Zachary Taylor
The Last American President
Final Paper: History of the USA and ASA
Part One: The Prelude to Secession
By Phillip Godfrey
11/7/2006
July 4, 1850 is now remembered as the last Independence Day of the undivided First American Republic then officially known as the United States of America. The day was then little noted for any extraordinariness. It was a hot and humid day in which the then President Zachary Taylor unexpectedly cancelled scheduled attendance to the dedication of the Washington Monument to visit his frail daughter Sarah Knox Taylor Davis, the wife of Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis, who was losing a battle against malaria, something that nearly killed her fifteen years before. So it was, on the last Independence Celebration on this historic day, the President was not even Washington, but Arlington.
Current political events dominated the fourth. The Senate was at an impasse following the failure of Clay and Douglas Compromise to gain a majority in the Senate and many Southern Whig politicians where demanding that California State Constitution be edited to legalize slavery as per the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the continuation of the slave trade in Washington, DC. Northern politicians where steadfastly against the both and President Taylor had pushed for the admission of California as a free state with no concession made to the south. Adding to this was the Nashville Convention of not quite a month before where representatives from Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, Florida, and Tennessee meant to discuss the issues confronting the South. Voices of Secession where heard distortedly to their actual number and Zachary Taylor was enraged when news reached him in Arlington that Georgia and South Carolina had voted for disunion in Nashville. He is quoted as saying “[That] if South Carolina and Georgia take the final step of treason I will personally led the Army of this Republic to end this rebellion and hang the traitors from the highest tree.”
As the 31st Congress edged into late July and the great Henry Clay, then at seventy-one years, and the soon-to-be renowned Stephen A. Douglas pushed forward a compromise which would allow a free California, the organization of New Mexico Territory at the expense of Texas, the assumption of Texas’ dept by the federal government, the ending of the slave trade in DC, and an act that would have made all US citizens punishable with prison if they provided aid to a runaway slave. This compromise failed the in the Senate twice; despite amendments that put the burden of proof on the slave-catcher to prove an African was a former slave and the addition of a specific law that closed the north of the former Norte Mexico to slavery. During a conference with Henry Clay on August 2nd Zachary Taylor, showing a disdain for the entire legislative processes and its inability to compromise, said California’s representatives and senators would be seated in the 32nd Congress by his order despite Congress’s interactions. Henry Clay is said to have responded, “Sir, that is a disregard to the Constitution and the Congress. What may come of it is yours.”
Unfortunately, Senator Clay’s health has deteriorating rapidly from months of overwork. He fainted in the Senate on August 15th and was removed from floor. He returned within two weeks only to fall ill by early September. Evening while dying he still worked furiously, passing away on the last day of Congress, September 30, 1850. With him passed the last great compromise of the antebellum American political system.
Even while Henry Clay was dying a settlement was still frantically being forged. The original Clay-Douglas bill was hacked in two with the hopes that it would provide easier to swallow by the Senate. The first bill, called the Western Bill dealt with the recently gained Mexican Cession and Texas. It would have allowed the entry of California as a free state, the repudiation of Texan claims to New Mexico, the assuming of Texan dept by the US and the explicit barring of slavery north of the Missouri Compromise line. The second bill, known as the Slave Bill, dealt with the removal of the slave trade from Washington DC and Fugitive Slave Law – the law intended to help former slave owners reclaim their runaway slaves. Northern Whigs, Free Soilers and a few northern Democrats rejected the Slave Bill on the grounds that the presence of slaves hunters in their home states was far more repulsive then the continued existence the of slave trade in Washington. The majority of Democrats and all southern Whigs rejected the Western Bill because it promised them too little in exchange for losing their power in the Senate. Henry Clay’s death, the end of the 31st Congress – with the exception of the lame duck session in March –, Zachary Taylor refusal to interfere in what he viewed as a feud between politicians and the prospect of California's delegation being seated without Congressional approval all added to the apprehension in Washington as September ended in a deadlocked Congress.
A fever of polarization seemed to have swept in the time preceding the elections of 1850. The election in the House of Representatives and the Senate saw gains for both the Free-Soilers in the North and the Democrats and independent States’ Rights Representatives in the South. The losers were the Whigs which lost some thirty seats, down to seventy-eight seats in the House of Representatives. The Free-Soilers went up to six Representatives and three US senators while independent States’ Rights candidates received four representative seats and one senate seat. The Democrats were the main victors controlling over half the House of Representatives and in the Senate. The Whigs lost most of their southern supporters and more radical northerners. The rump Whig party that survived was a party of Taylor supporters.
As a reaction to Congress’s impasse a follow-up to the Nashville Convention was held in Georgia’s capital, Milledgeville from November 10 to the 17th. Original the meeting was supposed to take place in Charleston, but the South Carolinians feared that simply hosting the convention would make it seem too radical for most of the South. Present at the Milledgeville convention were delegates from every slave state with the exception of Delaware, but only one representative was sent by Maryland and two from Missouri. More then two hundred delegates were present including twelve Senators, twenty-five members of the Houses of Representatives and a former U.S. President.
Since the Nashville Convention of five months before there had been a drastic changing in the view of secession as a realistic option. During the Nashville Convention – where all but seventy-five of the one hundred-and-sixty-six delegates had been from Tennessee – only a handful of radicals from the Deep South, especially Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina, favored leaving the union. By November the supporters of secession grow to include many former moderates. Delegates from all of the Deep South, with a few exceptions, believed that if Taylor seated California congressional members and refused to back a compromise favorable to the south that they had the right and duty to secede. This view was shared by a strong minority of the delegates from North Carolina, Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee. Even a handful of Virginians, previously considered the most moderate of the delegations attending, agreed with the principle of secession in this case, but refused to consider such a radical act without more time to try to reach a compromise. The Anti-Union group as it is now known was lead by Jefferson Davis, stepson of Taylor until the death of Sarah Davis four months before. They faced steadfast opposition from the Federal Group. The Federal Group was made up of moderates from the Upper South and the Border States and was lead by Texas’ Governor Sam Houston. These two groups experienced a reversal in fortunes as the convention went progressed. The Federal Group began as the more powerful group with supporters in every delegation and a slight majority in the convention as a whole. By November 17, they had lost there advantage and the Anti-Union group achieved an even smaller majority then the Federal Group had previously enjoyed.
The Milledgeville Convention began with the Statement of Intents which reaffirmed states’ commitment to the Federal Union as based on the Constitution; stressing the right of slaves as property and the constitutional procedure for the formal admission of states into the Union, a response President Taylor’s intention to seat the Californian representatives without Congressional consent. Despite the conciliatory steps taken in the beginning after a week of debate the more hostile Statement of Principles was agreed upon by a slim majority of the delegates. This manifesto included a record of the grievances that the South had experienced and stated that the South had the right of secession. While the Statement of Intents had almost universal support and been signed by all the members the Statement of Principles has signed by only one-hundred and nine delegates with eighty-five refusing to sign and ten walking out – including the member from Maryland and the two from Missouri – when the Statement of Principles passed.
When President Taylor received word of both statements and the widespread support of the Statement of Intents among multiply Southern states he publicly reaffirmed that the Union was neither dissolvable nor capable of being left by one or several states. He also restated his position of not interfering with Congress; that is to neither give support or opposition to any compromise that might be reached dealing with the California, the slave trade in DC, a potential fugitive slave law or any other pressing matter that Congress debated during the lame duck secession of 1851. He also stated that if the South did secede that, “They would be resisted with full force of arms and the Union would be preserved.” To give credence to this claim George W. Crawford, the Georgian Secretary of Defense, was removed from position under the pretext that his having killed in a man in a duel in 1828 made him ineligible for such a high post and replaced him with William L. Marcy from Massachusetts who had held the Defense post in the Polk administration.
As Congress resumed in December a feeling of hostility dominated both houses. With Henry Clay dead and the prospective of a more polarized Congress in March cooperation between the North and South was nearly impossibly, but attempts were valiantly or foolhardily made. John Bell of Tennessee, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi and William R. King of Virginia presented the so-called Southern Bill which would have organized and opened up New Mexico territory to slavery at the expanse of Texas, left the rest of the Mexican Cession open the possibility of slavery, had the US assume Texan debt but it also would have allowed the removal of the slave trade in Washington and the admission of California as a free state. This bill had detractors on both sides of the Senate the radical secessionists in the South and moderate abolitionists and Free-Soilers from the North. It had strong support among the Senators from the Upper South, Border States, the Old Midwest and Texas. It, like the Clay-Douglas Bill before, still foundered for lack of a majority by early January, 1851. Compromise might have been still been possible except for events in South Carolina that transpired in January.
Before the Milledgeville Convention the state legislatures of Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina tucked appropriation money for their respective militias into bills for the expenses of their Milledgeville delegations. Mississippi had done the same during the earlier Nashville Convention. South Carolina had allocated the most money, 350,000 dollars, for weapons for their state militia. By December twenty-one English field artillery pieces had been delivered to Charleston and another twenty where being shipped. President Taylor could no longer allow the buildup of the state arsenal to such proportions and sent a firm letter to South Carolina’s Governor John Hugh Means and ordered him to turnover the artillery. Taylor stated in his letter “[that] the United States government can not allow a state to threaten the peace of its neighbors by such warlike military preparations.” Governor Means responded that South Carolina had “every right to arm its militia in anyway it saw fit with the states’ own finances…as is its right as enshrined in the Constitution.”
President Taylor was torn as to what to do. Taylor wrote frequent letters to political and military friends as to what to do. In a letter Winfield Scott; a follow military men, Unionist and Southerner, he stated “To allow South Carolina to arm itself would surely lead to the rest of the South to as well…exasperating inter-state tensions.” The North, which still mistrusted Taylor as a Southerner and a slave owner, would likely respond with its own increased armament. President Taylor wrote to his son Richard Taylor; a Mississippi plantation owner, friend of Senator Jefferson Davis and proponent of secession, “To allow South Carolina to arm would lead to two armed camps one southern and one northern. These two could not remain at peace and we may find ourselves fighting not one treasoness (sic) enemy, but two.”
On January 12, 1851 one-hundred-and-one United States Marines, seventy five Maryland militiamen and fifty-four US Navy sailors under the command of Lt. Colonel Robert E. Lee left Fort Carroll in Baltimore harbor in two ships bound for Charleston. Colonel Lee had been given a written order from Zachary Taylor to seize South Carolina’s field artillery and inter them in Fort Moultrie and Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor until South Carolina could be reimbursed for there field artillery. Word traveled faster then the Charleston Expedition and when Lee docked on January 21 five-hundred members of the South Carolina militia where protecting the harbor personally led commanded by Governor Means. Colonel Lee, showing no signs of stress despite being outnumbered more then two-to-one by the Carolinians, read the President’s order and demanded to be lead to the artillery so they could be confiscated. Governor Means dismissed the order and responded with his famous, but most likely apocryphal, quote “The President [or Taylor] has no authority in South Carolina.” Lee then reread the order and restated his demands. He was meant with jeers from a growing number of watching Charlestonians and the refusal of the militia to move. Faced with no other recourse he withdrew back to Fort Sumter with one ship sending the other with the Maryland militia back to Baltimore and awaiting his orders. Very few people yet understood want had happened or the consequences.
Sources:
Zachary Taylor and Jefferson Davis: Step-Father and Step-Son. Jack Northside Copyright 1978, University of Washington Press: Washington, DC
The Man Beyond the Myth. Abraham L. Freeman Copyright 2001, Chicago Metropolitan Press: Chicago, IL
The Failures of 1850. Jacob Stone Copyright 1967, Gillerman Press Associates: New York City, NY
Henry Clay: The Last Southern Politician. Roberto Gonzales Copyright 1982, American Publishers: Phoenix, Gastonia
The End of Whig Politics. Jack Featherstone Copyright 1971, Gillerman Press Associates: New York City, NY
South Carolina and Rebellion. 1820-1853. Fredrick Benjamin Copyright 1952, Biller & Sons: Toledo, Ohio
Milledgeville 1850. Jack Northside Copyright 1982, University of Washington Press: Washington, DC
Nashville to Milledgeville. Copyright 1987, John S. Smogger Denver Press: Denver, Colorado
The Papers and Speeches of Zachary Taylor, Revised Edition. Ed. Jack Northside Copyright 1978, Pittsburgh Metropolitan Press: Pittsburgh, PN
Congressional History 1821-1851. Ed. James Meyers Copyright 1965, Congress Publishing House: Indianapolis, IN
Figures of Revolution: 1775-1855. David Breckenridge Copyright 1991, Walton Publishers: Columbia, South Carolina
The Southern War of Independence; Book I Beginnings, Revised Edition. Travis Mill Copyright 2000, Walton Publishers: Nashville, TN
