CHAPTER IX

ORIGIN AND AUTHORSHIP

THE Missouri Compromise was carried into effect, and the next quarter century was characterized by a sort of armed peace between the sections, under a continuation of the spirit. of bargaining after the Compromise precedent. States were admitted in pairs, slave and free (Florida and Iowa, for example, and Arkansas and Michigan) by a sort of logrolling between the northern and the southern democrats in Congress. But two more great steps were before the Republic in its pursuit of its "manifest destiny" to the Pacific; one along the south, through Texas, New Mexico and California; the other across the Rocky Mountains to Oregon. According to Professor Persinger, whose interesting paper is quoted and summarized in the following pages, it was a bit of sharp practice in trying to get the best of the "gentlemen's agreement" for maintaining the balance between the North and the South in this westward march, that led to the introduction of the Wilmot Proviso.

A more exact statement would be that the sectional feud preceded and energized the Wilmot Proviso. The northwestern faction very probably encouraged Wilmot's suggestion and furthered his ripened purpose, as an apparently powerful means of promoting their aims. But no one who has followed intimately Wilmot's private and public life can accept the view that he personally acted in this case upon any such balanced political calculations. His mental processes and his purposes were characteristically on a different plane from that, as the practical politicians of his day testified, sometimes with irritation. His motives belonged rather to the ethical type which Mr. Scott considers so dangerous in politics; but his act in

this instance coincided with a political crisis that hugely intensified the resulting storm.

To preface, it may be recalled that after playing fast and loose with the question of the southwestern boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase from the time of Madison's administration onward, Texas had been encouraged (chiefly by Jackson) to declare her independence of Mexico, to set herself up as a slave republic, to advance huge claims of territorial expansion toward the Pacific, and to seek annexation to the United States. It was called "reannexation," under the assertion that Texas had always been a part of the Louisiana Purchase and had been wrongfully surrendered to Spain, to whose invalid title Mexico had succeeded. Coincidentally, an increasing agitation had been worked up for terminating the joint-occupation agreement with Great Britain covering the Oregon territory, as described in a preceding chapter. The democrats, in the campaign of 1844, demanded the election of James K. Polk, the almost unknown, against the whig candidate, Henry Clay, with the war cry, "The reannexation of Texas and the reoccupation of Oregon," and it was to be "54 40 or fight!"

Tyler and his Secretary of State, Calhoun, stole Polk's thunder by practically annexing Texas through the extraordinary instrumentality of a joint resolution of Congress (adopted February 28 and signed by Tyler, March 1, 1845, only three days before he went out of office) consenting "that the territory properly included within, and belonging to, the Republic of Texas, might be erected into a new State, to be called the State of Texas, with a republican form of government, to be adopted by the people of the said republic by deputies in convention assembled, with the consent of the existing Government, in order that the same might be admitted as one of the States of the Union." The "existing Government" meant, of course, the independent government which Texas had set up for herself when she revolted from Mexico, in 1836, although Mexico's claim to sovereignty had never been abandoned. As the Twenty-ninth Congress met in its first session, the new

State was entering, bringing with her slavery, the certainty of war with Mexico, and a dowry of boundary disputes to be settled. Covert in these lay the other huge project for expansion referred to above, reaching to the Pacific along southerly latitudes and joining with the Oregon claims on the north.

Such was the situation when Wilmot took his seat. And now, to return to Professor Persinger's analysis and interpretation of it. Condensed, this is as follows:

When President Tyler revived the question of Texan annexation in the spring of 1844, the democratic party was to all appearances homogeneous and united. In reality, however, it was composed of diverse elements, loosely bound together, needing only the Texas issue to reveal their existence and identity. These groups were three in number: the southern, the northwestern and the northeastern. The southern or Calhoun group was already aggressively and recognizedly proslavery and proslave-soil; the northeastern or Van Buren group was already almost fanatically antislavery and free-soil, and on the verge of that union with the Liberty party which, in 1848, produced the free-soil party. But the northwestern group (as yet wavering between Cass, Douglas and Allen, and most brilliantly represented by Senator Hannegan, of Indiana) although antislavery and free-soil, was only moderately so. It was willing to see the increase of slave soil so long as free soil kept pace with it or gained a little upon it.

It was to these three groups of the Democracy that the Tyler treaty 2 for the annexation of Texas, in the spring of 1844, brought immediate puzzlement and not distant falling out. The southern group, in its anxiety for Texas, was more than ready to ratify the Tyler treaty, especially as its own leader had negotiated that treaty and had announced during the negotiations that the chief purpose of the proposed annexation was the preservation of slavery and the extension of slave soil. The northeastern and

1 Clark E. Persinger, "The Bargain of 1844 as the Origin of the Wilmot Proviso," Oregon Historical Society, Vol. XV, 1914.

2 The attempt to effect the annexation by treaty preceded the jointresolution plan, and failed.

3 It was expected that five new slave States could be organized out of the area of Texas alone. The creation of the additional four was provided for in the second section of the joint resolution

northwestern groups were united in their opposition to the Tyler treaty, but differed in their reasons for opposition to it; the northeastern group opposing it because Texas was slave soil, the northwestern group because it was offered without compensating addition of free soil to the northward.

To meet the demands of the northeastern democrats, Van Buren declared against immediate and unconditional annexation. Το satisfy the southern democrats, Calhoun meditated bolting the regular Baltimore convention and standing for election as a southern candidate on a straight southern platform. Then the northwestern democrats suggested that if the southern democracy were willing to combine Oregon with Texas in the party platform, campaign and subsequent Congressional action, such a balance of free- and slave-soil expansion would satisfy the northwestern and some northern democrats and bring about party harmony and victory instead of party disunion and defeat. So originated the "bargain of 1844”—the “Oregon and Texas" plank of the democratic platform of 1844; not as a mere appeal to the northern States in general, but as a definite means of party harmony and unity without the sacrifice of vital principle or interest by either the southern or the northwestern group of the party. The fact that such a bargain had been made was not published broadcast, in fact, was kept most secret; but party leaders in the northwest, and Calhoun's lieutenants, if not Calhoun himself, knew of the arrangement and contract.

But though the agreement had been made and ratified by their party convention, Professor Persinger continues, the southern democrats, while urgently demanding the completion of their half of the bargain, concerned themselves very little with Oregon in their campaign speeches. It was all Texas. With the democratic victory, in 1844, the southern group pressed for the admission of Texas, calling upon the northern representatives to come forward and respond, which they did. But when Congress assembled, in 1845, and the northwestern democrats attempted to insist on the Oregon portion of the bargain, Calhoun, on behalf of the southerners, discovered the

certainty of war with Great Britain and counseled deliberate

measures.

Charge and countercharge continued throughout the session. Finally, by signing and ratifying the Oregon boundary treaty with Great Britain in June, 1846 (fixing 49 degrees of north latitude as the dividing line) the President and the Senate accepted the Calhoun policy and its consequences as to the whole of Oregon. The northwestern senators were left in a bad temper. Then, two months later, came their opportunity to "get back," when the President asked for $2,000,000 to negotiate peace with Mexico. It was well understood that this was for further acquisitions of territory, and that that territory was south of 36° 30'. All was going as merrily as a marriage bell when suddenly the friends of the Administration from the free States led off the opposition to their southern brethren.

The northwestern democrats, remembering the bad faith of the South, as they called it, on the Oregon question, were resolved that no more slave territory should come into the Union with their consent.

This determination found expression in the Wilmot Proviso, introduced, it is true, by Wilmot, of Pennsylvania, a northeastern democrat; but its authorship was claimed by the northwestern democrat, Brinkerhoff, of Ohio.

The original draft of this Proviso, Professor Persinger adds (on the authority of Professor R. T. Stevenson, of Wesleyan University) "is in the possession of Brinkerhoff's son, Mr. George Brinkerhoff."

William Henry Smith, in his Political History of Slavery,* elaborates this last statement by explaining that "the original Proviso was in Judge Brinkerhoff's possession until his death, in 1880. After his death, the family . . . deposited it with Mr. Spofford, the librarian of Congress."

There is no such document in the Library of Congress, and so far as the records of that library show, there never has been. It should be added at once, however, that the records for the period in question are inconclusive, and that there is good testi4 Vol. I, pp. 83, 84, footnote.