Slavery
Louisiana's Democratic Senators Divide over Slavery and the Compromise of 1850

[SLAVERY.] Pierre Soulé to Editors of the Daily Delta, Printed Handbill, November 7, 1851. 1 p., 5.625" x 9.25". Some edge folds and tears, not affecting text; very good.

As slavery threatened to tear the nation apart in 1850, Whig U.S. Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky and Democratic U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois brokered a compromise package of five separate bills that they hoped would prevent a confrontation between slave and free states. They proposed bills that admitted California as a free state, assumed the public debt of Texas in exchange for its relinquishment of claims on New Mexico and other areas, organized territorial governments for New Mexico and Utah, banned the slave trade in Washington, D.C., and strengthened the federal fugitive slave law. U.S. Senator Pierre Soulé of Louisiana was a defender of slavery and states' rights and allied himself with John C. Calhoun of South Carolina in opposition to the Compromise. Soulé insisted that the Compromise did not protect the rights of the South to slavery and was no compromise. His fellow Senator from Louisiana Solomon W. Downs supported the Compromise.

When the Senators returned to Louisiana, their disagreements turned personal. On October 7, 1851, Downs gave a speech in Monroe, Louisiana, in which accused Soulé of misquoting a speech Downs gave in New York. Downs insisted that he had never said several things that Soulé attributed to him. The Daily Picayune published portions of Downs's speech in its November 4 issue, and Soulé wrote this letter to the newspaper the following day. When The Daily Picayune did not publish his response immediately, he turned to The Daily Delta to publish it, and this handbill came from the printing in The Daily Delta.

The Daily Picayune published Soulé's letter on November 9 with the editorial comment that “we share in the deep regret, which every citizen of the State must feel, that the differences of opinion between these two gentlemen, so eminent in position, and representing equally the sovereignty of Louisiana in the councils of the Union, should have assumed a tone of so much personal asperity.” The Daily Delta agreed: “The bitterness manifested by the two distinguished gentlemen is greatly to be deplored. Personally, our relations with both have ever been of the most friendly character. They are able and patriotic gentlemen, who pursue the same object by different roads, and ought not to suffer any personal feeling to draw them off from their duty as statesmen and Senators.”

Excerpts:

“the honorable Senator denies the correctness of the quotations I have made from his New York speech; and, alluding to my course on the Compromise, goes on to say, that ‘if he (meaning I) did not hear in the private circles of the capital a motive attributed to him (meaning me) for his course on that measure, so very suddenly and so unexpectedly taken, I presume he is the only Senator that did not.'”



Quoting Downs: “Convinced by the patriotism of their representatives that the Northern people were sound, I pledged myself to the support of the Compromise.... as New York goes, so will go the North; as the North goes, so will go the South; and, in the end, we shall all go together.”



Quoting Downs: “We have told the Southern people that abolitionism is no longer to be preached and practiced at the North; that aggression upon them, from that quarter, were put an end to?”



Pierre Soulé (1801-1870) was born in France and studied at a Jesuit college in Toulouse. As an anti-Royalist, he was exiled in 1816 to Navarre in northern Spain. He later studied law in Paris, passed the bar, and began a practice there. He published a newspaper and was convicted of opposition to the government and sentenced to three years in prison. In 1825, he fled France before being imprisoned and went to Great Britain, then Haiti. By 1826, he arrived in the United States and settled in New Orleans, where he resumed the practice of law. He became a naturalized citizen, founded a bank, and joined the Democratic party. In 1846, he won election to the Louisiana Senate. He briefly served in the U.S. Senate in 1847 to fill a vacancy, then returned to the U.S. Senate for a full term beginning in 1849. He resigned his seat to accept an appointment as U.S. Minister to Spain in 1853 and held the position until 1855. Along with the U.S. ministers to Great Britain (James Buchanan) and France (John Y. Mason), Soulé drafted the 1854 Ostend Manifesto, an attempt by southern slaveholders to annex Cuba to the United States to expand the area of slaveholding. He initially opposed secession but went with Louisiana into the Confederacy. Federal troops captured him in May 1861 and imprisoned him in Fort Warren, Massachusetts. Soulé escaped from the prison and returned to Confederate territory. After the war, he went into exile in Cuba but later returned and died in New Orleans.



Solomon W. Downs (1801-1854) was born in Tennessee and graduated from Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1823. He studied law, gained admission to the bar, and began a practice in Louisiana. He moved to New Orleans in 1845, where he continued the practice of law and became a planter. He served as the U.S. Attorney for the District of Louisiana from 1845 to 1847. He was elected as a Democrat to represent Louisiana in the U.S. Senate from 1847 to 1853. President Franklin Pierce appointed him as collector of the port of New Orleans in 1853.

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