7 - The Congressional Crisis of 1836

Summary

The first session of the Twenty-fourth Congress saw the tensions over slavery in the District of Columbia erupt on the floors of the House of Representatives and the Senate. In both chambers the presentation of abolitionist petitions became a point of controversy As actors in the Senate and House groped for a path around the polarizing and consuming issue of abolition, they moved away from reliance upon the text of the constitutional document and toward a constitutional spirit – embodied in the idea of “the compact” – as a way to navigate the apparent incompatibility of Southern and Northern understandings of the Constitution’s guarantee of rights of property. This chapter traces the process of the debates within each chamber of Congress before turning to a closer analysis of the constitutional issues raised by them. The chapter outlines the manner in which the invocation of “the compact” in the debates and in Pinckney’s Report of May 1836 met the challenges of the abolitionist petitions and erected an understanding of constitutional faith that rested upon the reanimation of values deemed present in the debates of 1787–88.