THE WILMOT PROVISO; OR, PROHIBITION OF SLAVERY IN THE TERRITORIES:
ITS INUTILITY AND MISCHIEF.
Scarcely was the war with Mexico commenced when means, different
from those of arms, were put in operation to finish it. One of these
was the return of the exiled Santa Anna (as has been shown) to his
country, and his restoration to power, under the belief that he
was favorable to peace, and for which purpose arrangements began
to be made from the day of the declaration of the war--or before.
In the same session another move was made in the same direction,
that of getting peace by peaceable means, in an application made to
Congress by the President, to place three millions of dollars at
his disposal, to be used in negotiating for a boundary which should
give us additional territory: and that recommendation not having
been acted upon at the war session, was renewed at the commencement
of the next one. It was recommended as an "important measure for
securing a speedy peace;" and as an argument in favor of granting
it, a sum of two millions similarly placed at the disposition of Mr.
Jefferson when about to negotiate for Florida (which ended in the
acquisition of Louisiana), was plead as a precedent; and justly.
Congress, at this second application, granted the appropriation;
but while it was depending, Mr. Wilmot, a member of Congress, from
Pennsylvania, moved a proviso, _that no part of the territory to
be acquired should be open to the introduction of slavery_. It was
a proposition not necessary for the purpose of excluding slavery,
as the only territory to be acquired was that of New Mexico and
California, where slavery was already prohibited by the Mexican laws
and constitution; and where it could not be carried until those
laws should be repealed, and a law for slavery passed. The proviso
was nugatory, and could answer no purpose but that of bringing on
a slavery agitation in the United States; for which purpose it
was immediately seized upon by Mr. Calhoun and his friends, and
treated as the greatest possible outrage and injury to the slave
States. Congress was occupied with this proviso for two sessions,
became excessively heated on the subject, and communicated its
heat to the legislatures of the slave States--by several of which
conditional disunion resolutions were passed. Every where, in the
slave States, the Wilmot Proviso became a Gorgon's head--a chimera
dire--a watchword of party, and the synonyme of civil war and the
dissolution of the Union. Many patriotic members were employed in
resisting the proviso as a _bona fide_ cause of breaking up the
Union, if adopted; many amiable and gentle-tempered members were
employed in devising modes of adjusting and compromising it; a few,
of whom Mr. Benton was one, produced the laws and the constitution
of Mexico to show that New Mexico and California were free from
slavery; and argued that neither party had any thing to fear, or to
hope--the free soil party nothing to fear, because the soil was now
free; the slave soil party nothing to hope, because they could not
take a step to make it slave soil, having just invented the dogma
of "No power in Congress to legislate upon slavery in territories."
Never were two parties so completely at loggerheads about nothing:
never did two parties contend more furiously against the greatest
possible evil. Close observers, who had been watching the progress
of the slavery agitation since its inauguration in Congress in 1835,
knew it to be a game played by the abolitionists on one side and
the disunionists on the other, to accomplish their own purposes.
Many courageous men denounced it as such--as a game to be kept up
for the political benefit of the players; and deplored the blindness
which could not see their determination to keep it agoing to the
last possible moment, and to the production of the greatest possible
degree of national and sectional exasperation. It was while this
contention was thus raging, that Mr. Calhoun wrote a confidential
letter to a member of the Alabama legislature, hugging this
proviso to his bosom as a fortunate event--as a means of "_forcing
the issue_" between the North and the South; and deprecating
any adjustment, compromise, or defeat of it, as a misfortune to
the South: and which letter has since come to light. Gentle and
credulous people, who believed him to be in earnest when he was
sounding the _tocsin_ to rouse the States, instigating them to pass
disunion resolutions, and stirring up both national and village
orators to attack the proviso unto death: such persons must be
amazed to read in that exhumed letter, written during the fiercest
of the strife, these ominous words:
"_With this impression I would regard any compromise or
adjustment of the proviso, or even its defeat, without meeting
the danger in its whole length and breadth, as very unfortunate
for us. It would lull us to sleep again, without removing the
danger, or materially diminishing it._"
This issue to be forced was a separation of the slave and the free
States; the means, a commercial non-intercourse, in shutting the
slave State seaports against the vessels of the free States; the
danger to be met, was in the trial of this issue, by the means
indicated; which were simply high treason when pursued to the
overt act. Mr. Calhoun had flinched from that act in the time
of Jackson, but he being dead, and no more Jacksons at the head
of the government, he rejoiced in another chance of meeting the
danger--meeting it in all its length and breadth; and deprecated the
loss of the proviso as the loss of this chance.
Truly the abolitionists and the nullifiers were necessary to
each other--the two halves of a pair of shears, neither of which
could cut until joined together. Then the map of the Union was in
danger; for in their conjunction, that map was cloth between the
edges of the shears. And this was that Wilmot Proviso, which for
two years convulsed the Union, and prostrated men of firmness
and patriotism--a thing of nothing in itself, but magnified into
a hideous reality, and seized upon to conflagrate the States and
dissolve the Union. The Wilmot Proviso was not passed: that chance
of forcing the issue was lost: another had to be found, or made.