The 1850 Compromise

I have been reading, as a slight deviation from reading on democracy and parties, a book on the Compromise of 1850, where supposedly the Civil War was delayed for ten years. The book is The Great American Debate by Fergus Bordewych. I had read about this period in our history before, but this book provides a more detailed look at the events of that time. The book makes it clear that far from delaying the Civil War for another ten years, what the debate did was to galvanize the North into a much more explicit antagonism against the institution of slavery. From the founding to 1850 the effort was to avoid the issue, given the dominance of the South in the federal government, in the presidency and in congress, and it may have been that the moral and economic dimensions of slavery were just not as well recognized. The Compromise of 1850 ended this willful ignorance. It was the end of an era, with the deaths of John Calhoun, the apostle of the virtues of slavery, of Henry Clay, the great compromiser, and of Daniel Webster, the great orator and traitor to his principles. It was the beginning of the career of Jefferson Davis and Stephen Douglas. The only heroes were William Seward, who spoke early of the moral evil of slavery, and Abraham Lincoln, who came only ten years after to make the same argument.

All of the elements I discuss in my book, the dominance of the senate, the ability of the south to use the lack of discipline in the senate to delay proceedings, the changes in demography, the blatant effort of the south to enshrine minority privileges for its institution of slavery, the inability of the north to take a principled stand on the issue, in part because of the south’s control of the senate—all of these things were present then and did not get discussed. These issues continue to plague us today. There is still little discipline in congress, and the minority is able to prevent action. I learned that the first mistake was to give to the south the ability to count every slave as 3/5 of a person, giving them an advantage in the House in terms of representation. This prolonged the dominance of the south, and allowed them to develop the delusion that they were somehow privileged even though they were a minority. Another aspect of the basically undemocratic constitution.