Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 / From Lincoln to Garfield, with a Review of the Events Which Led to the Political Revolution of 1860

by James Gillespie Blaine

But against this surrender to the Compromise measures of 1850, the Whigs who followed Seward and Wade and Thaddeus Stevens and Fessenden were earnest and active. Stevens was then a member of the House and had waged bitter war against the measures. Wade and Fessenden had not yet entered the Senate, but were powerful leaders in their respective States. These men had not given up the creed which demanded an anti-slavery restriction on every inch of soil owned by the United States. They viewed with abhorrence the legislation which had placed freedom and slavery on the same plane in the Territories of Utah and New Mexico. They believed that Texas had been paid for a baseless claim ten millions of dollars, one-half of which, as a sharp critic declared, was hush-money, the other half blood-money. They regarded the cruel law for the return of fugitive slaves as an abomination in the sight of God and man. In their judgment it violated every principle of right. It allowed the personal liberty of a man to be peremptorily decided by a United- States commissioner, acting with absolute power and without appeal. For a claim exceeding twenty dollars in value, every citizen has the right to a trial by jury; but by this law the body, the life, the very soul of a man, possibly a free-born citizen, might be consigned to perpetual enslavement on the fallible judgment of a single official. An apparently slight, yet especially odious feature of the law which served in large degree to render it inoperative was that the United-States commissioner, in the event of his remanding the alleged fugitive to slavery, received a fee of ten dollars, and, if he adjudged him to be free, received only five dollars.

It soon became evident that with the Whigs divided and the Democrats compactly united upon the finality of the Compromise, the latter would have the advantage in the ensuing Presidential election. The tendency would naturally be to consolidate the slave-holding States in support of the Democratic candidates, because that party had a large, well-organized force throughout the North cherishing the same principles, co-operating for the same candidates, and controlling many, if not a majority, of the free States. The Southern Whigs, equally earnest with the Democrats for the Compromise, were constantly injured at home by the outspoken anti-slavery principles of leading Northern Whigs. Just at that point of time and from the cause indicated began the formation of parties divided on the geographical line between North and South. But this result was as yet only foreshadowed, not developed. Both the old parties held their national conventions as usual, in 1852, with every State represented in both by full delegations. There were peculiar troubles in each. In the Democratic convention the dissensions had been in large part inherited, and had reference more to persons than to principles, more to the candidate than to the platform. While something of the same trouble was visible in the Whig ranks, the chief source of contention and of party weakness was found in the irreconcilable difference of principle between all the Southern Whigs and a large number of the Northern Whigs. In the South they were unanimous in support of the Compromise. In the North they were divided.

DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION.

The Democratic National Convention met in Baltimore on the first day of June, 1852. General Cass, though he had reached his seventieth year, was again in the field. Mr. Buchanan, then sixty-one years of age, was the candidate next in strength, and Stephen A. Douglas was third. Douglas was but thirty-nine years old, the youngest man ever formally presented for the Presidency by a State delegation in a National convention. Governor Marcy was fourth in the order of strength. There were scattering votes for other candidates, but these four were seriously and hopefully urged by their respective supporters. Marcy was in many respects the fittest man to be nominated, but the fear was that the old dissensions of the New- York Democracy, now seemingly healed, would open afresh if the chief of one of the clans should be imposed on the other. Douglas was injured by his partial committal to what was known as the doctrine of "manifest destiny,"—the indefinite acquisition of territory southward, especially in the direction of the West Indies. Cass was too old. Buchanan lacked personal popularity; and, while he had the Pennsylvania delegation in his favor, a host of enemies from that State, outside the convention, warred against him most bitterly. No one of these eminent men could secure two-thirds of the delegates as required by the iron rule, and on the forty-ninth ballot Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, who had been among the "scattering" on several preceding votes, was unanimously nominated. The suggestion of Pierce's name was not so spontaneous and sudden as it was made to appear. The precise condition of affairs was discerned before the convention met, and some sagacious and far- seeing men, among whom the late Caleb Cushing was one, and General Benjamin F. Butler another, had canvassed the merits of Pierce before the convention met. They saw that from his record in Congress he would be entirely acceptable to the South, and at the opportune moment their plans were perfected and Pierce was nominated with a great show of enthusiasm. William R. King of Alabama was selected to run as Vice-President.

General Pierce had many qualities that rendered him a strong candidate. He had served with credit if not distinction both in the House and the Senate. He was elected to the House in 1832, when he was but twenty-eight years of age, and resigned his seat in the Senate in 1842. In the ten years which intervened before his nomination for the Presidency, he had devoted himself to the law with brilliant success, leaving it only for his short service in the Mexican war. He was still a young man when he was preferred to all the prominent statesmen of his party as a Presidential candidate. He was remarkably attractive in personal appearance, prepossessing in manner, ready and even eloquent as a public speaker, fluent and graceful in conversation. He presented thus a rare combination of the qualities which attach friends and win popular support.

The platform of principles enunciated by the convention was just what the South desired and demanded. The entire interest centred in the slavery question. Indeed, the declarations upon other issues were not listened to by the delegates, and were scarcely read by the public. Without a dissenting voice the convention resolved that "all efforts of the Abolitionists or others to induce Congress to interfere with questions of slavery or to take incipient steps in relation thereto, are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences." The Compromise measures, including the fugitive-slave law, which was specially named, were most heartily indorsed, and were regarded as an adjustment of the whole controversy. By way of indicting how full, complete, and final the settlement was, the convention with unrestrained enthusiasm declared that "the Democratic party will resist all attempts at renewing, in Congress or out of it, the agitation of the slavery question, under whatever shape or color the attempts may be made." Among the men who joined in these declarations were not a few who had supported Van Buren and Adams in the canvass of 1848. One of the prominent officers of the convention was the author of many of the most extreme anti- slavery declarations put forth at Buffalo.

WHIG NATIONAL CONVENTION.

The Whigs met at Baltimore a fortnight after the Democratic convention had adjourned. The slavery question, upon which the Democrats of all shades had so cordially coalesced, was to the Whigs a dividing sword. Mr. Fillmore was a candidate, supported with almost entire unanimity by the Southern Whigs. Mr. Webster was a candidate, and though in his fear for the Union he had sacrificed more than any other man for the South, he could secure no Southern support. General Scott was a candidate, and though born and reared in Virginia, he was supported by anti-slavery Whigs of every shade in the North, against the two men of Northern birth and Northern associations. On the first ballot, Fillmore received 133 votes, Scott 131, Webster 23. Fillmore received every Southern vote, except one from Virginia given to Scott by John Minor Botts. Scott received every Northern vote except twenty-nine given to Webster, and sixteen given to Fillmore. The friends of Mr. Webster, and Mr. Webster himself, were pained and mortified by the result. Rufus Choate was at the head of the Massachusetts delegation, and eloquently, even passionately, pleaded with the Southern men to support Mr. Webster on a single ballot. But the Southern men stubbornly adhered to Fillmore, and were in turn enraged because the twenty-nine votes thrown away, as they said, on Mr. Webster, would at once renominate the President in whose cabinet Mr. Webster was at that moment serving as Premier. This threefold contest had been well developed before the convention assembled, and one feature of special bitterness had been added to it by a letter from Mr. Clay, who was on his death-bed in Washington. He urged his friends to support Mr. Fillmore. This was regarded by many as a lack of generosity on Mr. Clay's part, after the warm support which Mr. Webster had given him in his contest with Mr. Polk in 1844. But there had been for years an absence of cordiality between these Whig leaders, and many who were familiar with both declared that Mr. Clay had never forgiven Mr. Webster for remaining in Tyler's cabinet after the resignation of the other Whig members. Mr. Webster's association with Tyler had undoubtedly given to the President a measure of protection against the hot wrath of Mr. Clay in the memorable contest of 1841-2, and by natural reaction had impaired the force of Mr. Clay's attack. And now ten years after the event its memory rose to influence the Presidential nomination of 1852.

Another explanation is more in consonance with Mr. Clay's magnanimity of character. He was extremely anxious that an outspoken friend of the Compromise should be nominated. He knew when he wrote his letter that the Democrats would pledge themselves to the finality of the Compromise, and he knew the Southern Whigs would be overwhelmed if there should be halting or hesitation on this issue either in their candidate or in their platform. He felt, as the responsible author of the Compromise, that he was himself on trial, and it would be a peculiar mortification if the party which he had led so long should fail to sustain him in this final crisis of his public life. He had been sufficiently humiliated by Taylor's triumph over him in the convention of 1848. It would be an absolutely intolerable rebuke if in 1852 Taylor's policy should be preferred to his own by a Whig national convention. Taylor, indeed, was in his grave, but his old military compatriot, Scott, was a candidate for the Presidency, and the anti-Compromise Whigs under Seward's lead were rallying to his support. Mr. Clay believed that Fillmore, with the force of the national administration in his hands, could defeat General Scott, and that Mr. Webster's candidacy was a needless division of friends. Hence he sustained Fillmore, not from hostility to Webster, but as the sure and only means of securing an indorsement of the Compromise measures, and of doing justice to a Northern President who had risked every thing in support of Mr. Clay's policy.

The contest was long and earnest. Mr. Webster's friends, offended by what they considered the ingratitude of Southern Whigs, persistently refused to go over to Fillmore, though by so doing they could at any moment secure his nomination. They cared nothing for Fillmore's lead in votes, obtained as they thought in large degree from the use of patronage. They scouted it as an argument not fit to be addressed to the friends of Mr. Webster. Such considerations belonged only to men of the lower grades, struggling in the dirty pools of political strife, and were not to be applied to a statesman of Mr. Webster's rank and character. They felt, moreover, that all the popularity which Fillmore had secured in the South, and to a certain degree with the conservative and commercial classes of the whole country, had come from Mr. Webster's presence and pre- eminent service in his cabinet. In short, Mr. Webster's supporters felt that Mr. Fillmore, so far from earning their respect and deserving their applause, was merely strutting in borrowed plumage, and deriving all his strength from their own illustrious chief. This jealousy was of course stimulated with consummate art and tact by the supporters of Scott. They expressed, as they really entertained, the highest admiration for Webster, and no less frankly made known their dislike, if not their contempt, for Fillmore. Webster, as they pointed out, was supported by the voice of his own great State. Massachusetts had sent a delegation composed of her best men, with the most brilliant orator of the nation, to plead their cause at the bar of the convention. In contrast with this, Fillmore had no support from New York. The Whigs of that State had sent a delegation to impeach him before the nation for faithlessness to principle, and to demand that votes of other States should not impose on New York a recreant son to confound and destroy the party.