Wilmot Proviso

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WILMOT PROVISO

WILMOT PROVISO. Immediately after the beginning of the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), President James Polk asked Congress for $2 million, which he intended to use to buy a peace treaty with Mexico. A rider was attached to the bill on 8 August 1846, by David Wilmot, a little-known Democratic representative from Pennsylvania. The Wilmot Proviso, as it became known, would forbid the extension of slavery to any territory acquired from Mexico. The proviso caused a split among the Democrats as northerners supported it and southerners opposed it. Polk eventually got his appropriation, but Congress rejected the Wilmot Proviso after a bitter debate. The provision was reintroduced several times afterward, but never approved.

The implications of the Wilmot Proviso were far reaching. Wilmot's action was on behalf of a group of northern Democrats who were angry over Polk's political appointments, his apparent proslavery actions in Texas, his compromise with Great Britain over the Oregon issue, and Polk's veto of a rivers and harbors bill supported by midwestern Democrats. Many northern Democrats were also resentful of the domination of the party by southerners, feeling they had made too many concessions to the southern wing in the past, and that the war with Mexico was an act of aggression designed to expand slavery. As a result, the Wilmot Proviso sparked what would become a rancorous national debate on the question of expanding slavery into the territories.

All but one northern state legislature endorsed the Wilmot Proviso, while southern legislatures expressed their determination to resist it. Southern slaveholders resented the proviso as it seemed to stigmatize them, suggesting that they were not the equals of northerners. More importantly, southerners feared that if slavery could not expand, the slave system would slowly be strangled once it was surrounded by free territories. Prominent senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina argued that the territories were the common property of all the states, and Congress lacked the power to prevent persons from taking their property into a territory; therefore slavery was legal in all the territories. Failure to uphold this principle, Calhoun declared, would destroy the balance between the free and slave states. At the end of 1847, Michigan's Democratic senator Lewis Cass argued for what would become known as "popular sovereignty" by proposing that the territories decide the slavery question themselves. This idea attracted support from both northern and southern Democrats, each of whom interpreted the concept to fit their own views about the expansion of slavery.

Polk seems not to have understood the nature of the debate, holding that the slavery issue was a domestic problem and not a question of foreign policy. The president failed to recognize the question was, indeed, a major foreign policy issue. Expansion had been a significant aspect of American foreign policy since colonial days. The end of the Mexican-American War would leave either slave owners or anti-slave forces in control of an enormous amount of new territory; in time, the winner could control the government. Polk thought that Congress was raising the issue in order to embarrass him; he felt slavery could not exist in the poor soil conditions of northern Mexico.

The proviso served to heighten sectional animosity, and later efforts to pass the measure only provoked further debate. The modern Republican Party would be founded on the principle of halting slavery's expansion, and Abraham Lincoln would be elected to the presidency on a platform that promised to carry out the principles of the Wilmot Proviso.