lecture 6, "expansion and slavery: legacies of the mexican war..."
david blight

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frederick douglass' 4th of July speech: "like Beethoven on steriods, with language as weapon."

given in 1852, in Rochester, NY, in the wake of the crisis that has gripped the country in the wake of the Compromise of 1850, as slavery expands into the West.

"why have you invited me to speak on your Fourth of July?" a critique of American hypocrisy--utilizing "by the rivers of Babylon" passage from Bible.

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in 1847, in the midst of that expansionist war (and a modest number of Northerners who opposed it; and certainly abolitionists, who saw it as a war for the expansion of slavery), Douglass called America a "nation of inconsistencies."

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the anti-slavery impulse that takes hold in the American north goes through various stages:

(1) 1830s-1840s: an expansion of organization of American abolitionisms--tended to be a kind of Garrisonian moral suasion. largely devoted to this idea of reforming or changing the heart of American people. driven very much by the Second Great Awakening.

(2) 1837, with the birth of the Liberty Party--we see this moral line take a political turn. a political party begun by some quite serious abolitionists. in the 1840s, after minimal political success, the Liberal Party becomes the Free Soil Party, in 1848 (directly in response to the expansionist war with Mexico). directly committed to keeping the West (and, America's future) free from the institution of slavery.

it is a fear of slavery, a fear of the way slavery as a system could control America's future that comes to the front and center in American politics after the Mexican War (1846-1848, following formal annexation of Texas in 1845--effective annexation had come 9 years earlier, in 1836).

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how did we get the Mexican War?

after the annexation of Texas by the United States in 1836, which was to be that great Western border that was seemingly limitless (for that matter, there was no Southern border decided upon). the US simply took Texas. Mexico never accepted the Rio Grande as the border. they assumed that, if there was a border, it would be the Nueses river, further North and East.

we've talked about how the Western expansion of the South was booming from 1820s-1840s--and there was a deep and abiding sentiment in American society, now known as Manifest Destiny, of inevitablity. a "racialism" that informed a deep commitment to these territories and their colonization.

this was seen, of course, in the policy re: Native Americans--Indian Removal Act (1830) under President Jackson in the 1830s physically removed Native Americans from their homelands. the five great tribes were, between early-mid 1830s were removed, outwest--to Oklahoma and further. that Indian removal was part and parcel of opening up this Southern frontier to the cotton boom. and the development of the greatest source of wealth in the Southern US.

in the presidential election of 1844, James K. Polk, an avid expansionist, Democrat, and a slaveholding cotton-planter from Tennesee, ran against Henry Clay (intellectual founder of the Whig party, which operated from 1833-1856 on a platform of supremacy of Congress, among other things), who also ran on an expansionist platform. But the Whigs tended to argue for expansion by negotiation(!). Polk said," negotiation=bullshit, elect me and I will give you Mexico and Oregon. "

it was a close election, Polk won by 36,000, out of 2.8 million. (Liberty Party won 16,000, mostly in NY). just before John Tyler left office, he pushed through the annexation of Texas in 1845 (not as a negotiated treaty, but as a State--i.e., without 2/3 approval of Congress). but James K. Polk became the sixth of the first ten American presidents who was a slaveholder. before the American Civil War, 2/3 of all American presidents were either slaveholders or deeply sympathetic. 2/3 of all members of the Supreme Court. James K. Polk was, as far as we know, the only president who bought and sold slaves from the Oval Office(!).

Polk ordered troops to move South to the Rio Grande in order to, in effect, see what the Mexicans would do. in early 1846, there was a brief attempt at negotiation (which was conducted in French, actually, because neither spoke the other's language). Mexico had never acknowledged the Rio Grande. there was a three-week stand-off along the river, and then on the 24th of April 1846 a Mexican cavalry contingent ambushed American troops on the other side. two weeks later, Zachary Taylor's dispatch reached to the White House, announcing that hostilities had commenced in Mexico. Polk received the news and immediately asked Congress for a declaration of war, saying "Mexico had invaded American soil(!)" Approved, even if with a number of abstentions from Northerners in Senate.

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the first major expansionist war of American history. a flurry of speculation about what soldiers, settlers might find in Mexico. Herman Melville said, "the people here are all in a state of delirium... nothing is talked about but the halls of Montezuma." Illionis paper arguing "reptiles on the path of progressive democracy."

many abolitionists had very serious things to say about the war. James Russel Lowell: "a national crime committed in behoof of slavery, our national sin." Ralph Waldo Emerson (in his private journals, however): "the US will conquer Mexico, but it will be as though a man swallows arsenic... Mexico will poison us..."

by the end of 1846, the US had established dominion over the southern half of California. in 1847, US forces conquered Mexico City. and, by the end, a treaty was negotiated, on dictated terms. Treaty of Guadaloupe-Hidalgo, in the US lost 13,000 Americans in a year and a half of fighting, the vast majority of disease. an estimated 50,000 Mexicans died.1848, gave the US all of the western part of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah, Nevada, parts of Colorado). Payment was $15 million.

that same year, 1848, was a tremendous turning point (as important in American history as in Europe, some argue). as these nationalistic revolutions against monarchy were breaking out all over Europe (Austria, Hungary, Italy, Germany, France--some will succeed, some will fail), republican America was seizing territory, and launching an Empire on its own continent.

sitting in House of Representatives, young Congressman from IL, Abraham Lincoln, voted against the Mexican War every chance he got, calling Polk's justification "a half-insane mumbling of a fever dream."

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why all the fuss? what did the war unleash?

Daniel Webster, the great Whig of MA, probably the most powerful and important Northern politician, kept trying to argue that this wasn't really all that important. (the Southwest was all desert--we won't expand slavery there, "an imaginary Negro in an [inhospitable] place"

but why did so many people care?

first, Northerners (prof is admitting that he is generalizing): (1) they cared about this because there was a belief that slavery could indeed take place in the Southwest (in mining, e.g.)--and, lo and behold, what was discovered in California, but gold! and why couldn't you build canals/railroads/etc. with slaves? (2) lots of Northerners in politics favored non-extension on constitutional grounds. (3) didn't want to be complicit in the expansion of slavery--"don't ask me to vote, to create a new territory, which will become a Slave state." Northerners wanted to confine slavery to the South--make slavery sectional, but free labor national. (4) there was also racism, involved in this. they saw the West as a place that would be free for small, white farmers--free from competition from a powerful Southern oligarchy. (5) and finally, of course, there were some abolitionists around, who believed in the immorality of slavery's expansion. (and sometimes there would be a mix of all this: racism, moral opposition, etc..--Abraham Lincoln, e.g.)

the South: (1) cared, in part, because an assumption had set in that it was not just because it was considered the South's destiny, but also a necessity for its economic system ("to check the expansion of slavery would be to strangle the Southern economy and way of life"). (2) the growing slave population in existing Southern states was a possible powder-keg--they feared the "shrinking" South as an economic entity, as a political culture--an economy turning in on itself, possibly. (3) political party in the Congress. new states meant two new senators. in 1850, the ratio of slave states to free states was 1:1 (15 to 15). they wanted to sustain that parity. California will be the test case. (4) and then there's a question of State's rights--did anyone have the right to prohibit anyone else from taking their property anywhere? "you Northerners have no right to stop me from taking my wagon, my horse, and my slave, anywhere I wish."(5) there's a sense of honor, here--the legal standing of slavery in the Western territories stood as a measure of its moral standing everywhere. if you tell me that slavery is not a part of America's future, then you're telling me that it's wrong in my home. and that's unacceptable.

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the fuss, then, is this is because this is really a debate about American's future.

there were four plans put in place:

(1) Wilmont Proviso: penned by a young Democratic HofR, who got up in the midst of the Mexican War, who got up during the debates and said, "in any new territory we gain from Mexico, there won't be slavery." it became the rallying cry of the Free Soil movement. all but one Northern legislature endorsed it; all the Southern legistlatures condemned it. it passed the House of Representatives, but did not pass the Senate (where the slave states still had parity). there was a good deal of racist support for the Proviso (and here we see the mixture of Northern anti-slavery sentiments)--"I have no sympathy for the slaves... I speak on behalf of the free white men..." Keep the West free of black people, essentially.

(2) State sovereignty (South's position): ultimately, no federal legislature, President, etc., had the authority to stop slavery's expansion.

(3) Popular sovereignty: the simple idea that there would be no act of Congress--take Congress out of the story, and simply let the people in the Western territory have a vote. let there be a referendum, popular democracy. "a charm of ambiguity"about this proposal. the problem, of course, was when do you hold the vote? do you establish a rule about the #'s of ppl there. Southerners wanted the vote later in the process, because it would take them a while to take slaves/their system out there.

(4) they went back to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which prohibited slavery North of the parallel. half of California, of course, was North of that line. in the 1850s, people suggesting that we continue to draw careful geographic lines across the West.

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the election of 1848 was crucial: Democrats ran on a popular sovereignty platform, candidate was Lewis Cass. Zachary Taylor was the Whig candidate, recent war hero, "ol' rough an' ready." problem was, of course, that he was a Louisiana slaveholder, not very committed to Whig principles.

there were two new political offshoots, at this time, over this furore: (1) the conscience Whigs--a group of abolitionists created in MA who broke with the Whig party (and would never go back, harbinger of its future demise) (2) Free Soil Party, created in 1848, and ran Martin Van Buren, a former president. and they stood for one thing--stopping slavery's expansion. they took 10%!

Zachary Taylor was elected.

and, lo and behold, gold was discovered in California--and so suddenly there was a desperate need to find a middle-ground. on a night in January 1850, Henry Clay gets together with Daniel Webster and they cut a deal, that became the Compromise of 1850 (they're drunk, prof is noting).

that month, Clay would announce the five provisions of the Compromise before the Senate (holding a piece of George Washington's coffin, to boot!). people were very worried that the Union was going to unravel, and fall apart.

and indeed, it almost did.