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tv   [untitled]    April 15, 2012 5:00pm-5:30pm EDT

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most part -- the bodies were taken back into halifax whereas much of the steerage were buried at sea. >> there is definitely a number of steerage that were taken back as well. not all to halifax either. but to other locations. with the new -- where the family was -- we were able to identify them. but that's one area we don't really get into. we sort of go through as i say to the point where the carpathia rescue and then we deal with the changes to the ship, itself, to the sister ship and the other ship under construction. okay. >> sam, thank you for your time. >> you're welcome. [ applause ] this is c-span3 with politics and public affairs
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programming throughout the week, and every weekend, 48 hours of people and events telling the american story on american history tv. get our schedules and c-pass programs at our websites. and you can join in the conversation on social media sites. each week, american history tv sits in on a lecture with one of the nation's college professors. watch the classes every saturday at 8:00 p.m. and midnight eastern and sundays at 1:00 p.m. this week a look at the compromise of 1850 and collapse on the second party system with gillis harp, a professor in grove city, pennsylvania. the class is part of a survey course called history of the united states to 1865 which covers american history from the colonial era through the civil war. this is about 50 minutes. >> all right. we'll begin as usual with short selection of saplasms.
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blessed are they who keep his statutes and seek him with all their heart. they do nothing wrong. they walk in his ways. you have laid down precepts that are to be fully awobeyed. that's from psalm 1:19. okay. well, last time we left off talking about the election of 1848. and we said, remember, you may recall that the whigs has taken a page out of the playbook of the, once again, taken a page out of the playbook of the democratic party in nominating a war hero, rather ironic since they nominated a war hero from a war they opposed pretty voi sie bacciferously. this is general zachary taylor. we have a poster from the 1848 campaign with taylor and the immortal millard fillmore. we'll talk more about him later. so taylor manages, the whigs
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under taylor manage to win, to defeat the democrat party candidate. the democrats hurt very badly by internal divisions especially within new york state, serious battle within new york state. had new york gone a different direction, the democratic nomine might have been directed instead of zachary taylor, the whig nominee. serious internal divisions within the democratic party in new york. i may have talked about this before. a lot of factionalism among the democrats in new york. factionalism. different elements. the so-called hunker group and so-called barn burner group. we won't get into that. but suffice to say, the whigs, again, end up with a successful candidate with electing a president in the form of zachary taylor, but ironically again, someone who's not really a committed whig. someone who is less than a diehard whig, you know, in the clay or webster mold.
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taylor had often portrayed himself not as a whig candidate but as a no-party candidate, as someone who's kind of above party, and he incorrectly assumed that a broad coalition had made him president and that he owed little to the whigs per se. political historians know that's nonsense, that in fact it was the whig party machine that got him elected, but that was his perception. and the way that zachary taylor would attempt to deal with the mexican session, remember the mexican session? that's that territory ceded by mexico to the united states as a result of the american victory in the war with mexico. his approach to the mexican session would reflect this no-party approach, this no-party idea of his. the election, after all, had not really provided a solution to the problem of slavery in the
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territories and no immediate solution was in sight. remember, you have a long gap here between taylor being elected in november of 1848 and something actually happening in washington. well, first of all, long gap between him being elected in november of '48 and being sworn into office. in those days, it was march. so not until march of 1849 do you have the end of the sort of lame duck period of his predecessor. meanwhile, the gold rush in california was attracting thousands of new settlers west. amid this policymaking vacuum, sectional animosities in congress increased. so there's kind of a lack of leadership. there's a kind of power vacuum and as a result there's a lot of pretty nasty debate in congress, a lot of maneuvering, political maneuvering. northern democrats are flirting more and more with the wilmot proviso. remember the proviso?
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we talked about that last time. the proposal to exclude slavery from any new territory acquired in the war with mexico. northern democrats are flirting more and more with the proviso. and also with something new, something called the free soil party that had emerged. some of them want to join that. plus northern whigs are alarmed at the initial moves of their newly elected president in forming his cabinet. taylor skips over traditional whigs such as clay or webster and ignores clay's american system policy agenda. taylor hoped to build some kind of new political movement, some sort of new party. sometimes he called it the republican party, to be distinguished from the republican party that's formed a couple of years later here. thus, most of taylor's cabinets are actually enemies of what people called ultra whiggery. the way taylor dolled out federal patronage also consoled
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old whigs a lot. remember, that's one of the key things presidents do. well, a little bit less today. definitely true in the mid 19th century, that is, one of their most important jobs was to pay off people, to pay off supporters within the party. complaints from party regulars poured into the white house as taylor's first year in office went by. so you have conflict between taylor and his party. you have a kind of power vacuum at the top -- oh, another aspect of the power vacuum is, as i said, taylor's not inaugurated until march of '49. congress doesn't actually go into session until december of '49. so, again, you have basically more than a year of not much happening. okay. well, eventually, though, taylor comes forward with a plan regarding the mexican session. what's his plan? you can see some of it eventually takes the form here. i'll explain how we get there.
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taylor wanted california and other parts of the session to bypass or skip the territorial stage and be admitted immediately as states, thus, he thought sidestepping the whole wilmot proviso question. right? i think it's a rather dishonest move in some ways, but think about it. if you're talking about debating, should we have slavery in the territories? taylor's response is, okay, we won't have territories, no debate. we'll bring these territories in immediately as states. by the time taylor submitted the proposal to congress, though, most southern whigs were annoyed with his cabinet and patronage appointments that i mentioned already. they weren't interested in his proposal, which their democratic opponents in the south called the wilmot proviso in substance, if not in form. so it's clear taylor's plan
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would not garner any support in congress. it seemed to be dead on arrival. he didn't have sufficient support within the whig party. democrats were certainly not inclined to support the proposals of an at least nominally whig president. okay. so what happens? who steps into the power vacuum? predictably it's henry clay, right? clay, always an aspirant for the executive mansion. always someone interested in running for president. clay comes forward, the great compromiser. remember we talked about him in the context of the missouri compromise back in 1819, 1820. clay comes forward with a package. his original set of eight separate resolutions was introduced in late january of 1850. again, note quite a bit of time has passed. so january 1850. actually, some of this first set of clay's proposals looked something like taylor's plan. clay wanted to admit california
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immediately as a free state. it had recently, by the way, applied for admission with an anti-slavery constitution. the difference was that this measure was now tied, though at first rather loosely, to certain concessions to the south. okay? so the beginnings of some kind of compromise are taking shape and clay is saying, all right, we'll bring in california as a free state, but we recognize we have to give some -- grant some concessions to the south. as far as the other territories were concerned, well, the wilmot proviso was not necessary there because clay believed nature would prohibit slavery from thriving in that part of the southwest. you know, arid conditions. you're not going to have plantations there growing cotton so why needlessly antagonize, why needlessly antagonize southerners with the wilmot
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proviso by excluding slavery in those territories? all right. so clay, it seems, was trying to steal the administration's thunder and believed that if he could resolve the sectional debate, this would help him wrestle back control of the whig party and he is definitely interested in running for president in 1852 although as we'll see he doesn't make it. he dies before that. like taylor, though, clay had counted upon united whig support in congress and it simply wasn't there by early 1850. another senator by the name of foot mississippi, name not that important, tries to combine the separate measures into a single omnibus bill. let's pull this altogether in one big package. that doesn't work either. he was hoping thereby to lock in concessions to southerners for the admission of california as a free state. the battle over the bill's
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different parts, though, was very fierce. eventually the omnibus package had to be broken up into separate legislation and ran through the congress, interestingly, under the leadership not of a whig but of a democrat, of a northern democrat, senator steven a. douglas of illinois. more about him later, but it's interesting that it's a democrat that does it, not a whig. okay. that's ultimately what gets passed. here's the -- here you can see what happens. here's the package. you admit california as a free state. these other territories, you chop down the size of texas and you have these other territories. the question of a slavery, the status of slavery in those territories to be determined by popular sovereignty. makes sense because, after all, it's douglas who's proposing this and douglas is a democrat.
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remember democrats had since 1840, since the late 1840s had embraced this idea of popular sovereignty or what's sometimes called squatter's sovereignty. so what's the package? number one, california's admitted as a free state. utah and mexico as you can see on our map there is organized as territo territories. popular sovereignty there to determine the status of slavery. texas is compensated for loss of territory granted to new mexico. that's number three. you're not getting all of these down, don't worry about it. your text has them in some detail. number three and number four, perhaps most controversial, tough new federally enforced fugitive slave law is introduced. more about that in a minute. also the slave trade in washington, d.c., is abolished. that is, the slave trade in d.c. is abolished. the selling of slaves in the nation's capital.
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okay. that's the package. you can see, as i said, on the map here what that means. ironically, these measures might not even have been made law had it not been for president taylor's untimely death in july of 1850. remember we said that the whigs had a bit of a hard luck story with electing presidents. they only elect two, both of them die in office. taylor dies in office in july of 1850. some indication that taylor actually might have vetoed the compromise, but remember, taylor is succeeded by my personal favorite, millard fillmore. i don't know why he's become such a brunt of jokes. maybe it's the name. i don't know. but millard fillmore is a diehard whig. taylor might not have been, but fillmore is. fillmore is a traditional whig. he's busy fighting free soil
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forces within his own party and consequently fillmore is eager to support the compromise and he signs it into law. all right. so he's keen about getting the compromise through. in fact, as we'll see, fillmore locks onto the compromise as a kind of test, as a litmus test for party loyalty in the whig party. we'll see there's some dangerous consequences and bad consequences that come from that. all right. let's step back for a minute here and analyze who supported the party and why. excuse me, who supported the compromise and why. it's difficult to determine since the various measures were all voted upon separately and different voting alliances supported each measure. thus, not unlike clay's earlier missouri compromise, the compromise of 1850, as we call
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it, is really more of an intersectional truce than it is a genuine compromise where everyone's sort of giving a little bit. it's really more of a time out or a truce. basically, though, one can generalize the attitudes regarding the compromise in this way. as you can see on our chart here, you can see that folks from -- oops. folks from -- let's go back. folks from the north, whigs from the north tend to be anti-compromise. democrats from the north, like steven douglas who champions it, he's the one whose parliamentary skills gets it through congress, they tend to be pro compromise. in the south whigs tend to be pro compromise. democrats, on the other hand, tend to be anti-compromise. now, i want to pause for a second and analyze what's going on, because this is really important. maybe i'll throw it open as a question. what's going on? how do you interpret this chart?
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what's happening to the second party system? i'm going to let you chew on that for a minute. what's happening to the second party system and what does this chart tell us as far as what's happening to it? what's going on? yes? i think a man's going to come to you here. go ahead. >> the second party system is really sitting amongst itself. it's not really functioning as a national second party system. the whig party is actually splitting into almost two parties and the democrats are almost splitting into two parties. so the two-party system is really collapsing in on itself on a national level. >> yes. fa exactly. exactly. we're moving away from a well integrated national party system. and so what this is evidence of is the beginnings of a sectional realignment. all right.
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as we move away from the second party system, or as i should say as the second party system begins to collapse, you get the emergence of something new still sort of taking shape, taking form. we haven't seen exactly what form it's going to take yet, but you get a sectional realignment. in other words, it seems to be more important what part of the country you come from than what political party you're affiliated with. however, having said that, that's a good point, but having said that, notice within the regions what's going on. so, for example, within the north, ignore the south for a minute, within the north what's going on in terms of the distinctive positions of the two parties? remember we talked a little bit about this last time in the 1848 election. we said that it was kind of interesting how in those days the national parties could really run a candidate two different ways. could run them one way in the south and one in another, rather
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different way in the north. what's going on within the regions, within the sections, within the north, for example? what's happening? how are the parties trying deal with this hot potato, you know, political hot potato of slavery's expansion? within the north you've got what? what's happening? anybody? thoughts? random ideas? yes, rick? >> the whigs are opposed to the expansion of slavery while the democrats are open to the possibility of it. >> right. the democrats taking, of course, that squatter's popular sovereignty approach. yeah. notice within the regions you still have a choice. you see a vital and vibrant two-party system in part is built on the idea of giving people real choices, right?
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so within the section you've still got a choice there, right? within the north you've still got the whigs taking a different position from the democrats. and for that matter in the south, right? the whigs are taking a different position from the democrats. now i think the writing's on the wall that this is not a good thing in the long run for a national -- for a well integrated national two-party system, but you can see the parties trying to sort of come to terms with this trying to deal with this very difficult issue. okay. well, let's move ahead. so note that within the sections the parties are still able to take digit positions regarding the compromise issue, but clearly unified national parties are in serious trouble here. a sectional realignment appears to have begun. all right. but arguably the most important, the single most important element that comes out of the compromise of 1850 is this tough
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new federal fugitive slave law. in the north whigs denounce the compromise as a democratic document, especially obnoxious because of this controversial fugitive slave law. what exactly did this mean? it made it illegal, a made it a federal offense to help escape slaves, to help fugitive slaves or a federal offense to refuse to cooperate with federal officials who were responsible for tracking them down and returning them to their masters. this would produce a storm of controversy in the north. a lot of opposition in the north where most people were outraged by this feature of the compromise. and we should emphasize this point. remember, of course, as we said a couple lectures ago, we were talking about the abolitionist movement. most northerners are not abolitionists, but they don't
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like this idea of the federal government intervening in state affairs in this way. they don't like local officials having to go along with federal slave catchers. so many people who are not by any means, many northerners who are not by any means abolitionists are concerned about this. and you could say in some respects the compromise of 1850 did what abolitionists had failed to do thus far, that is, it really alarmed northerners regarding the slavery issue. okay. and there's a lot of fallout from that, as we'll see. you can see here's a broad side from boston warning boston has a significant free black population that they needed to be concerned, worried, careful about being kidnapped. all right. for several reasons the
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compromise would prove to be very unhealthy for the second party system. there were those who favored the compromise as the definitive resolution of the seemly endless slavery debate. remember i noted how once vice president and now president fillmore wanted to enforce loyalty to the compromise within the whig party. to use it as a kind of litmus test. just as northern democrats wanted support for the compromise also to be a test of party loyalty. but, but, this had all sorts of bad consequences. if this agreement was enforced -- let's say, let's enforce the support for the compromise of 1850 as a kind of sign of party loyalty. if that happened, the two major parties then would not disagree on this issue. remember we said that one of the
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key features of a vital and vibrant two-party system is to really have different positions, distinctive positions on issues, especially issues that most americans cared a lot about. well, if the agreement was enforced in this way, the two major parties would have consensus over this issue. some politicians thought that was okay. they viewed the slavery extension issue or the slavery question in general as too difficult, as too controversial. as a political hot potato that they simply couldn't handle. and they thought that new issues, perhaps maybe even new parties, would emerge once the compromise had been universally accepted. well, as we'll see, the issues don't go away. new parties do emerge. the question remains, what if the two major parties did agree about the finality of the compromise but voters in the north and the south remained
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unhappy about its features and remained concerned about the larger issue of slavery's extension? what then would happen to the once loyal constituencies of the major parties? might they grow disenchanted with the major parties while looking elsewhere for political groups that were addressing these concerns? you know, these concerns about slavery in a meaningful way. well, this, of course, is precisely what happened in the north in the wake of the compromise. in other words, at just the point when many northerners are starting to say, wait a minute, this is a serious issue, this does have serious political consequences, okay, i don't necessarily support black equality or immediate emancipation, but i'm worried about the political power of slaveowners, especially in the national government. and i'm worried about the expansion of the slave system.
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remember we talked about that free soil ideology last time that many northerners subscribe to. all right. so voters appear to have grown steadily more disenchanted with the traditional party and they began to gravitate to the call of third parties. in the north there was a free soil party that had run back in 1848. it was gathering some momentum and was attracting support of some individuals, former democrats like david wilmot of pennsylvania and others. of course, we saw earlier that the parties had been able sometimes to handle the slavery extension issue but now a nationally enforced agreement on that question denied them the issue at about the same time that both northerners and southerners were increasingly fearing threats of the survival of the republic arising from that very question. okay. let's talk a little bit more about what happens between 1850,
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the passage of the compromise 1850 and of course we have in the presidential election cycle 1852 coming up, and how are the two major political parties going to handle that? how are they going to handle 1852? that's the situation as the presidential contest approaches 1852. both major parties were in serious trouble in most states with the whigs disintegrating especially rapidly in the deep south. in the south you see, especially in some states, the deep south, you see the traditional parties falling apart. you see the emergence of a kind of a state's rights party, of a kind of southern rights party emerging. it takes on different names in different states in the deep south. and then in some cases a unionist party sometimes made up of former whigs. definitely the second party system is in serious shape in
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many southern states by 1851, 1852. so you can say that the presidential contest of 1852 was only another nail in the coffin of the second party system. the whigs were in a particularly tight spot as a result of erosion of support for the party at the national level. here a critical factor was immigration. this is something we haven't talked too much about for a while, but it's something that has serious political consequences for the whigs and especially for how they handle the question of immigrant voting, immigrant support. the immigrant population, especially roman catholic immigrants, had grown by leaps and bounds during the 1840s, and most of them were courted by the democratic party.
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first of all, we should pause and note just how large a group we're talking about here. people talk a lot about illegal immigration today, but look at these numbers. really quite remarkable. 3 million foreigners came to the u.s. between 1846 and 1854. 3 million. now how does that compare in terms of total population? that constitutes 14.5% of the 1845 population. so those are huge numbers. obviously, that's going to be viewed especially by native born evangelical protestants with some alarm. they're going to be alarmed by this influx of catholics, and, as we shall see, they're going to organize politically to meet this perceived threat. in a couple of minutes i'm going to talk about how they organize politically first in these secret fraternal organizations. ultimately in a national political party called the american party. let's set that aside just for a minute here, stay focused on the

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