Bell’s Dissent, Part Six

John Bell (Whig-TN)

(Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

John Bell, the Tennessee Whig, laid into Stephen Douglas for his unorthodox and precipitous bill to open the Great Plains for settlement. It would give away all the public domain and so close the book on the frontier for future generations. It came in advance of any real settlement, instead of in recognition of that settlement. It came while ample and good land existed in the states bordering on the Indian country. It would break the nation’s word to the Indians that they could have the land forever. Other countries could even look at the United States and take note of how scrupulously it abided by its treaty obligations from this example. All of that amounted to a lot of questioning Douglas’ motivation and Bell wondered what grand plan Douglas had in mind, besides the obvious fast train to the White House.

To Douglas, that must have sounded a great deal like when Salmon P. Chase called him an accomplished architect of ruin. That a southerner like Bell went on to talk about how Douglas would inflame the North against the South by giving its future up to slavery. And even if everything worked, Bell did not think slavery would take root. He tempted southern senators with an empty repeal for a needless cause that would bring at best a Pyrrhic victory. The Little Giant rose to object, denying that he had any secret plans. If Bell wanted to accuse him of something, the Tennessee Whig should come out and say it.

Bell did not. He denied any such intentions. No, he

was pledging myself to the honorable Senator, that if he would give me any sufficient explanation or exposition of the points of objection I have taken as to the vast extent of this country which he proposes to embrace in the new Territories -the departure he purposes from the long-established and guarded policy of the Government in the interposition of some barrier to the intrusion of the white man, and the formation of detached settlements in a country occupied by wild and savage Indian tribes, far beyond the regularly advanced line of frontier settlements; and throwing open at once unnecessarily the whole public domain- I will go with him in the accomplishment of his great schemes.

Stephen Douglas

Don’t take it personally, Stephen. He just wants some reasons you can’t give him. But even if Douglas couldn’t answer, Bell might come around. He had an open mind and knew progress, meaning the advance of white settlement across the continent, could never stop. He believed in the nineteenth century. So he gave Douglas some advice:

Wait a season; be not so impatient to build up a great northwestern empire. In due time all your great plans of development will be accomplished, without any great sacrifices of any kind, and without conflicting with any other great public interest. In a few years, by the regular law of progress and settlement, which swept first all of the Atlantic States, and then the eastern slope of the great valley of the Mississippi, of the Indian tribes which once held possession of them, by a greatly accelerated process, they will disappear from the plains, and the whole of the vast region beyond the Mississippi; and then, without any abrupt departure from the old and established policy of our Government in relation to the Indians or the public domain

Bell had a bit of cheek to call the forced removal of Indian tribes from east of the Mississippi some kind of force of nature. He wrote the bill that required them to vacate the Southeast. We would say that today and might call it unfair to judge him by our standards. Bell could certainly believe that his bill just ratified natural processes already underway. But he rose to speak against another bill in the same vein of his own, except far less radical.

Bell knew that he asked a lot of Douglas, who had been after organization of the plains for a decade. The Little Giant had fire in his veins, not all of it from his appetite for drink, and waiting still longer would chafe:

If the honorable Senator will indulge me, and not think it offensive, I must say here, because it occurs to me, that I think for a long time he has had a passion, amounting to a sort of mania, for the organization of new Territories, and the founding of new States. Sir, to my certain knowledge, the honorable Senator drew up the Utah and New Mexico bills, and almost in the very terms in which they finally passed into laws. I believe he is also entitled to the credit of having originated the bills for the establishment of the Territories of Oregon, Minnesota, and Washington. It seems, from present indications, that it will not be long before he will have succeeded in organizing three or four more. Not content with the fame which may attach to him as the conditor imperii […] he is emulous of the title of clarissimus conditor imperiorum. It seems to me that whatever other rewards he may receive from his countrymen, if they should imitate the policy of the ancient Greeks and Romans in bestowing honorary crowns on citizens who distinguish themselves in the service of their country, the honorable Senator will be entitled, not to one, but to ten civic crowns! I hope the honorable Senator will not be offended at anything I have said on this.

The Latin translates to “founder of the empire” and “most famous founder of the empire,” I think.

Douglas assured Bell that he caused no offense, to the Senate’s laughter. Amid all the flattery the Tennessean had grasped a bit of truth. Douglas saw himself as a great man on the make, a common enough affliction among politicians, and must have expected that the storm his Missouri Compromise repeal would bring would blow over and leave him the conquering hero of white America, who opened the West and saved the Union. Surely that man deserved to move into the White House.

Bell’s Dissent, Part Five

John Bell (Whig-TN)

(Parts 1, 2, 3, 4)

Once Tennessee’s John Bell started challenging Stephen Douglas, he got on a roll. Where did Douglas find the white Americans desperate for the new land? Why did they not settle available land already organized? What so lit Douglas on fire that he would put forward such radical, sweeping legislation to give away all of white America’s future in one sudden rush? Bell asked the questions with the usual rhetorical flourishes, but they amounted to more than a show for his Senate peers. If nothing else, they served to demonstrate to his Tennessee supporters that Bell had sober, considered reasons for opposing the South’s new favorite bill.

Douglas needed to answer those objections. They did not all amount to theory and issues of precedent. The whites living in the Indian country illegally could not make a very convincing case that the Congress ought to support them there with all the land still available elsewhere. So where would Douglas come up with a batch that did deserve their good favor? And so unprecedented a grant as the entire remaining public domain? Bell did not quite say that no such people existed, but he instead advanced his own theory as to why the Little Giant wanted Kansas-Nebraska so badly:

I know that he does not act without motives or a purpose, and as he has given us no expositions of his views upon this point, I trust he will indulge me in conjecturing what they may be. That I mean nothing offensive or unkind to the honorable Senator he will understand, when I say that, upon a full consideration of his policy as shadowed forth in this bill, taking it altogether, I am at a loss which most to admire, the genius or the boldness of his conception. And I can tell honorable Senators around me, that when that Senator, shall be arraigned before the tribunal of the public in the Northwest, for his advocacy of any feature of this bill which may be obnoxious to them, and he shall come to unfold the grandeur of his plans, and the skill with which he managed to combine in their support both the North and the South, they will speak trumpet-tongued in his defense.

It took a genius to pull this off, so absolutely sure of himself to risk so alienating the North by giving away its future to slavery. Douglas would win great fame for it, unite the nation, revitalize his ailing northern Democracy, and sail into the White House. Bell didn’t have to spell it all out. Every Senator sees a president when he or she looks in the mirror, then and now.

I trust the honorable Senator understands me: but I will nevertheless say to him, that although by the offer of a principle, an abstraction -a dangerous temptation to southern Senators- which I fear will prove utterly barren- bearing neither fruit nor flower, he has drawn into the support of his plans the whole South and Southwest, yet, if he will give me but a reasonable answer to the objections I have taken to this provision of the bill, I will go with him in its support.

Give him a reason, Stephen. Convince John Bell that he can vote for your bill without disaster ensuing. Slavery will not take off in Kansas or Nebraska. Douglas had said so himself. The way Bell phrases it speaks deeply to his, and other southern politicians’, predicament. By dangling repeal of the Missouri Compromise out in front of them, Douglas offered a long-sought victory. It will thrill the radicals but enrage the North and set it further against the South for a hollow triumph. Archibald Dixon and Phillip Phillips twisted Douglas’ arm to get the repeal into the bill and now that repeal twisted the arms of every southern senator. If they voted against it, they named themselves traitors to slavery and wrote their epitaphs. If they voted for it, yielding to the temptation, they brought the North down on them for their folly.

Bell’s Dissent, Part Four

John Bell (Whig-TN)

(Parts 1, 2, 3)

Before I took my vacation from the Congressional Globe, John Bell rose to tell the Senate why he would join Texas’ Sam Houston (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) in voting against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would repeal the Missouri Compromise and so open the great plains to slavery as well as organizing all the land between Canada and modern Oklahoma and between Missouri, Iowa, and the Minnesota territory into the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. Of all the southern senators, the Texas Democrat and Tennessee Whig stood alone against the bill.

Bell’s objections began with the lack of any particular need for the bill and how it proceeded to organize government for such a tiny population of white settlers. In the past, Congress waited until more would benefit from a territorial government. He continued to vent his displeasure over how the bill would break the nation’s word to the Indians, who he expected to go West and quietly die to open the way for white settlement. Rushing things would only provoke Indian hostilities.

But Bell saw problems for American whites aside from hostile Indians. Stephen Douglas’ hasty bill would

in addition to the Indians hostilities likely to be provoked by encouraging settlements, at irregular and distant intervals, over such an extent of territory now inhabited by wild Indians, the measure evidently contemplated the exhaustion of all the most desirable portions of the public domain in a few years, leaving no residuum to invite the enterprise or to furnish cheap homes to the young men and young families of the next generation. I held such a policy unwise, unstatesmanlike, and essentially selfish in the present generation. I was of the opinion that there was no necessity arising from a crowded population in the frontier States, or from any deficiency of good unappropriated lands in those States, to justify a measure which proposes to throw open so large an extent of new country for settlement.

That probably sounds a bit obscure today, but in the nineteenth century a great deal of white America’s understanding of itself rested on going west. Your life might not bring you earthly delights or advancement back east, but every young white man could take up and go west to cheap land to set himself up as the fabled yeoman farmer. If the law opened so much land to settlement, the current generation would take the lot and what would become of America then? With no more frontier, that story had to end. With the boundless west all eaten up, the United States could rapidly turn into an ossified, class-ridden society like bad old Europe.

And for what?

I contented that the population in the border States was yet small and sparse, and that there was within their limits an abundant supply of good lands, inviting settlement and cultivation -both by native citizens and foreign emigrants. Two years ago, I objected to the treaty for the purchase of the territory which belonged to the Sioux Indians, in the Territory of Minnesota, upon the ground that it would open a vast wilderness for detached and irregular settlement, when there was no adequate necessity for the measure; and I showed, if I remember aright, that there were then about one hundred and twenty millions of acres of good land surveyed and open to entry and settlement in the adjoining States, after deducting from ten to twenty per cent for lands unfit for cultivation. Nevertheless that treaty, costing the Government some five millions of dollars, was ratified by the Senate; and an additional supply of between twenty-five and thirty millions of acres of land was thus provided for new settlements; and notwithstanding the late increase in the sale and settlement of the public lands in the northwest, we may safely conclude that, at this moment there are not less than one hundred millions of acres, not of indifferent lands, but of good cultivable lands, still remaining to be taken up and occupied by emigrants, in the same section of the country.

Here we have something like sustainable development in a nineteenth century style. Good lands still exist already set aside for white settlement. We should not open more to exploitation until they are full up. If the Senate proposed to add more land to that trust, it ought to have a good reason. Minnesota did not look full up to Bell. Nor did Iowa, Missouri, or Wisconsin. He challenged Douglas to point to the whites who could not find cheap land already available if they wanted it. The illegal squatters opposite Council Bluffs and around Fort Leavenworth could find their land in Minnesota, or in the states Bell named, cheaply, legally, and without requiring any strange new laws to facilitate it.

Where to fly that flag?

Where and when?

I’ve written about the Confederate Battle Flag before but I don’t think I’ve written about when and where one ought to fly it. Brooks Simpson asked that, at least implicitly, in the post I wrote in response to yesterday. That comes to mind especially as I’ve followed the comic saga of the Virginia Flaggers, a group devoted to the strange position that Virginia wants to suppress and deny its Confederate history. One would think people who lived in Virginia knew better. After various defeats, they leased some private land by a freeway south of Richmond where they now fly their flag. Many of the bloggers I’ve read on the subject could not contain their awe at the flagger’s triumph. You can read all about it here. Andy Hall even gave them an apology. He, like probably everybody commenting, assumed they might be effective. I know that I did. Shows us, right?

But yahoos aside, where should one display that flag? To my knowledge, Germany does fairly well at answering the same question of its own troubled banner with “nowhere.” I don’t know all the details, but apparently any kind of Nazi emblem or memorabilia can only be displayed in proper historical context per German law. I don’t endorse importing that law and fining or arresting people for waiving Confederate flags, but the idea behind it seems like a good one for any historical symbols. They ought to go up and remain up where they aid in modern understanding of events, where they existed at the time, and so forth. If a battlefield marks Confederate positions with flags, or they fly from memorials to Confederate units, provided those are the correct flags for the era, that sounds fine to me. Flying it over historical buildings preserved as museums of the time also fits.

Flying the flag over current government buildings involves different issues, as the flag largely departed those buildings in 1865 or earlier. It came back to fight against Civil Rights and Jim Crow’s diehard supporters made that very clear. Continued display in that vein does tell a story about the past and the present, but in a very different way. That flag declares for White Supremacy and proclaims it the policy of the government. That it remains gives the impression to a fair observer that the policy commitment also endures. Sometimes, if not as often as it used to, it really does endure. I’d like to see the lot of those taken down. Put the originals under glass and display them in a museum about the Civil Rights Movement or American racism. They belong there. They do not belong flying over buildings in any government committed to serving all its people, regardless of the color of their skin. Nor do they belong flying ominously outside historically black churches.

I did not pull that example from thin air. One of the Virginia Flaggers went to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s church to show his flag. Over at CW Memory, Kevin Levin has the picture. When you bring the slavery and Jim Crow banner to display outside a church at the center of the Civil Rights Movement, it makes a statement about Southern heritage that viewers have little trouble understanding. It doesn’t quite reach the level of brandishing James Earl Ray’s gun, which would be hard to get, or wearing his face inside a heart on a t-shirt, but the content differs little. Would a white hood have been too on the nose?

Outside proper historical contexts, I have trouble seeing why one would even want to fly that flag unless they understand themselves as carrying on the politics that brought Confederate flags out of the attics in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Heritage? I would think that includes more than four years of war 150 years ago even if one’s idea of national heritage only includes the former major slave states…a problematic situation in itself.