Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Read online

  And for forty years after 1819, among those desks (at which senators studied reports and wrote speeches and letters, since most senators did not have offices of their own), the senators of the United States grappled—as, once, the senators of ancient Rome had grappled—with the concerns of expanding empire: should the borders of the young republic be extended west of the Mississippi, and if so how far west—to the Great Plains, or even further, to the mighty mountain chain of the West and the shore of the great ocean beyond? (Many senators considered this last suggestion ridiculous. When, in 1824, there was a proposal for the erection of a fort on the Pacific shore of the Oregon Territory, Mahlon Dickerson of New Jersey said there was no realistic possibility that Oregon, separated from the United States by virtually impassable deserts and mountains, could ever become a state; even if its congressmen managed to cover twenty miles a day, he pointed out, they would need 350 days to get to Washington and back. Benton of Missouri rose at his desk to reply angrily that “Within a century from this day, population, greater than that of the present United States, will exist on the West side of the Rocky Mountains,” but the proposal was defeated.) Among those desks was debated peace and war: whether, once it was decided twenty-five years after the Columbia River Fort was debated that Oregon was worth settling after all, to go to war with England over it (“54–40 or fight!”); whether to march against Mexico or instead negotiate for sovereignty over California and Texas and the vast arid stretches of the Southwest. It was at one of those desks that the first senator from newly annexed Texas, Sam Houston, who usually sat silently, dressed in sombrero and a waistcoat of panther hide with its hair still on, whittling away at small pine sticks, finally rose during a debate on the legal technicalities of the issue to tell the Senate bluntly that Texas was already at war with Mexico and that the United States, in annexing Texas, had inherited that war. Among those desks was debated the great questions involved in the settlement of the vast new territories of the West: would their land go to speculators or to brave and enterprising individual families?—it was in the Senate that Benton proposed the Homestead Act that made him “the father of the cheap land system”; would it be the federal government or the new states and territories who would pay for the roads and canals that would knit them together? And, of course, it was among those desks that, for these forty years, was debated the great problem that overshadowed all questions about the new territories and states: whether they should be slave or free? It was not only Webster’s reply to Hayne that preserved the Union; among those desks, the desks of the Senate, men fought to save it for forty years.

  The forty years—1819 to 1859—after the Senate moved back into its elegant domed Chamber would be called the Senate’s “Golden Age.”

  In part, the phrase was inspired by the hue of the Chamber itself, by the immense gold eagle atop the dais, by the radiance of the great chandelier, by the gallery’s gilt columns and balustrade. In part, it was inspired by the debates that took place in that Chamber, by oratory as brilliant as the surroundings, and by the men who participated in those debates, particularly the shining figures of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun—the “Great Triumvirate.” And in part those four decades were the Senate’s Golden Age because it was the period in which the Senate came closest to living up to the greatness that the Framers had envisioned for it. During those forty years the Senate held center stage in the great arena of American history, becoming the focus and balance wheel of government—while, true to the principles on which it had been founded and which Washington so pithily summarized to Jefferson, it “cooled” passions, tried to reconcile the unreconcilable. For some decades after the founding of the Republic, the House of Representatives had overshadowed the Senate; Webster and Clay had been members of the lower house then. But now, as the population of the new nation expanded, the House expanded with it—by 1820, it had 213 members and its membership grew faster and faster with each census—and became too unwieldy: rules had to be adopted that inhibited the role of debate, and sheer size worked against calm consideration of delicate issues. And, beginning in 1819, when the Senate twice stood fast against inflammatory House measures and then, in 1820, forged the territorial division known as the Missouri Compromise, it was in the Senate, now the true deliberative body that the Framers had envisioned, that were enacted the great compromises that, for forty years, pulled the Union back from the edge of abyss.

  It was at one of those desks that Calhoun sat in 1833 after his return to Washington—a Washington buzzing with whispers that President Andrew Jackson had sworn to hang him if he returned. When Hayne had debated Webster in 1830, he had been speaking for Calhoun, then Vice President, and, as presiding officer of the Senate, not permitted to speak there; Hayne was defending Calhoun’s doctrine of the ultimate sovereignty of the individual states, of a state’s right to nullify a federal law if it felt the law exceeded the power granted to the federal government by the Constitution; and if the government insisted on enforcing the law, to secede. Now, in 1833, Calhoun was a senator, and spoke for himself. Jackson was still proposing a tariff bill the South considered onerous and unconstitutional, and was sending to the Senate a Force bill, authorizing enforcement of the tariff by military force. The South Carolina Legislature authorized the use of the militia to resist; Calhoun continued to publish papers reaffirming the constitutionality of nullification; and Jackson warned that “Disunion by armed force is treason.” “Within three weeks, sir,” the enraged President told a South Carolina delegation—within three weeks after the first blow is struck—“I will place fifty thousand troops in your state.” Calhoun had resigned the vice presidency, and Hayne had resigned his Senate seat, so that Calhoun, named by the South Carolina Legislature to succeed him, could present the South’s case himself, and the South’s greatest orator was seated at his desk, grimly taking notes, as Jackson’s message requesting passage of the Force bill was read.

  On the day Calhoun was to deliver his major speech against the measure, there was a heavy snowfall, but carriages jammed the Capitol plaza, carrying people who had come to hear John C. Calhoun speak. While the verbiage of other leading orators of the day was flowery, Calhoun’s was “stripped bare”—down to the bones of a remorseless logic. His sentences were often long and involved, as was the intricate process of his reasoning, and he spoke so fast that journalists considered him the most difficult man to report in the Congress. But, he was a gaunt, unforgettable figure, his eyes burning in a pale face, his great mass of hair rising like a lion’s mane, his voice ringing metallically in every corner of the Chamber. “The commanding eye, the grim earnestness of manner, the utter integrity of sentiment held the galleries in anxious attention,” as one historian wrote. “His voice was harsh, his gestures stiff, like the motions of a pump handle. There was no ease, flexibility, grace or charm in his manner; yet there was something that riveted your attention as with hooks of steel.” As he rose now, the galleries could see how much the fifty-year-old South Carolinian had aged in a few months as he saw his beloved South being forced to the brink. The blazing eyes were sunk deep in his head, the furrows in his cheeks had become gashes, the lion’s mane was gray now. To his opponents, the gaunt figure looked like “the arch traitor … like Satan in Paradise.” To others, he was “a great patriot with his back against the wall, battling fiercely in defense of violated liberties.” Consumed with his feelings, he paced back and forth between the desks “like a caged lion.” The Force bill, he said, exhibited “the impious spectacle of this Government, the creature of the States, making war against the power to which it owes its existence…. We made no such government. South Carolina sanctioned no such government.” The Force bill, he said, “enables him [Jackson] to subject every man in the United States … to martial law … and under the penalty of court-martial to compel him to imbrue his hand in his brother’s blood.”

  The Senator from South Carolina paced as he spoke. The Senator from Massachusetts stood immobile beside his desk—as he had done thre
e years before, again wearing his blue coat with the brass buttons and his stiff cravat—as again, in another great speech, he defended the Constitution as the overriding law. The Senator from Kentucky strolled among the desks—as casually as if they had been props in a theater.

  When he was a lawyer in Kentucky, it had been said of Henry Clay that he could “hypnotize a jury”; as a national spokesman for the Whig Party, he had attracted crowds so large on a speaking tour that it was said that he “depopulated the fields and forests of the West”; as a dinner party guest he was so charming that “the white gloves kissed by Clay became treasured mementoes.” He charmed the Senate as well. “No lover was ever more ardent, more vehement, more impassioned, or more successful in his appeal than Henry Clay” when he was courting the Senate, an observer wrote, watching him “stepping gracefully, backward and forward and from side to side, flourishing a silk handkerchief,” an actor born to center stage. From time to time, Henry Clay returned to his desk to pick up his snuffbox, and carried it with him for a while, taking a pinch to punctuate an anecdote, tapping it with a forefinger to emphasize a point. Tall, slender, and graceful in a black dress coat and a high white stock, his face was bright, playful, and grinning as he told his wonderful stories, his voice “so penetrating that even in a lower key” it rang through the Chamber “as inspiring as a trumpet.” And when he turned serious, the stamp of his foot and the raising of a tight-clenched fist “made the emotion visible as well as audible,” an historian wrote. “Harry of the West,” “Brave Prince Hal,” “the Gallant Star”—Henry Clay, who had been elected Speaker of the House of Representatives the day he arrived in it, leader of the War Hawks in 1812, Henry Clay whose previous triumphs had already earned him the nickname of “the Great Compromiser”—now, in 1833, with North and South on the very brink of civil war, he proposed a compromise tariff bill that he said was not an ordinary piece of legislation but “a treaty of peace and amity”—a true compromise in which each side would sacrifice something for the sake of unity.

  The North—President Jackson—“would, in the enforcement act, send forth alone a flaming sword,” Clay said. “We would send that also, but along with it the olive branch, as a messenger of peace. They cry out, ‘The Law! the law! the law! Power! Power! Power!’ … They would hazard a civil commotion, beginning in South Carolina and ending, God only knows where…. We want no war, above all no civil war, no family strife. We want no sacked cities, no desolated fields, no smoking ruins, no streams of American blood by American arms!”

  Calhoun rose to respond in a great silence, for spectators and senators alike knew how much hung on his next words, as so much had hung on Webster’s words three years before. When he agreed to Clay’s proposal, “such was the clapping and thundering applause that… the sensation was indescribable,” an observer wrote. As Jackson’s Force bill moved through the Senate and House, Clay’s compromise tariff bill moved in tandem with it. And the moment the tariff bill passed, Calhoun was on the road to South Carolina. He traveled, as the historian Merrill Peterson has written, “day and night over snow-covered and rain-soaked roads, sometimes in open mail carts,” in order to stop a state convention from taking rash action. When he persuaded the convention to repeal the nullification ordinance, the crisis was over. And “the Compromise Act of 1833,” that Act created among the desks of the Senate, “would generally be celebrated as an act of deliverance.”

  Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, three men who each longed for the presidency, and never attained it. The mark they made was in the Senate. But it was quite a mark. The battles they fought—sometimes, in opposition to Andrew Jackson, united; often opposed to each other (increasingly, Calhoun isolated from the other two and from most of the Senate)—were battles over the most momentous issues of the age, and the Senate was often the dominant arena in which those issues were decided, for it was not the White House but Capitol Hill that was the epicenter of government then, and the Senate was the dominant house of Congress. As Peterson has written,

  Webster, Clay and Calhoun… were the ornaments of American statesmanship in the era between the founding and the Civil War. At home and abroad, making exception for their common enemy, they were the most celebrated Americans of the time; … All across the country their speeches were read as if the fate of the nation hung on them….

  Sixteen years later, in 1849, it was again in the Senate that Clay, seventy-two years old now, rose to again urge compromise. He had always been thin, but now he was too thin, and frail—he had had to be helped up the stairs in front of the Capitol—and racked by the cough that his friends suspected was consumption although no one dared even to whisper the dreaded word. He didn’t stroll through the desks this time, didn’t move about much at all, in fact, as if he was trying to conserve his strength during the two days he spoke, standing for the most part at his back-row desk in a far corner of the Chamber, but “he spoke with the musical voice of old, with the same passionate intensity”—and, at crucial points, he still tapped the snuffbox. The spectre of sacked cities and desolated fields was very near now, but he was still fighting against it. Victory in the war with Mexico had brought the United States vast new territories—Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California—and the explosive issue of whether these territories should be slave or free was splitting the nation apart, and the dispute was being played out on the floor of the Senate, where for years Calhoun and his followers had successfully blocked admission of the territories as free states, had blocked admission while talk grew of secession, and of civil war. “If any solution to the [problem] … was to be found, it would be up to the Senate to take the lead”—up to the Senate, and to its “Great Compromiser.” For three weeks, Clay had worked and reworked alternate plans, and then, having finally settled on a complicated package of eight separate resolutions, one rainy January evening, haggard and coughing constantly, he had impulsively climbed into a carriage and visited Daniel Webster at Webster’s boardinghouse, and outlined his plan—to which Webster consented. And now, as his biographer wrote, Brave Prince Hal “rose in the Senate chamber and began his last great struggle to save the Union that he loved.”

  From his position in the far corner, the long semi-circle of desks stretched below and away from him, and his gaze traveled along the upturned faces of the men sitting at them as he said: “I implore Senators—I entreat them, by all that they expect hereafter, and by all that is dear to them here below, to repress the ardor of these passions, to look at their country in this crisis—to listen to the voice of reason.” Sometimes the physical effort seemed too much for him, and he faltered, but he always went on, for two long days, and one observer wrote, “when in moments of excitement, he stands so firm and proud, with his eyes all agleam, while his voice rings out clear and strong, it almost seems that… the hot blood of youth was still coursing through his veins…. The wonderful old man!” In a stroke, as Peterson puts it, he “seized the initiative from the President, centered it in the Senate…. and set the legislative agenda for the country.” “What a singular spectacle!” wrote the editor of the New York Herald—a newspaper long hostile to Clay. “Of all the leaders of the old parties, of all the aspiring spirits of the new ones, including [the President] and the whole of his cabinet, from head to tail, not a single soul, not a single mind has dared to exhibit the moral courage to come out with any plan for settling the whole except it is Henry Clay … solitary and alone.”

  One of the desks below Clay’s had been vacant while he spoke. It was a desk near the center of the Chamber, third from the aisle in the second row on the right—Calhoun’s desk. Calhoun’s boardinghouse was just across from the Capitol, but Calhoun was too ill to attend. When he read Clay’s speech in the newspapers, though, he determined to reply, and his supporters said he would be present on March 4. The galleries again were packed, the walls were lined with spectators, and shortly after noon Calhoun came. “He was emaciated and feeble,” one of his biographers has recounted, “his sallow cheeks sunken, his lon
g hair now almost white, his step short.” He had hoped to deliver his own speech, but he didn’t have the strength. While Senator James Mason of Virginia, standing at his shoulder, read the words Calhoun had written, Calhoun sat at his desk, with a great black coat drawn around him, and a journalist described “his eyes glowing … as he glanced at Senators upon whom he desired to have certain passages make an impression.” And the speech was as defiant as ever. It was on a great theme—“the greatest and gravest question that can ever come under your consideration: How can the union be preserved?”—and he said the question had a simple answer: Only by adopting measures to assure the southern states that they could remain in the Union “consistently with their honor and safety.” The speech rallied the South—against the compromise—and when, on March 7, 1849, Webster stood to reply to Calhoun, at his desk also near the center of the Chamber, “not since the Reply to Hayne did the fate of the nation seem to hang so fatefully on the wisdom, eloquence and power of one man.” Standing in the same Chamber, on almost the same spot, twenty years before, Black Dan Webster had given a speech that would live in history. Now he began another such speech: “Mr. President, I wish to speak today, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a northern man, but as an American, and a member of the Senate of the United States. It is fortunate that there is a Senate of the United States; a body … to which the country looks with confidence, for wise, moderate, patriotic and healing counsels.” Webster, too, was old, but his voice still pealed through that Chamber like an organ, rolling across the long arc of desks and the crowded galleries as he continued: “I speak today for the preservation of the Union. Hear me for my cause.”