March 21, 1831
Executive Mansion, Washington, D.C.
For Secretary of State John Sergeant, today was shaping up to be rather unusual. President Clay had asked to see both him and Postmaster General Charles E. Dudley in the Oval Office. Even with all Quincy Adams had done to expand the federal government, it wasn’t so vast that two men in different offices would never meet, but Sergeant had rarely had occasion to cross paths with Dudley. And judging by the look on his face, Dudley was as confused as he was.
The president turned to Sergeant. “To begin with,” he said, “what do you know about the situation with Spain?”
“Funny you should ask. Only this morning I received the news that one of the more popular generals from New Spain had been killed in ambush in Cuba. Lopez de Santa… Santa Anna, I think. The story I hear is that he set up camp too close to a stretch of woods where rebels lurked.”
“A popular general, but apparently not a very good one,” said Clay. “What of the larger picture?”
Sergeant took a moment to collect his thoughts. “Spain is… in a bad way,” he said. “The rebellion in Cuba is costing them dear, both in revenue lost and the money they must spend to reclaim the isle. In Haiti, when last I heard they had well-nigh ceded all save the eastern third, the cities of Santo Domingo and Port-au-Prince and a few other towns on the coast. Had they come to blows with the Dutch in the Philippines last year, they might well have lost those isles.”
“Does it seem to you that the Spaniards are any less determined to win in Haiti?”
“If they’ve started to see reason, I haven’t heard it. They seem bent on fighting to the last East Indian.”
“That would explain this.” Clay held up an advertisement clipped from a newspaper and handed it to Sergeant. “It has appeared in several newspapers in our southern states.”
On closer examination, it purported to be from the Spanish government, and was a call for volunteers. WHITE MEN! PROVE your VALOR! Join the fight against the SAVAGE TRIBE of RUNAGATE NEGROES who have overrun SANTO DOMINGO… It offered to pay for transportation and food, but said nothing about arms or gear.
“This government is more desperate than I thought, if they seriously intend to make Hessians of us,” said Sergeant. “And I marvel that the Spanish government has the cheek to call upon slaveholders to fight for them in Haiti while they fight other slaveholders in Cuba. Still, so long as they do not propose to make war upon us or our allies, I don’t see that they’re doing anything against our laws.”
“There are those who disagree,” said Clay. “Calhoun, for instance. He would like to see these advertisements outlawed.”
“What?” Sergeant was perplexed. Apart from the outrageousness of the idea, it seemed to him that Calhoun should have been if anything sympathetic to the Spaniards.
“He’s concerned that too much talk of Haiti might inspire our own slaves to revolt. Even these advertisements… he says, and I am inclined to agree, that Negroes’ powers of intellect are sufficient to infer that if white men are fighting black men, black men must perforce be fighting white men — and that they have yet to be defeated.”
“On that score, surely the damage is done,” said Sergeant. “Haiti has been out of white men’s control for rather a long time.”
“True,” said Clay, “but how many slaves even know about Haiti? I doubt if one in ten could tell you the name of a single island in the Caribbean. A good master tries not to let them learn too much of the outside world. Speaking of which…” He turned to the postmaster.
“You’ve heard that Calhoun wants to see the Post Office closed to abolitionist… messages,” said Clay.
“So I have,” said Dudley. “I have not heard what possible rationale they can offer for this mad course of action.”
“The argument Calhoun and the other Quids put forth,” said Clay in carefully neutral tones, “is that abolitionists and others have the right to speak as they please, but that the Post Office is under no obligation to facilitate their speech, and that to do so would undermine public order in the slave states.”
“Have any of these people considered the extent of the powers we’d need to carry out their wishes?” said Dudley. “Reading every letter, judging its contents… we’d need more men than the Army simply to do that.”
“Most impractical,” said Clay.
“Not ten years ago,” said Sergeant, “such a suggestion from the Tertium Quids would have been unthinkable. It would have gone against everything they believed.”
“Or everything Mr. Randolph[1] believed, at least,” said Clay.
“None of us here shares the Quids’ principles,” Sergeant continued, “but to see them abandon those principles—does this not prove that slavery corrupts everything it touches?”
Clay held up a hand for silence. “Your views in this matter are known, John. There is no need to recapitulate them.”
“I do so only to show how well borne out they are.”
Clay held up a hand. “I will not argue with you,” he said. “These men are frightened—frightened by Haiti, frightened by the Paixão de Cristo, frightened by the triumph of abolitionism in the West Indies. Frightened men do foolish things.” He took a breath. “I am neither frightened nor foolish.”
Sergeant nodded. He supposed he should have been satisfied with this, but he wasn’t. While Clay would do nothing extravagant to help slavery, he would do nothing at all against it unless compelled by circumstances.
Which was… bad. Slavery is an evil, to be tolerated where it holds sway for no other reason than that we cannot root it out without grave injury to the republic, but not to be extended one kilometer further.
After all, there was a reason that even with the canals, industry was far slower to grow in the South than in the North. By all logic, there should not be one cotton mill in Massachusetts, Manchester or Mulhouse. Yet there they were, spinning raw cotton into thread thousands of kilometers away from Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi where it was grown. The only immigrant population the South was known for was the Italians come to dig the canals, and that stream had dried to a trickle years ago—and many of those who had come had returned to Italy[2], moved north or gone to the mountains to start vineyards… a business where they had little competition from slaveholders. As the man behind the American System, Clay had to see this. But as a slaveholder himself, it was too much to expect that he’d act on it.
[1] John Randolph of Roanoke. Still alive, but in poor health, and watching these shenanigans isn’t helping.
[2] In American history, we often forget about the immigrants who made their fortunes and moved back to Europe.