[CHAPTER CLXVI.]
THE WILMOT PROVISO; OR, PROHIBITION OF SLAVERY IN THE TERRITORIES: ITS INUTILITY AND MISCHIEF.
Scarcely was the war with Mexico commenced when means, different from those of arms, were put in operation to finish it. One of these was the return of the exiled Santa Anna (as has been shown) to his country, and his restoration to power, under the belief that he was favorable to peace, and for which purpose arrangements began to be made from the day of the declaration of the war—or before. In the same session another move was made in the same direction, that of getting peace by peaceable means, in an application made to Congress by the President, to place three millions of dollars at his disposal, to be used in negotiating for a boundary which should give us additional territory: and that recommendation not having been acted upon at the war session, was renewed at the commencement of the next one. It was recommended as an "important measure for securing a speedy peace;" and as an argument in favor of granting it, a sum of two millions similarly placed at the disposition of Mr. Jefferson when about to negotiate for Florida (which ended in the acquisition of Louisiana), was plead as a precedent; and justly. Congress, at this second application, granted the appropriation; but while it was depending, Mr. Wilmot, a member of Congress, from Pennsylvania, moved a proviso, that no part of the territory to be acquired should be open to the introduction of slavery. It was a proposition not necessary for the purpose of excluding slavery, as the only territory to be acquired was that of New Mexico and California, where slavery was already prohibited by the Mexican laws and constitution; and where it could not be carried until those laws should be repealed, and a law for slavery passed. The proviso was nugatory, and could answer no purpose but that of bringing on a slavery agitation in the United States; for which purpose it was immediately seized upon by Mr. Calhoun and his friends, and treated as the greatest possible outrage and injury to the slave States. Congress was occupied with this proviso for two sessions, became excessively heated on the subject, and communicated its heat to the legislatures of the slave States—by several of which conditional disunion resolutions were passed. Every where, in the slave States, the Wilmot Proviso became a Gorgon's head—a chimera dire—a watchword of party, and the synonyme of civil war and the dissolution of the Union. Many patriotic members were employed in resisting the proviso as a bona fide cause of breaking up the Union, if adopted; many amiable and gentle-tempered members were employed in devising modes of adjusting and compromising it; a few, of whom Mr. Benton was one, produced the laws and the constitution of Mexico to show that New Mexico and California were free from slavery; and argued that neither party had any thing to fear, or to hope—the free soil party nothing to fear, because the soil was now free; the slave soil party nothing to hope, because they could not take a step to make it slave soil, having just invented the dogma of "No power in Congress to legislate upon slavery in territories." Never were two parties so completely at loggerheads about nothing: never did two parties contend more furiously against the greatest possible evil. Close observers, who had been watching the progress of the slavery agitation since its inauguration in Congress in 1835, knew it to be a game played by the abolitionists on one side and the disunionists on the other, to accomplish their own purposes. Many courageous men denounced it as such—as a game to be kept up for the political benefit of the players; and deplored the blindness which could not see their determination to keep it agoing to the last possible moment, and to the production of the greatest possible degree of national and sectional exasperation. It was while this contention was thus raging, that Mr. Calhoun wrote a confidential letter to a member of the Alabama legislature, hugging this proviso to his bosom as a fortunate event—as a means of "forcing the issue" between the North and the South; and deprecating any adjustment, compromise, or defeat of it, as a misfortune to the South: and which letter has since come to light. Gentle and credulous people, who believed him to be in earnest when he was sounding the tocsin to rouse the States, instigating them to pass disunion resolutions, and stirring up both national and village orators to attack the proviso unto death: such persons must be amazed to read in that exhumed letter, written during the fiercest of the strife, these ominous words:
"With this impression I would regard any compromise or adjustment of the proviso, or even its defeat, without meeting the danger in its whole length and breadth, as very unfortunate for us. It would lull us to sleep again, without removing the danger, or materially diminishing it."
This issue to be forced was a separation of the slave and the free States; the means, a commercial non-intercourse, in shutting the slave State seaports against the vessels of the free States; the danger to be met, was in the trial of this issue, by the means indicated; which were simply high treason when pursued to the overt act. Mr. Calhoun had flinched from that act in the time of Jackson, but he being dead, and no more Jacksons at the head of the government, he rejoiced in another chance of meeting the danger—meeting it in all its length and breadth; and deprecated the loss of the proviso as the loss of this chance.
Truly the abolitionists and the nullifiers were necessary to each other—the two halves of a pair of shears, neither of which could cut until joined together. Then the map of the Union was in danger; for in their conjunction, that map was cloth between the edges of the shears. And this was that Wilmot Proviso, which for two years convulsed the Union, and prostrated men of firmness and patriotism—a thing of nothing in itself, but magnified into a hideous reality, and seized upon to conflagrate the States and dissolve the Union. The Wilmot Proviso was not passed: that chance of forcing the issue was lost: another had to be found, or made.