A Strife of Tongues: The Compromise of 1850 and the Ideological Foundations of the American Civil War by Stephen E. Maizlish

Author:Stephen E. Maizlish [Maizlish, Stephen E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813941196
Google: EJNBswEACAAJ
Amazon: 0813941199
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2018-01-15T00:43:52.905000+00:00

FIGURE 7. Jefferson Davis, Mississippi Democratic senator and future Confederate president. (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-cwpbh-00879)

Some southerners who also saw slavery as an evil believed it was a necessary evil. Louisiana Democratic senator Pierre Soulé reminded his colleagues who were considering the evil nature of slavery that “war is an evil;—and your statute-books shows that there may be just and necessary wars.” In this same way, government itself was an evil but was necessary to the maintenance of peace. Missouri Democrat and Senate fixture Thomas Hart Benton came to a similar conclusion. To Benton, himself a slaveholder, slavery was an evil that could not be ended since ending it would bring on, in his judgment, a race war. He focused instead on blocking slavery’s spread. “The incurability of the evil is the greatest objection to the extension of slavery,” he argued. “It is wrong for the legislature to inflict an evil which can be cured: how much more to inflict one that is incurable.” The key, according to Benton and others, was the practical difficulty of ending slavery, not their principled judgment of it. George Badger, conservative Whig senator from North Carolina, also believed that slavery was a necessary evil. “We live, and our race have ever lived,” he explained, “in the midst of evils necessary which cannot and ought not to be at once removed.” So the present generation, he decided, must “struggle on with the difficulties … trusting that in the future—perhaps, probably in the far distant future—good may be worked out of this institution, more than commensurate with all its present evil.”39

“Struggling on with the difficulties” was the fate many southerners faced, and no senator struggled more than Kentucky Whig Joseph Underwood. There was no question for this border-state senator that slavery was an “evil, a great evil,” but even he, a colonization advocate, saw ending it as quite a challenge. To stop it immediately, he believed, would be “like a father abandoning his children.” “If the stupendous evils of American slavery” were ever to be “redressed and obliterated,” he insisted, it would have to be through a “scheme of moral suasion.” To John Bell, Whig senator from Tennessee, the answer to slavery was time. “The time may come,” he declared, “when three millions of slaves in the United States will be free; but it is not yet.” Still, Bell pointed out that “hundreds, if not to say thousands” of southerners “who have regarded the institution of slavery as contrary to the precepts of religion and the dictates of natural justice” had already freed their slaves.40

Underwood and Bell, along with all those who questioned slavery and saw the evil, necessary or lesser, in it, did not exhibit the unambiguous belief in slavery’s “positive good” that Barnwell and his mentor, Calhoun, wished to believe had captured southern thinking. Southern attitudes were more complex than that, often containing strains of deep uncertainly, if not uneasiness, with the institution that in many ways defined their lives.41

However, whatever

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