Massachusetts and South Carolina at the Sectional Crisis, Part 2
How The Fluidity of Political Parties in the First Half of the 19th Century Affected The Battle To Succeed Webster in Massachusetts and Calhoun in South Carolina
During the first half of the 19th century political parties were rarely stable and came to rise and fall so that individual elected officials lasted longer than the parties they could be elected under. To use the most pertinent example Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina would serve three different political parties during their nearly forty years in politics.
Calhoun would start his career as Democratic-Republican in 1812 and would serve as Vice President to both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson under that party. Upon resigning to run for Senate the first time in 1828, he took on the party label ‘Nullifier’ a third party that argue for the kind of government he served in South Carolina. Finally in 1838 he officially joined the Democratic Party.
Webster by contrast would begin his career as a Federalist, a party already in decline when he joined it when first elected to Congress in 1812. In 1825 he joined the National Republican Party which he would build with Henry Clay. And when it collapsed in 1833 like Clay he would help form the Whig Party which he would represent in the Senate.
But even before the Compromise of 1850 was being formed in Congress Webster’s position in the latter was becoming more tenuous. The Whig Party was beginning to divide between the so-called Cotton Whigs and Conscience Whigs, which were divided on how to deal with slavery. The Cotton Whigs, which were in the South and much of the North were uncomfortable with the North’s antislavery stands and who wanted to maintain the lucrative flow of southern cotton to the Massachusetts textile factory. The Conscience Whigs viewed slavery as a civic evil and considered its eradication a moral imperative. Webster was a Cotton Whig in a region of the country that was increasingly becoming the Conscience Whigs — or was abandoned the party in favor of the Free Soil Party starting in 1848. Even before his speech in favor of the Compromise of 1850, men in his own state were dismissing Webster as ‘the relic of a bygone era.
Calhoun himself was having trouble with his own sphere of influence. In December of 1848 he had called a meeting of Southern senators and Congressmen in Washington with the aim of producing an address to the people of the South, outlining the dire threat of Northern encroachment, arguing for the idea of an independent Southern nation. Calhoun’s influence didn’t have much weight: of the 121 members of Calhoun’s region, just 48 signed on.
The Compromise of 1850 looked like it was headed for disaster after its initial formation. President Zachary Taylor had little use for it and might have wanted a conflict. But when he suddenly sickened and died in July of 1850, his vice president Millard Fillmore ascended to the White House. On board with Clay’s version of the compromise his political views improved the prospect of passage.
While this was going on Robert Winthrop, a Massachusetts congressman and a Cotton Whig like Webster, was approached by one of his colleagues from the Massachusetts delegation Joseph Grinnell, a friend of the new president. Fillmore had just fired Taylor’s entire cabinet and paralyzed with indecision, was deciding on who the appoint to fill the post of Secretary of State. He was considering either Winthrop or Webster, who had previously held the post under William Henry Harrison and John Tyler. Winthrop extolled his colleagues virtues with an eye on Webster’s seat in the Senate. Webster moved upwards and Winthrop was appointed to fill out the remainder of Webster’s unexpired term.
Winthrop was only forty-one in 1850 but had already established himself as one of the major figures in Massachusetts politics. Descended from the legendary Winthrop family which dated back to 1630, he had been first elected to Massachusetts House of Representatives at 26, the House at 31 and Speaker at the age of 38. However in the battle for the Speaker in 1849, he had ended up losing the Howell Cobb in a struggle that had symbolized the divisiveness in the nation. Even then his standoffish behavior made him seem above politics to his colleagues.
Winthrop knew he was going to face challenges if he wanted to hold his Senate seat for another six year term. Part of it was due to his connection to Webster, toxic politically in Massachusetts and with hostility between the division in his own party and the Free Soilers. His support for the Compromise of 1850 — especially the Fugitive Slave Act — made him suspect the Whig Party in Massachusetts might crumble very soon. Already there was a division between loyalty to one’s party and principles — which Winthrop followed — and loyalty to the moral fervor of the cause of anti-slavery. Winthrop suspected he would ended up on the losing side.
By this point a new political force was developing in Massachusetts: the Young Whigs. Mostly from established upper-crust families, who begrudged the rise of ‘new money’ — mostly from the industrial factories that powered the Cotton Whigs — and the political power that came with it. To them, the central issue was the moral issue of slavery. Charles Francis Adams was one of those early Young Whigs, and like his father before him, developed a dislike for ‘the distressing vulgarities of politics’. Eventually he ran for the legislature and served in both the state House and state Senate between 1841 and 1846. When Cotton Whig friend denounced Garrison in terms they found jarring, he would join the anti-slavery side and run as vice president for the newly formed Free Soil Party. (As was stated in the previous article that loyalty was not returned by Garrison in his publication.)
During this period a prominent Massachusetts figure arose who while he subscribed to The Liberator was never part of Garrison’s circle. Indeed he eschewed what he considered the ‘vindictive, bitter and unchristian tone’ of Garrison’s paper.
Charles Sumner was born in 1811, one of 9 children in a household where the parents were solemn and without warmth to any of their family. He taught himself to read Latin and entered the legal profession but while talkative he was austere and humorless. Frequently melancholy, he quickly became an activism for social causes — prison reform, education, international peace and the evils of slavery. He would form what would be an almost religious like faith in mankind’s capacity to improve itself. He would embrace a gaudy idealism expressed in a tone of zealotry — railing against patriotism in speeches on the 4th of July, calling for the end of warfare throughout the world, pressing for antislavery agitation beyond what most established figures considered prudent. Worse, he became a ‘master of invective’, directing at opponents such venom and cruelty that many Bostonians recoiled in shock and shunned him socially.
Winthrop quickly became a target of his wrath, first with his vote authorizing the war in Mexico that terminated a decades long friendship. Quickly it became clear his persona was self-assured, self-absorbed — and completely lacking in self-awareness. He would charge ahead with little regard for the feelings of others or the impact it would have on him. If he were to lose friends as a result, he would simply make new friends.
He resisted the urge to go into electoral politics until 1848 when he challenged Winthrop in Congress as a Free Soil candidate. He would lose to him badly and his successor two years later, but the losses only whetted his appetite.
This self-destruction among the Whigs made it clear that the Massachusetts party was in deep trouble. The Whigs has been using New England for their body of strength since its inception and now with the fractures, the Democrats saw an opening. Unable to stand on their own with the power they had, they aligned with the Free Soilers who held the balance of power.
The major leader of the party in that state was Henry Wilson, president of the Massachusetts Senate. He had hoped to lead his fledgling party to bootstrap itself to prominence until Adams and his allies objected on the alliance out of a consideration for ‘power rather than hallowed principle’. This emergence was forcing Whigs into three-way races that had diminished their prospects for winning elections. The fall elections cost the Whigs the majority in the statehouse and put the Democrats and Free-Soilers into a new majority.
The Democrats wanted to control the state and wanted to put Democrats in all the major legislative positions, governor, lieutenant governor, House Speaker etc. The Free Soilers were concerned with the slavery issue and only wanted Webster’s seat in the Senate. They would choose Charles Sumner, a decision that shocked Democrats and Cotton whigs.
When the legislative balloting began in January, Sumner scored a 60.53 percent majority on the sixth ballot in the Senate. The House would prove more troublesome as Caleb Cushing, a Whig-turned-Democrat who loathed Sumner, pulled together a coalition of nearly thirty Democrats who wouldn’t vote for Sumner under any circumstances. It would take 26 ballots before on April 23rd two Whigs switched from Winthrop to Sumner giving him 193 votes to Winthrop’s 166 — just enough for a majority. The win was the official political death-knell for the power of Daniel Webster in his home state, something he would acknowledge. After a disastrous run for the governorship later that year Winthrop’s political career was over and Massachusetts was about to enter a new era in politics.
When Barnwell Rhett ascended to John C. Calhoun’s Senate seat, he had attained what he thought was his life’s ambition. He attended to assail no one and was warned to avoid the most troublesome southern unionists: Henry Clay, still vital at 74 and Mississippi’s Henry S. Foote.
He handled himself during the second session of Congress set to end in March, staying clear of both men and behaving cordially with Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis the South’s key spokesman — who Rhett considered too accommodating. Then in February 24 he rosed for his first extended address during debate of the Fugitive Slave Act. Entered into the Compromise to mollify the South Rhett challenged the law as being an overreach of federal power.
“The government has it not in its power to enforce this law,” he proclaimed. “I believe by the actions of the States, and the Staes alone, the rights of the South can be maintained and enforced.” This position confused many Southerners, who had welcomed the act as favoring their region. But for Rhett, the principle of state sovereignty superseded all others. “I protest this usurpation…It is fatal to the rights of the south.”
Clay observed this and calmly rose. He chided Rhett for going on at length about the Constitution’s delegated powers as if his elder colleagues didn’t already understand this fundamental element of the American.
The difficulty with the Senator and his school on delegated powers (is) if all others do not concur with them they are consolidationists, Federalists, Whigs, precipitating the country into ruin. Clay lumped him in with Free Soil Senator Salmon Chase saying that they held opposite opinions on nearly everything but joined together “in expressing the opinion that there is no power in Congress of the United States to pass the fugitive slave law, and that Washington, and that all of us from the commencement of the government down to this time, have been wrong.”
It was a devastating putdown. In South Carolina an amused James Hammond noted that Southern politicians were threatening secession if the fugitive slave measure were repealed and here was Rhett implicitly urged it as a representative of South Carolina. Rhett cared little for consistency and waited five days for an opportunity to speak again. But Congress adjourned before he could get a chance. Rhett was determined to use the Compromise as a measure to argue for secession. In South Carolina Rhett went out of his way to argue for a secessionist movement to secede on its own.
However in the months that followed, opposition was growing within the state. Rhett crisscrossed his home state urging for a statewide vote in order to endorse it, issuing dire warnings about South Carolina’s fate at the hands of abolitionists if it didn’t extricate itself from the Union. He ignored the fears of those such as his fellow Senator Andrew Pickens Butler that a federal blockade would shut off trade as ‘humbug’ “By our secession,” he declared, “the union is dissolved by our mere non-action.
The movement failed. Across the state cooperationist candidates captured 25,045 votes to 17,010 for secessionist candidates. The cooperationists elected their men in six of the states seven Congressional districts and 25 of the 44 assembly districts. The result was a humiliation for Rhett in his home state. And when he returned to the Senate in December he came under fire from Henry Foote, once a Southern firebrand but now a defender of the 1850 compromise. Introducing a resolution in support, he suddenly launched into a bitter denunciation of Rhett as a hater of the Union and a possible traitor. When Pickens Butler tried to defend him, saying this was an attack on South Carolina, Foote countered that he had high gratification to South Carolina who had successfully opposed Rhett and his secessionist allies. “I felt that real people of South Carolina had come nobly to the rescue of the honor of the state in the contest lately in progress between them and certain demagogues.”
Rhett sought to defend himself by scoffing at Foote’s epithets — while also embracing them. “I am a secessionist — I am a disunionist.” As long as South Carolina was part of the Union “I am bound, as I am sworn, to support the Constitution…but in my opinion, the compact of the Constitution is violated — the Union of the Constitution is dissolved.”
The exchange went on for three days and by the time it was over it was clear that Foote had revealed just how far he had ventured beyond conventional discourse and to his own political zone. He was a marked man in the Senate. When he left for the Christmas holidays Alabama’s Jeremiah Clemens made a bizarre attack saying that northerners Charles Sumner, William Seward and Salmon had responded to Rhett’s speech with applause and encouragement.
Rhett was urged to ignore it when he went back to Washington but instead attacked Clemens with such venom that the Alabama Senator suggested perhaps a duel should settle this. And when the South Carolina legislature met in April of 1851 to determine a course of action, there was no consensus. Rhett was not even allowed to address the convention.
The day the convention adjourned Rhett resigned from the Senate. “In consequence of the proceedings of the convention which has just ended, I deem myself no longer a proper representative of the position and policy of the people of South Carolina with respect to the aggression of the general government. “ Not even his home state was willing to come around to his way of thinking on the crisis over slavery. South Carolina had much of his zealotry but they weren’t prepared to follow him into the unknown of immediate and independent secession. Rhett had lost both his constituency and his political standing. This would lead to the permanent assent of the senior senator: Andrew Pickens Butler.
Andrew Pickens Butler was a big man with a friendly demeanor and a hearty laugh. He was known for his good-natured ridicule that he couldn’t take in kind. He was praised for his common-sense and being high minded and honorable. His father had been a general in the Revolutionary War and he grew up knowing his grandfather and uncle had died in the war of independence. He had been elected to the state House when in his 20s. He spent nine years in the state Senate and had participated in the battle for nullification with Calhoun. He had moved on to the bench and moved to the Senate in 1846. He moved on to the Senate that year. Quickly he became chairman of the Judiciary Committee, with jurisdiction over many slavery issues and issued considerable sway over debates on the subject. He was just as opposed to the Compromise of 1850, only endorsing the Fugitive Slave Act. He was blunt in his rhetoric but no where near as fiery as Rhett.
As a result in years to come Butler would have increasing power of the South’s interest in the next decade. Yet oddly enough when Charles Sumner came to the Senate, despite being opposites on both political and social appearance the two men would initially be cordial. That would not last long into the tumultuous decade that would follow.
In the next article I will deal with how both states played a role in the 1852 election and how the conflict over slavery that the Compromise of 1850 seemed to have put at bay and how it flared back into life not long after.