Emancipation War: The Fall of Slavery and the Coming of the Thirteenth Amendment

Chapter 1

“No More Slave States”

It was a Tuesday, January 29, 1850, and Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky
had set himself the none-too-modest goal of solving the seemingly
intractable problem of American slavery once and for all. By Clay’s
own none-too-modest reckoning, he was uniquely qualified for the job,
having nearly done the very thing once before. Thirty years earlier, while
serving as Speaker of the House of Representatives, Clay had been the
driving force behind the landmark legislation that came to be known
as the Missouri Compromise. That storied law had admitted Missouri
to the Union as a slave state while simultaneously admitting Maine to
the Union as a free state; it also bisected the young nation, slashing a
line across the map that prohibited slavery “north of thirty-six
degrees and thirty minutes north latitude” in the remaining federal territory
acquired from France in the Louisiana Purchase. Clay’s legislative
maneuverings had thus preserved the tenuous sectional balance between
slave states and free states. The Union remained intact.

But that was then. The United States had kept on expanding in the
years since, its territorial growth aided in no small part by an 1848 military
triumph over the nation of Mexico. That war’s end had brought with it
vast new lands that were now readying to become new states, such as
California. Before such states might take their respective places in the
Union, however, Congress had to confront, again, the vexing question
of slavery and sectional balance. This was no mere academic query. The
nation then stood starkly divided between slave states and free states.
If Congress flatly outlawed slavery in the new federal territories―as
a growing number of lawmakers wanted to do―that meant Congress
could prevent new slave states from forming and entering the Union.
The number of free states would grow while the number of slave states
would remain the same. The slaveholders and their political allies did
the math and shuddered at the results.

Enter the senator from Kentucky. “I consider our country in danger,”
Clay was heard to say, “and if I can be the means in any measure
of averting that danger, my health and life is of little consequence.”
Clay’s overriding idea, soon to be known as the Compromise of 1850,
was to appease both sides by getting each to give up something to get
something. “I hold in my hand a series of resolutions,” Clay announced
to the Senate, which, “taken together, in combination . . . propose an
amicable arrangement of all questions in controversy between the free
and slave States, growing out of the subject of slavery.”

The most pressing of those questions was the territorial one. Would
the number of future slave states keep pace with the number of future
free states as the new territories formed their protostate governments?
Clay’s answer harkened back to the grand political bargain he had struck
in 1820. Admit California to the Union as a free state, he now urged
his fellow senators, while admitting the rest of the Mexican cession
“without the adoption of any restriction or condition on the subject of
slavery.” It was to be a sort of Missouri Compromise redux.

Another controversial question centered on the future of slavery
in Washington dc. Under the terms of the U.S. Constitution, Congress
possessed the power to “exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases
whatsoever, over . . . the Seat of the Government of the United States.”
Antislavery activists had long urged Congress to wield that power on
behalf of human freedom by abolishing slavery in the capital city. If
Congress “can pass laws ‘to prevent horses from being cruelly abused,’”
the abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld argued in an 1836 pamphlet,
referring to a dc law that was then on the books, then Congress “can
pass laws to prevent men from being cruelly abused, and if it can prevent
cruel abuse, it can define what it is. It can declare that to make men
work without pay is cruel abuse, and can prohibit it.”