America's Great Debate

Review by Sanford Levinson

There is an almost Shakespearean quality about this superbly written, absolutely riveting saga of the Compromise of 1850. Great figures—including Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, and President Zachary Taylor, portrayed as a steadfast opponent of what came to be called the Slavocracy even though a slaveowner himself—dominate the book, and by the end all are dead. There are also Stephen A. Douglas (who would die at 48 in 1862, having failed in his own ambitions to become president), and, surprisingly, Taylor’s successor, Millard Fillmore, who emerges as a surprisingly formidable political figure.

At stake was nothing less than the survival of the United States. Calhoun and other Southern firebrands, including Mississippi Sen. Jefferson Davis, were contemptuous of any compromise that would retard the expansion of the Slavocracy west into southern California and, ultimately, into Cuba and Mexico. Texans eager to annex much of New Mexico welcomed the prospect of secession as well. (They did not include, however, senator and former governor Sam Houston, another vivid character in the book.) The task was to cobble together a compromise that would gain enough votes from ever-more-polarized Northerners and Southerners to keep the Union together. Everyone would have to make what appeared to be dreadful concessions. Southerners had to accept the admission of California as a free state; northerners had to accept the strengthening of the altogether odious fugitive slave law. Texans would have to accept a future that lacked Santa Fe and other parts of New Mexico, a concession purchased by the federal assumption of the state’s debts. As Bordewich laconically writes, “The assumption of Texas’s debt was…the first federal bailout of a state in American history.”

Still, one must confront the ambiguity latent in the subtitle, for the Compromise of 1850—what historian William Freehling called “The Armistice of 1850” and Sean Wilentz has more recently described as a “truce”—did not in fact “preserve” the Union. As predicted by John C. Calhoun almost literally on his deathbed, it only staved off by a decade attempted secession and the accompanying catastrophic war. Bordewich, fully attentive to the awful realities of slavery and its maintenance made possible by the Compromise, ultimately defends it because he believes that secession in 1850 would have basically succeeded; “The North, if it had any stomach for war at all in 1850, would likely have lost.” What, however, if an earlier Civil War would have defeated the Slavocracy and ended slavery a decade earlier? Would we then continue to praise the Compromise? Of course, this is ultimately unknowable. But whether thinking of America 160 years ago or today, evaluations of compromise inevitably rest on controversial empirical assessments of the consequences of acquiescence or, instead, “just saying no.” Clay’s or Webster’s stature as “tragic heroes” rather than villains depends on such assessments. Bordewich has written a remarkable book that is illuminating both about American history and, implicitly, about our own times. It deserves wide readership and, more importantly, discussion.