Things continued to go well for Commodore Stockton after the war with Mexico ended. His gold mine in Virginia was yielding $8,200 a week in 1849. His father-in-law, John Potter passed away that year and asked Robert to settle up his affairs. His daughter Maria, and therefore Robert would inherit some of his rice works and plantations. The Joint C&A Railroad and D&R Canal Companies paid dividends of over $900,000 in a single year. After almost 40 years of service, Robert retired from active duty in the Navy, and he continued his work for the American Colonization Society.
Father in Law John Potter (Thomas Sully portrait)
Cornelius Vanderbilt, emerged as transportation king over the Stevens brothers in the ferry business in New York and he was the wealthiest man in America. Ironically he was almost killed on the Camden and Amboy railroad in 1834. Commodore Stockton could not match the wealth of Commodore Vanderbilt, but Robert was one of the richest men in New Jersey.
Stockton’s enterprises influenced his politics on the lightning rod of the era: slavery.
Morven’s servants were on the payroll, as were the 50 African Americans working his Virginia gold mine. Stockton invested with his father-in-law in a Georgia sugar plantation, which owned 120 slaves in the 1830s and he inherited more slaves with Potter’s death.
In 1850 the legislature of New Jersey asked Robert to be their pick for Democratic Senator. He entered the US Senate in March 1851. There were whispers of putting Stockton up for president. He was an outsider, staunchly independent of party politics with a strong pedigree and deep pockets.
He could carry the south. He even went as far as to say in 1851 that if the nation were to divide, perhaps the Hudson and not the Mason Dixon line should be the demarcation of north and south, and New Jersey would side with the south. The southern Democrats loved his speech.
Stockton believed in a strict interpretation of the Constitution. Any power not explicitly designated to the Federal Government belonged to the individual states, slavery included.
States were accepted into the Union in 1776 with slavery, and he believed each state had a right to determine their own laws. His position was that the federal government had no more right to ban slavery in South Carolina than they did in Russia where 23 million were in serfdom or Austria which had recently banned the practice.
Slaves were considered property, and the federal government could regulate their importation, but the 5th Amendment prevented the federal government from taking the property of slave owners.
Other than an unlikely constitutional amendment, Robert saw no legal way to impose abolition on the southern states. He felt slavery was a moral problem, not a political one. So was alcohol. He did not drink, but did not force his temperance on others. He also believed some slaves were well treated, and having seen living conditions in West Africa firsthand, he wrote that they were better off here, with a chance for long-term freedom than there.
The Union put together by his grandfather was more important to preserve than forcing the South to end the practice of slavery. He saw the results in Texas when Mexico demanded emancipation. Texans first evaded the law and eventually revolted.
He also had a hand in personally stopping the slave trade. He believed free African Americans in large numbers would create their own problems in society, and take jobs, and fill the poor houses, so the ACS colony in Liberia was his solution. He felt that if African nations could be uplifted and Christianized through the example of freed Christian Americans moving there, it would be to the benefit of all mankind.
Moral suasion and Divine Providence were his solutions. The North had peacefully found a way to phase out the practice and was still in that process. The South would eventually do the same, God willing.
Fredrick Douglas a fugitive slave, wrote about his experiences and then went to Europe to speak. His promotors bought his freedom and he returned to the US and was a leader in the Abolitionist movement.
But another man, Frederick Douglas, a runaway slave who turned writer and abolitionist, spoke out at the same time. He argued against waiting on Divine Providence to solve the issue.
“I prayed for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my feet.”
He spoke on July 4, 1850, first with reverence for Robert’s grandfather and the other signers:
“I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too—great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.”
But he also raged “That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is passed…
“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed… What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?
I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.”
The Massachusetts, Vermont and New York Abolitionists were still too extreme for most, and the politicians embraced complex compromises to put off the looming conflict.
Henry Clay, a Senator from Kentucky brokered the Missouri Compromise in 1820. A sick and dying Clay tried again in 1850 after the Mexican War. He suggested California be admitted as free, that the states carved from the Utah and New Mexico territories self-determine as they applied for statehood, Washington DC would end their slave trade, and federal laws against fugitive slaves be enhanced to return runaways.
Daniel Webster, who had once argued in favor of Robert’s actions against slaver ships at the Supreme Court, argued for Clay’s 1850 compromise in the Senate.
“…a bill on the subject now before the Senate, which, with some amendments, I propose to support, with all its provisions, to the fullest extent... I put it to all the sober and sound minds at the North as a question of morals and a question of conscience. What right have they, in their legislative capacity or any other capacity, to endeavor to get around this Constitution, or to embarrass the free exercise of the rights secured by the Constitution to the persons whose slaves escape from them? None at all; none at all.”
When Webster sent his speech to the Commodore for comment, Robert replied with a letter of his own, which was published and widely shared. He wanted states to select their own path. Like Douglas, he wanted no artificial compromises, but unlike Douglas, he argued that time and God would solve all ills.
There were obvious problems with his approach. The financial viability of captive labor exploded with the adoption of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. More land was put into production in the south and slave owners bred slaves or imported them from northerners as slavery was phased out in those states.
In the 30 years since Robert stopped the slave ships as captain of the Alligator, the number of Americans in bondage rose from 1.7 million to 3.2 million souls. Punitive laws in some states treated slaves as sub-human. Webster was vilified in Massachusetts for his speech. The Commodore escaped that judgment. Some saw hope in Robert’s independence and plain talk.
In a nation that could not agree, and where politicians put party in front of their country, the Commodore appeared to represent a new choice. A new newspaper, the New York Times wrote an editorial in 1852:
“Personally, the Commodore is a thousand leagues ahead of his rivals. The swagger and bluster of quarterdeck charm...There is something so free, candid, and nautical in his manners, such a winning disregard for partisan matters, a contempt so lofty for conventionalities and formalities of every kind….he at once clings to and clenches the popular heart….a glory-loving ruler whose motive to action shall ever be his own sweet will.”
Read more: https://slavery.princeton.edu/stories/the-potter-family-of-prospect-and-palmer-houses
https://slavery.princeton.edu/stories/navigating-slavery
https://edsitement.neh.gov/student-activities/frederick-douglasss-what-slave-fourth-july#:~:text=At%20the%20time%20of%20the,were%20high%20across%20the%20county.