That's Henry Clay, a Senator from Kentucky, who twice engineered political compromises that kept America from plunging into civil war. Unfortunately, he died shortly after the second compromise in 1850 and ten years later the war broke out anyway.
History doesn't repeat itself but we can learn from it - maybe. But maybe we are ten years away from a 21st Century repeat of what happened between 1850 and the bombardment of Fort Sumter.
Please go below the fold.
By 1850 politically, economically and culturally, there were really two United States. There was the North, which was beginning to experience the Industrial Revolution, and there was the South which was still dependent upon slave labor and a plantation economy. The North was increasingly urbanized, its population expanding through larger and larger groups migrating from overseas. The South, on the other hand, was still a traditional, rural-based economy and society.
The major issue separating the two regions was slavery. Politically slave-holding states had parity in Washington with free states, but this parity was beginning to end and would eventually disappear as the new states coming in from the Louisiana Purchase region entered as free, rather than slave states.
The compromise of 1820 effectively limited the extension of slavery to only one state - Missouri - that existed in the northern (and larger) part of the Louisiana Purchase. But the compromise almost foundered when Missouri's new state Constitution refused to recognize free blacks. Clay went back to work, smoothed things over, and got things back on track.
The situation was more complicated in 1850 because the stakes were higher. By the latter date, Clay's Whig Party had largely been superseded by the Republicans who increasingly took an abolitionist line on the issue of slavery, not just in free states but everywhere in the United States. Further, the Republican economic program which emphasized protective tariffs to foster industry helped the North but hurt the South.
The compromise of 1850 basically guaranteed that no more slave states would enter the Union, but it forestalled a greater crisis because it also contained the Fugitive Slave Act which allowed Southern slaveholders (Clay being one himself) to chase down and return runaway slaves even if the capture took place in a free state.
Clay died in 1852 and therefore was unable to play any role in halting the gradual radicalization of the Republicans with the ultimate nomination of the anti-slavery Lincoln in 1860. Lincoln actually began his political career as a moderate on slavery and did not see any reason to abolish it in the Southern states. But his views became more extreme as he strove to align himself with the majority views that helped him secure the nomination, even though he, like most Northern politicians, did not believe that the Southern states would make good on their promise to secede.
Can anyone be sure that we aren't facing a similar situation now? The refusal of slaveholding politicians to seek an accommodation between 1850 and 1860 is hardly different from the increasing intransigence of Republican conservatives today. And despite efforts by McCain and other Republican stalwarts to push back the Tea Party tide, nearly half the Congressional seats held in the current Congress (108 of 234) are held by representatives from the 13 Confederate states.
I can see a scenario in which Democrats continue to push health care, immigration, gay marriage and other programs that are as anathema to Republicans today as abolition was to the slaveholding states in the decade leading up to the Civil War. Why would a red-state politician who gets more than 60% of the vote find it in his or her self-interest to compromise their beliefs?
Not a single member of Lincoln's cabinet nor any ranking officer in his military command believed that the South would fire a single weapon at anyone wearing the uniform of the United States. Not a single one.