departure from the course pursued on that memorable occasion either by affirming or repealing the 8th section of the Missouri act, or by any act declaratory of the meaning of the Const.i.tution in respect to the legal points in dispute.” The essential features of the Compromise of 1850, which should again be carried into practical operation, were stated as follows:

”First: That all questions pertaining to slavery in the Territories, and in the new States to be formed therefrom, are to be left to the decision of the people residing therein, by their appropriate representatives, to be chosen by them for that purpose.

”Second: That 'all cases involving t.i.tle to slaves,' and 'questions of personal freedom,' are referred to the adjudication of the local tribunals, with the right of appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States.

”Third: That the provision of the Const.i.tution of the United States, in respect to fugitives from service, is to be carried into faithful execution in all 'the organized Territories,' the same as in the States.”

The subst.i.tute reported by the committee followed the Dodge bill closely, but contained the additional statement. ”And when admitted as a State or States, the said Territory, or any part of the same, shall be received into the Union, with or without slavery, as their Const.i.tution may prescribe at the time of their admission.”[446] This phraseology was identical with that of the Utah and New Mexico Acts.

The bill also made special provision for writs of error and appeals from the territorial court to the Supreme Court of the United States, in all cases involving t.i.tle to slaves and personal freedom. This feature, too, was copied from the Utah and New Mexico Acts. As first printed in the Was.h.i.+ngton _Sentinel_, January 7th, the bill contained no reference to the Missouri Compromise and no direct suggestion that the territorial legislature would decide the question of slavery. The wording of the bill and its general tenor gave the impression that the prohibition of slavery would continue during the territorial status, unless in the meantime the courts should declare the Missouri Compromise null and void. Three days later, January 10th, the _Sentinel_ reprinted the bill with an additional section, which had been omitted by a ”clerical error.” This twenty-first section read, ”In order to avoid all misconstruction, it is hereby declared to be the true intent and meaning of this act, so far as the question of slavery is concerned, to carry into practical operation the following propositions and principles, established by the compromise measures of one thousand eight hundred and fifty, to wit:” then followed the three propositions which had accompanied the report of January 4th. The last of these three propositions had been slightly abbreviated: all questions pertaining to slavery were to be left to the decision of the people through their appropriate representatives, the clause ”to be chosen by them for that purpose” being omitted.

This additional section transformed the whole bill. For the first time the people of the Territory are mentioned as the determining agents in respect to slavery. And the unavoidable inference followed, that they were not to be hampered in their choice by the restrictive feature of the Missouri Act of 1820. The omission of this weighty section was certainly a most extraordinary oversight. Whose was the ”clerical error”? Attached to the original draft, now in the custody of the Secretary of the Senate, is a sheet of blue paper, in Douglas's handwriting, containing the crucial article. All evidence points to the conclusion that Douglas added this hastily, after the bill had been twice read in the Senate and ordered to be printed; but whether it was carelessly omitted by the copyist or appended by Douglas as an afterthought, it is impossible to say.[447] After his report of January 4th, there was surely no reason why Douglas should have hesitated to incorporate the three propositions in the bill; but it is perfectly obvious that with the appended section, the Nebraska bill differed essentially from its prototypes, though Douglas contended that he had only made explicit what was contained implicitly in the Utah bill.

Two years later Douglas replied to certain criticisms from Trumbull in these words: ”He knew, or, if not, he ought to know, that the bill in the shape in which it was first reported, as effectually repealed the Missouri restriction as it afterwards did when the repeal was put in express terms. The only question was whether it should be done in the language of the acts of 1850, or in the language subsequently employed, but the legal effect was precisely the same.”[448] Of course Douglas was here referring to the original bill containing the twenty-first section.

It has commonly been a.s.sumed that Douglas desired the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in order to open Nebraska to slavery. This was the pa.s.sionate accusation of his anti-slavery contemporaries; and it has become the verdict of most historians. Yet there is ample evidence that Douglas had no such wish and intent. He had said in 1850, and on other occasions, that he believed the prairies to be dedicated to freedom by a law above human power to repeal. Climate, topography, the conditions of slave labor, which no Northern man knew better, forbade slavery in the unoccupied areas of the West.[449] True, he had no such horror of slavery extension as many Northern men manifested; he was probably not averse to sacrificing some of the region dedicated by law to freedom, if thereby he could carry out his cherished project of developing the greater Northwest; but that he deliberately planned to plant slavery in all that region, is contradicted by the incontrovertible fact that he believed the area of slavery to be circ.u.mscribed definitely by Nature. Man might propose but physical geography would dispose.

The regrettable aspect of Douglas's course is his attempt to nullify the Missouri Compromise by subtle indirection. This was the device of a s.h.i.+fty politician, trying to avert suspicion and public alarm by clever ambiguities. That he really believed a new principle had been subst.i.tuted for an old one, in dealing with the Territories, does not extenuate the offense, for not even he had ventured to a.s.sert in 1850, that the compromises of that year had in any wise disturbed the status of the great, unorganized area to which Congress had applied the restrictive proviso of 1820. Besides, only so recently as 1849, he had said, with all the emphasis of sincerity, that the compromise had ”become canonized in the hearts of the American people, as a sacred thing, which no ruthless hand would ever be reckless enough to disturb.” And while he then opposed the extension of the principle to new Territories, he believed that it had been ”deliberately incorporated into our legislation as a solemn and sacred compromise.”[450]

By this time Douglas must have been aware of the covert purpose of Atchison and others to secure the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, though he hoped that they would acquiesce in his mode of doing it. He was evidently not prepared for the bold move which certain of the senators from slave States were contemplating.[451] He was therefore startled by an amendment which Dixon of Kentucky offered on January 16th, to the effect that the restrictive clause of the Act of 1820 should not be so construed as to apply to Nebraska or any other Territory; ”but that the citizens of the several States or territories shall be at liberty to take and hold their slaves within any of the territories of the United States or of the States to be formed therefrom,” as if the Missouri Act had never been pa.s.sed. Douglas at once left his seat to remonstrate with Dixon, who was on the Whig side of the Senate chamber. He disliked the amendment, not so much because it wiped out the Missouri Compromise as because it seemed ”affirmatively to legislate slavery into the Territory.”[452] Knowing Dixon to be a supporter of the compromise measures of 1850, Douglas begged him not to thwart the work of his committee, which was trying in good faith to apply the cardinal features of those measures to Nebraska. The latter part of Dixon's amendment could hardly be harmonized with the principle of congressional non-intervention.[453]

There seems to be no reason to doubt that Dixon moved in this matter on his own initiative;[454] but he was a friend to Atchison and he could not have been wholly ignorant of the Missouri factional quarrel.[455]

To be sure, Dixon was a Whig, but Southern Whigs and Democrats were at one in desiring expansion for the peculiar inst.i.tution of their section. Pressure was now brought to bear upon Douglas to incorporate the direct repeal of the compromise in the Nebraska bill.[456] He objected strongly, foreseeing no doubt the storm of protest which would burst over his head in the North.[457] Still, if he could unite the party on the principle of non-intervention with slavery in the Territories, the risk of temporary unpopularity would be worth taking.

No doubt personal ambition played its part in forming his purpose, but party considerations swayed him most powerfully.[458] He witnessed with no little apprehension the divergence between the Northern and Southern wings of the party; he had commented in private upon ”the distracted condition” of the party and the need of perpetuating its principles and consolidating its power. Might this not be his opportunity?

On Sunday morning, January 22d, just before the hour for church, Douglas, with several of his colleagues, called upon the Secretary of War, Davis, stating that the Committees on Territories of the Senate and House had agreed upon a bill, for which the President's approval was desired. They pressed for an immediate interview inasmuch as they desired to report the bill on the morrow. Somewhat reluctantly, Davis arranged an interview for them, though the President was not in the habit of receiving visitors on Sunday. Yielding to their request, President Pierce took the proposed bill under consideration, giving careful heed to all explanations; and when they were done, both he and his influential secretary promised their support.[459]

What was this momentous bill to which the President thus pledged himself? The t.i.tle indicated the most striking feature. There were now to be two Territories: Kansas and Nebraska. Bedded in the heart of Section 14, however, was a still more important provision which announced that the prohibition of slavery in the Act of 1820 had been ”superseded by the principles of the legislation of eighteen hundred and fifty, commonly called the compromise measures,” and was therefore ”inoperative.”

It has been commonly believed that Douglas contemplated making one free and one slave State out of the Nebraska region. His own simple explanation is far more credible: the two Johnsons had pet.i.tioned for a division of the Territory along the fortieth parallel, and both the Iowa and Missouri delegations believed that their local interests would be better served by two Territories.[460]

Again Pacific railroad interests seem to have crossed the path of the Nebraska bill. The suspicions of Delegate-elect Hadley Johnson had been aroused by the neglect of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to extinguish the claims of the Omaha Indians, whose lands lay directly west of Iowa. At the last session, an appropriation had been made for the purpose of extinguis.h.i.+ng the Indian t.i.tle to lands west of both Missouri and Iowa; and everyone knew that this was a preliminary step to settlement by whites. The appropriation had been zealously advocated by representatives from Missouri, who frankly admitted that the possession of these lands would make the Pacific railroad route available. Now as the Indian Commissioner, who had before shown himself an active partisan of Senator Atchison, rapidly pushed on the treaties with the Indians west of Missouri and dallied with the Omahas, the inference was unavoidable, that Iowa interests were being sacrificed to Missouri interests. Such was the story that the Iowa Johnson poured into the ear of Senator Douglas, to whom he was presented by Senator Dodge.[461] The surest way to safeguard the interests of Iowa was to divide the Territory of Nebraska, and give Iowa her natural outlet to the West.

Senator Dodge had also come to this conclusion. Nebraska would be to Iowa, what Iowa had been to Illinois. Were only one Territory organized, the seat of government and leading thoroughfares would pa.s.s to the south of Iowa.[462] Put in the language of the promoters of the Pacific railroad, one Territory meant aid to the central route; two Territories meant an equal chance for both northern and central routes. As the representative of Chicago interests, Douglas was not blind to these considerations.

On Monday, January 23d, Douglas reported the Kansas-Nebraska bill with a brief word of explanation. Next day Senator Dixon expressed his satisfaction with the amendment, which he interpreted as virtually repealing the Missouri Compromise. He disclaimed any other wish or intention than to secure the principle which the compromise measures of 1850 had established.[463] An editorial in the Was.h.i.+ngton _Union_ threw the weight of the administration into the balance: ”The proposition of Mr. Douglas is a practical execution of the principles of that compromise [of 1850], and therefore, cannot but be regarded by the administration as a test of Democratic orthodoxy.”[464]

While the administration publicly wheeled into line behind Douglas, the ”Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States” summoned the anti-slavery elements to join battle in behalf of the Missouri Compromise. This memorable doc.u.ment had been written by Chase of Ohio and dated January 19th, but a postscript was added after the revised Kansas-Nebraska bill had been reported.[465]

It was an adroitly worded paper. History has falsified many of its predictions; history then controverted many of its a.s.sumptions; but it was colored with strong emotion and had the ring of righteous indignation.