Letter to the Editor

Abstract

Letter to the Editor John Adam To the editors and readers of The Michigan Historical Review: Governor Gretchen Whitmer issued 193 executive orders in 2020. Most addressed COVID-19 pandemic issues; however, Executive Order 2020-139 (issued in June) renamed Lansing's Lewis Cass Building as the Elliott-Larsen Building. Governor Whitmer renamed the building without consulting any Michigan historical organization and without approval of the legislature, even though it was named the Lewis Cass Building by a 1952 Michigan House of Representatives concurrent resolution. The governor says that no one can deny the important role Cass played in Michigan and the nation's early history. But the governor did not say what Cass did, did not consider the historical context in which he lived, and did not explain that his position on these issues were the positions of the Democratic Party and its leaders. Instead, the governor justified the renaming by claiming that "Cass owned a slave; defended a system to permit the expansion of slavery; and implemented a policy that forcibly removed Native Americans from their tribal lands." The governor should be careful in cherry-picking the record of Cass and in making retroactive assessments of this nineteenth-century politician. Cass, a Democratic Party politician for five decades, should be judged in full historical context. Trained as a lawyer, he had an impressive resume. He was a member of the Ohio legislature (1806), US marshal of Ohio (1807-1812), colonel during the War of 1812, governor of the Michigan Territory (1813-1818, 1820, 1822-1823, 1825-1826, 1828-1829), and served concurrently as superintendent of Indian Affairs (1813-1831), secretary of war (1831-1836) under President Andrew Jackson, minister to France under Jackson and President Martin Van Buren (1836-1842), Michigan senator (1845-1847), 1848 Democratic presidential candidate (losing to Zachary Taylor), again Michigan senator (1849-1857), and secretary of state (1858-1860) under President James Buchanan. Governor Whitmer's criticisms would apply to almost every Democratic officeholder during Cass's lifetime and later. The governor's statement that Cass owned a single slave was odd, so I tried to find the basis for this [End Page 171] claim. I believe the source is William Klunder's 1996 book Lewis Cass and the Politics of Moderation (Kent State University Press). Klunder wrote that, while Cass said he never owned a slave, a "note written to Cass by General Alexander Macomb reveals that the governor was negotiating with the general's cousin, David Betton Macomb, to sell a slave." (47) Klunder believes Cass owned a slave used for domestic work. If it is true that Cass owned a slave, and the evidence is weak on this, we know that many of our greatest leaders owned slaves. Indeed, consider US Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan (1833-1911), who dissented in the landmark case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Justice Harlan wrote that "our constitution is color-blind." But, as Peter Canellos notes in his book The Great Dissenter (Simon and Schuster, 2021), before that Harlan "owned slaves and supported slavery right up through the Civil War," and was on the "record as having initially opposed the postwar amendments to the Constitution, maintaining that his state of Kentucky—which had painfully resisted the Confederacy—should be rewarded by getting to make its own decision on whether to free its slaves based on a popular vote." (19) Cass was not an abolitionist (nor was Abraham Lincoln), but he was anti-slavery. Like Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas and other northern Democrats, Cass was a proponent of "popular sovereignty" as a route to avoid civil war. Cass advocated sectional compromise with the slave states to keep the nation from violent conflict. The Democratic Party in 1856 ran on a platform that embraced the popular sovereignty argument. This allowed people residing in new territories to decide if new states would permit slavery or not. Moreover, Cass resigned as secretary of state in 1860 in protest over President Buchanan's refusal to reinforce Fort Sumter and the defenses surrounding Charleston, South Carolina. Cass fully supported the Union during the subsequent war, as articulated by historical works such as Frank B. Woodford's Lewis Cass...