CHAPTER IV FIRST ACTIVITIES IN THE HOUSE CONTEMPORARY pictures of the city of Washington, as Wilmot found it on his arrival, in the closing weeks of 1845, are not at all attractive. "There is no state in the world," wrote one visitor, "which possesses proportionately so small, scantily populated and shabby a capital as the American Union. Planned on a scale of surpassing grandeur, its architectural execution is almost contemptible. The whole resembles a frame of Berlin wool work in which the fair embroidress has made spasmodic attempts at a commencement.' Pennsylvania Avenue was the only paved street in the city; it was a straggling mud hole in rainy weather, while after a few hours of sunshine the streets were filled with clouds of dust; the cattle pastured in the streets, and bullfrogs "croaked and roared" in the side lanes. The private buildings were generally squalid, the great heat dictating deep houses which were exceedingly ugly, with rooms badly proportioned, long and narrow, and usually one dark chamber on each floor. But few houses had water led into them, the supply being carried in from neighboring pumps. In spring, all mirrors, etc., were swathed in pink net to protect them from the swarms of flies. Only a little note of relief is afforded in a glimpse of a short season in spring when peach blossoms and magnolias and the greenery of trees and gardens drew the eye from the prevailing ugliness, and the perfume of flowers filled the soft southern air. The Capitol itself, Wilmot's special goal, then lacked the 1 This description and the paragraph following are condensed from a number of articles in a volume entitled Washington During War Time, by Marcus Benjamin, Ph.D. great marble wings that now house the Senate and the House respectively, and the colonnaded dome of to-day had not yet replaced a much less imposing affair of brick and iron. Two sodded slopes on the western side were connected by intervening terraces, the lower bordered by stiff rows of trees and flower beds, and the whole surrounded by a tall, iron paling pierced by three gates (the principal one opening to Pennsylvania Avenue) flanked by porters' lodges and closed and locked at night. The drift of population, at least so far as legislative Washington was concerned, had not yet begun to set strongly toward the northwest. Most of the representatives and many of the senators were quartered in "messes" (we should probably call them boarding houses to-day) on Capitol Hill or about the eastern end of Pennsylvania Avenue just under the Hill. During his first session Wilmot lodged and took his meals at Masi's, on the southeast corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 41⁄2 Street. It was a rambling brick house with high-pitched roof and quaint dormers, which stood until very recently as one of the few survivors of old Washington in that vicinity. It had slipped sadly down the social scale with the decay of its environment, and was demolished, in 1923, to give place to the new order now creeping into that part of the city. His fellow lodgers in the winter of 1845-6 were five other members of his State delegation in the House. With the second session of the Twenty-ninth Congress, Masi's disappears from the list of Washington messes, and Wilmot is recorded as living half a block further west, on the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue, at Mrs. Hamilton's, with a larger mess made up almost entirely of northern democrats: Benton, DeMott, Ellsworth, Goodyear, Hungerford and Russell, of New York; Hunt and McClelland, of Michigan; Wentworth, of Illinois, Yost, of Pennsylvania; and Bowlin, of Missouri. He took his seat in the House of Representatives at the opening of the first session of the Twenty-ninth Congress, December 1, 1845-a session that in its closing hours was to bring him into the notice of the nation and the pages of history as the advocate of the Wilmot Proviso. His earliest recorded vote was given on the same day, for John W. Davis, of Indiana, as Speaker-a strictly party division in which Davis led his whig opponent, Samuel F. Vinton, of Ohio, by 121 to 84, with a few ballots scattering. The majority shows the strong predominance of the democratic party in the House at that period. Later in the opening proceedings the new congressman showed a certain independence of mind by siding with the minority on some nonpartisan questions-against the abrogation of the one-hour rule for limitation of debate, and against a new method of seating the members; but in anything touching party policies he seems to have followed the course to be expected of a good democrat, deeply convinced of the worth of party solidarity in the support of party principles. 2 December 8, he was appointed to serve on the Standing Committee on Manufactures, of which John Quincy Adams was chairman. The first especially significant question calling for his ballot came up, however, earlier-in fact, on the opening day and his position seems curious. Chapman, of Alabama, moved to restore to the rules of the House a section which had been included as Rule 21 of the preceding Congress, providing that "No petition, memorial, resolution or other paper praying for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia or any State or territory, or of the slave trade between the States and territories in which it now exists, shall be received by this House or entertained in any way whatever." This rule had been abolished during the latter part of the last session. Wilmot voted with the minority (84 to 121) for its restoration. His name seems strangely associated in this roll call with the 2 The method adopted was to deposit the names of all the members in a box, mix the slips thoroughly, and draw them one by one. Each man, as his name appeared, chose his seat from those remaining unassigned, thus combining the element of choice with that of chance. Wilmot's seat was in the last row, about halfway around the quadrant on the Speaker's right, in front of the spot where the statues of Blair and Benton now stand in the old chamber of the House of Representatives. & Cong. Globe, Twenty-ninth Congress, 1st session, p. 4. names of members who were later his bitter antagonists over the Proviso, while on the other side stood his future allies and supporters. December 10, the House took up consideration of the admission of the State of Texas, on a report from the Committee on the Territories. It will be recalled that the joint resolution put through Congress in the closing days of Tyler's administration had consented to the erection of a new State in Texas, upon the organization of a republican form of government by the people of that Republic, "in order that the same might be admitted as one of the States of the Union." The report now submitted recited these facts, declared that "the said constitution with proper evidence of its adoption by the people of Texas had been transmitted to the President and laid before Congress," and presented for adoption a joint resolution “That the State of Texas shall be one, and is hereby declared to be one, of the United States of America, and admitted into the Union on an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever." This joint resolution was made the special order for December 16. The agitation over the annexation of Texas had existed for years, and the definite prospect of its admission as a slave State had been before the country at least since the preceding March. During the interval, opposition had crystallized in the free States, and had expressed itself in memorials to Congress. John Quincy Adams "presented a remonstrance from the citizens of Denmark, in the county of Lewis, State of New York, against the admission of Texas into the Union as a slave State . . . and sundry similar remonstrances from citizens of various other parts of the State of New York; also from the States of Pennsylvania, Maine, Massachusetts, and Indiana." So far as can be determined from the recorded yeas and nays, Wilmot voted consistently to lay all such remonstrances on the table, in a mixed company of southern and northwestern democrats and southern whigs, while the north4 Cong. Globe, p. 37. eastern democrats and northern whigs voted against this mode of dismissal of the protests. Further, during the business preceding consideration of the actual question of admitting Texas, Congress was memorialized by Washington County, New York, praying for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and Wilmot's name appears among those who voted to table these memorials also, the division being again along geographical rather than party lines." The joint resolution for the admission of Texas came up December 16, 1845, and throughout all the parliamentary skirmishing, Wilmot appears to have voted steadily for its advancement to the third reading and to passage. He helped to exclude an amendment offered by Julius Rockwell, of Massachusetts (a whig), which would have recommitted the resolution to the Committee on the Territories with instructions to add a provision "that within the State by this resolution admitted into the Union, slavery and involuntary servitude (except for crime) shall be prohibited, and all provisions of the said (State) constitution inconsistent with this proviso shall be null and void." Finally, in much the same company by which he had been surrounded in the preceding ballots touching slavery questions, he voted for the passage of the resolution, which was sent to the Senate by a majority of 141 to 56. It was passed by the Senate, December 22, and signed by the President, December 29, 1845. 6 These votes adverse to the strategy of those who sought to abolish slavery where it was an established institution, and in favor of the addition of more slave soil to the Union, seem incongruous with the ideals and purposes of a man who, but a few months later, was to appear as the implacable opponent of slavery extension. There seems to be a contradiction, in spirit and in act, between his vote against Rockwell's proviso excluding slavery from Texas, and his advocacy of his own more emphatic proviso excluding slavery from New Mexico • Cong. Globe, p. 43. • Cong. Globe, pp. 62-65. |