Wilmot Proviso - Introduction and Debate On The Proviso

Introduction and Debate On The Proviso

On Saturday August 8, 1846 President Polk submitted to Congress a request for $2,000,000 in order to facilitate negotiations with Mexico over the final settlement of the war. The request came with no public warning after Polk had failed to arrange for approval of the bill with no Congressional debate. With Congress scheduled to adjourn that Monday, Democratic leadership arranged for the bill to be immediately considered in a special night session. Debate was to be limited to two hours with no individual speech to last more than ten minutes.

David Wilmot, a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, and a group of other Barnburner Democrats including Preston King of New York, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, Gideon Welles of Connecticut, and Jacob Brinkerhoff of Ohio, 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. 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.

William W. Wick, Democrat of Indiana, attempted to eliminate total restriction of slavery by proposing an amendment that the Missouri Compromise line of latitude 36°30' simply be extended west to the Pacific. This was voted down 89–54. The vote to add the proviso to the bill was then called, and it passed by 83–64. A last-ditch effort by southerners to table the entire bill was defeated by 94–78, and then the entire bill was approved 85–80. Most ominously, these votes all fell overwhelmingly along sectional rather than party lines.

The Senate took up the bill late in its Monday session. Democrats hoped to reject the Wilmot Proviso and send the bill back to the House for a quick approval of the bill without the restrictions on slavery. Whig John Davis of Massachusetts attempted to forestall this effort by holding the floor until it would be too late to return the bill to the House, forcing the Senate to accept or reject the appropriation with the proviso intact. However, before he could call the vote, due to an eight minute difference in the official House and Senate clocks, the House had adjourned and the Congress was officially out of session.

The issue resurfaced at the end of the year when Polk, in his annual message to Congress, renewed his request with the amount needed increased to three million dollars. Polk argued that, while the original intent of the war had never been to acquire territory (a view hotly contested by his opponents), an honorable peace required territorial compensation to the United States. The Three Million Dollar Bill, as it was called, was the sole item of business in the House from February 8, 1847 until February 15. Preston King reintroduced the Wilmot Proviso, but this time the exclusion of slavery was expanded beyond merely the Mexican territory to include "any territory on the continent of America which shall hereafter be acquired". This time Representative Stephen Douglas, Democrat of Illinois, reintroduced the proposal to simply extend the Missouri Compromise line to the west coast, and this was again defeated 109–82. The Three Million Bill with the proviso was then passed by the House 115–106. In the Senate, led by Thomas Hart Benton (Democrat), the bill was passed without the proviso. When the bill was returned to the House the Senate bill prevailed; every Northern Whig still supported the proviso, but 22 northern Democrats voted with the South.

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. 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. Lewis Cass (Democrat) in December 1847, in his famous letter to A. O. P. Nicholson in Tennessee, further defined the concept of 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.