Wilmot Proviso

The Wilmot Proviso was an unsuccessful 1846 proposal in the United States Congress to ban slavery in territory acquired from Mexico in the Mexican–American War.^[1] The conflict over the Wilmot Proviso was one of the major events leading to the American Civil War.

Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania first introduced the proviso in the House of Representatives on August 8, 1846, as a rider on a $2,000,000 appropriations bill intended for the final negotiations to resolve the Mexican–American War (this was only three months into the two-year war). It passed the House largely on sectional lines between a generally anti-slavery North in favor and a pro-slavery South against, foreshadowing coming conflicts. It failed in the Senate, where the South had greater representation. The proviso was reintroduced in February 1847 and again passed the House and failed in the Senate. In 1848, an attempt to make it part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo also failed. Sectional political disputes over slavery in the Southwest continued through the Compromise of 1850.

After an earlier attempt to acquire

The Whigs faced a different scenario. The narrow victory of James K. Polk (Democrat) over Henry Clay (Whig) in the 1844 presidential election had caught the Southern Whigs by surprise. The key element of this defeat, which carried over into the congressional and local races in 1845 and 1846 throughout the South, was the party's failure to take a strong stand favoring Texas annexation. Southern Whigs were reluctant to repeat their mistakes on Texas, but, at the same time, Whigs from both sections realized that victory and territorial acquisition would again bring out the issue of slavery and the territories. In the South in particular, there was already the realization, or perhaps fear, that the old economic issues that had defined the Second Party System were already dead. Their political goal was to avoid any sectional debate over slavery which would expose the sectional divisions within the party.^[4]

The Mexican–American War was seen by many as an effort to gain more territory for the establishment of slave states. It was popular in the South,^[5] and much less so in the North,^[6] where opposition took many forms. For example, Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax, arguing that the money would be used to prosecute the war and gain slave territory.^[7]

On Saturday, August 8, 1846, President

David Wilmot, a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, and a group of other Barnburner Democrats including Preston King and Timothy Jenkins of New York, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, Gideon Welles of Connecticut, and Jacob Brinkerhoff of Ohio,^[9] had already been meeting in early August strategy meetings. Wilmot had a strong record of supporting the Polk Administration and was close to many Southerners. With the likelihood that Wilmot would have no trouble gaining the floor in the House debate, he was chosen to present the amendment to the appropriations bill that would carry his name.^[10] Wilmot offered the following to the House in language modeled after the Northwest Ordinance of 1787:

Provided, That, as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the United States, by virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated between them, and to the use by the Executive of the moneys herein appropriated, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime, whereof the party shall first be duly convicted.

In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the war was submitted to the Senate for approval. Douglas, now in the Senate, was among those who joined with the South to defeat an effort to attach the Wilmot Proviso to the treaty.^[15] In the prior year's debate in the House, Douglas had argued that all of the debate over slavery in the territories was premature; the time to deal with that issue was when the territory was actually organized by Congress.^[16] Lewis Cass (Democrat) in December 1847, in his famous letter to A. O. P. Nicholson in Tennessee, further underlined the principle of appealing to popular sovereignty which would soon evolve as the mainstream Democratic alternative to the Wilmot Proviso:

Leave it to the people, who will be affected by this question to adjust it upon their own responsibility, and in their own manner, and we shall render another tribute to the original principles of our government, and furnish another for its permanence and prosperity.^[17]

With the approval of the treaty, the issue moved from one of abstraction to one involving practical matters. The nature of the Constitution, slavery, the value of free labor, political power, and ultimately political realignment were all involved in the debate.^[18] Historian Michael Morrison argues that from 1820 to 1846 a combination of "racism and veneration of the Union" had prevented a direct Northern attack on slavery.^[13] While the original Southern response to the Wilmot Proviso was measured, it soon became clear to the South that this long postponed attack on slavery had finally occurred. Rather than simply discuss the politics of the issue, historian William Freehling noted, "Most Southerners raged primarily because David Wilmot's holier-than-thou stance was so insulting."^[19]

In the North, the most immediate repercussions involved Martin Van Buren and the state of New York. The Barnburners were successfully opposed by their conservative opposition, the Hunkers, in their efforts to send a pro-proviso batch of delegates to the 1848 Democratic National Convention. The Barnburners held their own separate convention and sent their own slate of delegates to the convention in Baltimore. Both delegations were seated with the state's total votes split between them. When the convention rejected a pro-proviso plank^[20] and selected Lewis Cass as the nominee, the Barnburners again bolted and were the nucleus of forming the Free Soil Party.^[21] Historian Leonard Richards writes of these disaffected Democrats:

Overall, then, Southern Democrats during the 1840s lost the hard core of their original doughface support. No longer could they count on New England and New York Democrats to provide them with winning margins in the House. ...
To them [Free Soil Democrats] the movement to acquire Texas, and the fight over the Wilmot Proviso, marked the turning point, when aggressive slavemasters stole the heart and soul of the Democratic Party and began dictating the course of the nation's destiny.^[22]

Historian

Southern Democrats, for whom slavery had always been central, had little difficulty in perceiving exactly what the proviso meant for them and their party. In the first place the mere existence of the proviso meant the sectional strains that had plagued the Whigs on Texas now beset the Democrats on expansion, the issue the Democrats themselves had chosen as their own. The proviso also announced to southerners that they had to face the challenge of certain northern Democrats who indicated their unwillingness to follow any longer the southern lead on slavery. That circumstance struck at the very roots of the southern conception of party. The southerners had always felt that their Northern colleagues must toe the southern line on all slavery-related issues.^[23]

In

Southerner Whigs looked hopefully to slaveholder and war hero General Zachary Taylor as the solution to the widening sectional divide even though he took no public stance on the Wilmot Proviso. However, Taylor, once nominated and elected, showed that he had his own plans. Taylor hoped to create a new non-partisan coalition that would once again remove slavery from the national stage. He expected to be able to accomplish this by freezing slavery at its 1849 boundaries and by immediately bypassing the territory stage and creating two new states out of the Mexican Cession.^[25]

The opening salvo in a new level of sectional conflict occurred on December 13, 1848, when

Thus the contest was joined on the central issue which was to dominate all American history for the next dozen years, the disposition of the Territories. Two sets of extremists had arisen: Northerners who demanded no new slave territories under any circumstances, and Southerners who demanded free entry for slavery into all territories, the penalty for denial to be secession. For the time being, moderates who hoped to find a way of compromise and to repress the underlying issue of slavery itself – its toleration or non-toleration by a great free Christian state – were overwhelmingly in the majority. But history showed that in crises of this sort the two sets of extremists were almost certain to grow in power, swallowing up more and more members of the conciliatory center.[27]

Combined with other slavery-related issues, the Wilmot Proviso led to the Compromise of 1850, which helped buy another uncertain decade of peace. Radical secessionists were temporarily at bay as the Nashville Convention failed to endorse secession. Moderates rallied around the Compromise as the final solution to the sectional issues involving slavery and the territories. At the same time, however, the language of the Georgia Platform, widely accepted throughout the South, made it clear that the South's commitment to Union was not unqualified; they fully expected the North to adhere to their part of the agreement.

In regard to the territory the Proviso would have covered, California had a brief period of slavery due to slave owning settlers arriving during the 1848

• Slave Trade Acts
• Proviso Township, Illinois
  , named for the Wilmot Proviso