Was the Wilmot Proviso the White Man's Answer to Popular Sovereignty? 

 

 

In August 1846, Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot began a four year debate on the question of extending slavery into the territories obtained from Mexico with an amendment to an appropriations bill called the Wilmot Proviso. This short, one paragraph amendment would prohibit slavery in the Mexican Cession, territories like New Mexico and California. None of the territories about to be acquired and annexed by the United States were covered under the terms of the 1820 Missouri Compromise line. The Wilmot Proviso would provoke outrage in the South and set the stage for the 1850 Compromise that temporarily kept sectional peace.

 

Start of the Debate

 

David Wilmot was not an abolitionist. His Proviso was not motivated by moral concerns. Quoted by historian William Freehling, “Wilmot sought a white man’s mecca, where ‘my own race and own color can live without the disgrace’…of…’association with negro slavery.’” Southerners, whose sons represented more war casualties than northern boys, were indignant. Georgia’s Robert Toombs declared, “We have the right to call on you to give your blood to maintain the slaves of the South in bondage. Deceive not yourselves; you cannot deceive others. This is a proslavery government. Slavery is stamped on its heart!” President Polk, in his diary of August 10, 1846, called the Proviso a “mischievous and foolish amendment.”

 

Although passed in the House by a vote of 83 to 64, the bill containing the Amendment was killed in the Senate when Senator John Davis took the floor and filibustered the bill until the end of the Congressional session. The Proviso would be revived in futures Congresses but was never approved by the Senate. Historian Frederick Merk suggests that the Proviso ultimately split political parties on the question of Congressional interference with slavery in the new territories.

 

Outrage and the Realities of Slavery

 

As Polk reflected in his diary, the expansion of slavery into the new territories would be addressed through the natural course of expansion and not by Congressional fiat: most of the lands were not suited to slavery. The core issue for Southerners was expressed by Mississippi Governor Joseph Matthews during his January 1848 inaugural address: “whether citizens of the slave states are to be considered as equals.” Stephen Douglas of Illinois, whose solution to the slavery debate in the new territories was popular sovereignty, vigorously opposed the Proviso from the very beginning, defending his opposition in an 1852 letter to the editor of the Washington Union. The slavery issue had to be decided by citizens in the territories, not by a Congressional measure. If Congress lacked the power to regulate slavery in the new territories, resolutions like the Proviso were unconstitutional. As Merk observes, “The Wilmot Proviso…opened conflicts of law and theory…”

 

Aftermath

 

The Wilmot Proviso may have been the match that ignited the debate regarding slavery’s extension into territories won from Mexico in 1848. Painfully aware that California might soon enter the Union as another free state, Southern leaders like John C Calhoun envisioned the prospect of the slave South ultimately surrounded by free states, dooming the institution’s future. The issue became one of survival as well as Constitutional legality. The ensuing Compromise of 1850 would clearly demonstrate the extent of sectional hostilities and party disunity.

 

For Further Reading:

 

William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion:Secessionists at Bay 1776-1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)

 

Frederick Merk, History of the Westward Movement (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978)

 

William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996)

Published November 20, 2008 in Suite101 by M.Streich. copyright