Upshur, Abel Parker, 1790-1844

In 1790, Abel Parker Upshur was born into one of Virginia’s most prominent conservative planter families – a background Upshur defended at state, federal, and international levels until a ceremonial accident cut his life short at 54.

Upshur entered Yale College in 1805 as a teenager after growing up at Vaucluse, the Uphsurs’ family estate in Northampton County, Virginia. One year later, Upshur joined a wave of southerners and enrolled at the College of New Jersey (now known as Princeton).

Like his time at Yale, Upshur’s tenure at Princeton did not last long. In 1807, Upshur and his fellow classmates protested the decision of university faculty to suspend three students. What followed surmounted to “perhaps one of the most significant student uprisings of 19th-century America.”^[1]

After a signed petition and the week-long occupation of an academic building failed to persuade the faculty to reinstate the students, Upshur and his fellow rebels entered negotiations with the faculty. His peers tapped the sixteen-year-old Abel Parker Upshur to be their spokesman. In what may have been one of his first diplomatically oriented speeches, Upshur gave an impassioned plea to end the “parent and child” relationship between faculty and students at Princeton. But this, too, was rejected by the authorities. Princeton trustees branded Upshur a “Jacobin,” and expelled him from the institution.

Upshur returned to Virginia after his expulsion from Princeton in 1807. He studied law in Richmond and gained admission to the Virginia Bar in 1810. Between 1812 and 1813, Upshur served as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, a post he occupied again between 1825 and 1827. Upshur married Elizabeth W. “Betsy” Dennis in February 1817 at Beckford on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.^[2]

Upshur’s political career continued to accelerate throughout the 1820s when, as Princeton historian Matthew Karp notes, “as an attorney, judge, and state legislator, Upshur defended the interests and worldview of eastern Virginia’s slaveholding class.”

In 1826, Upshur was appointed a justice to the Virginia General Court. Three years later, in 1829, Upshur served as a delegate to Virginia’s Constitutional Convention where he defended the interests of planter conservatives and pushed back against the growing populations of non-slaveholders in western Virginia. “Shall he who possesses no property,” Upshur asked his fellow delegates, “be permitted to dictate laws for regulating the property of others?” Property, of course, meant not only tobacco and cattle for Upshur and his fellow pro-slavery Virginians – but enslaved people, too.^[3]

Defending the interests of enslavers in the United States continued to serve as the focal point of Abel Parker Upshur’s political career. In an 1840 review of Massachusetts judge Joseph Story’s Commentaries on the Constitution, Upshur promoted an ardent defense of the rights of individual enslavers and the individual states to protect the institution of chattel slavery within their states from the federal government as they saw fit. “Suppose that congress should enact that all the slaves of the country should immediately be free,” Upshur hypothesized. “It would be the grossest and most palpable violation of the constitutional rights of the slaveholder. This would certainly produce the most direct conflict between the State and Federal governments.” Instead of wielding its power inward, Upshur suggested, the federal government is responsible for exercising their influence abroad to defend American institutions – including enslavement. Over the coming years, Upshur would flesh out this worldview as he rose the ranks of American politics.^[4]

In 1841, President John Tyler appointed his lifelong friend Abel Parker Upshur as Secretary of the Navy. Historian Matthew Karp identified Upshur – alongside then-Secretary of War and future President of the Confederate States of America Jefferson Davis of Mississippi – as one of the “two most ambitious reformers of the antebellum armed forces.” As late as September 1841, Upshur wrote furiously to a friend complaining about the federal government’s lack of commitment to states’ rights. Three months later, installed as Secretary of the Navy, Upshur lobbied Congress to “fund the largest peacetime expansion and centralization of military power yet seen in American history.”^[5]

During his two years at the post, Upshur focused on modernizing the military and administrative workings of the Navy to better compete with Great Britain’s superpower fleet. But more than expanding the American Navy for its own sake, domestic and global event spurred Upshur’s advocacy. Upshur “was only one member of a loosely connected group of southern military officers, politicians, and editors who, in the late 1830s and early 1840s, led the charge for expanded American sea power” in the defense of chattel slavery in the Western Hemisphere.^[6]

Upshur made these threats clear in his 1841 naval report to Congress. Speaking on the possibility of yet another war with Great Britain over American sovereignty, Upshur surmised, “the first blow would be struck at us through our own institutions” to “subvert our social systems.” By “social systems,” Upshur meant slavery. Britain’s global anti-slavery campaign recently reached their Caribbean colonies in the preceding decades – not far from the United States’ southern shore. For Upshur and his pro-slavery peers, the threat of British anti-slavery so near to the United States necessitated the expansion of the America’s naval fleet.^[7]

The rationale behind “southern navalists” like Upshur was not lost on former president and anti-slavery congressmen John Quincy Adams. In February 1842, Adams wrote in his diary: “This New born passion of the South for the increase of the Navy, this profusion of appropriations recommended and urged by the Secretary, of that Department is one of the most curious phenomena in our National History.— From Jefferson’s dry docks and gunboats, to Admirals, three Deckers, and War-Steamers equal to half the Navy of Great-Britain, there is more than a stride— There is a flying fishes leap.” Two months later, Adams rightly speculated the origins of this “new born passion.” “This sudden Virginian overflow of zeal for the patronage of the Navy comes reeking hot from the furnace of Slavery,” Adams reflected on Upshur. “Tis a wholesome stream from a polluted fountain.”^[8]

By 1843, President Tyler, “appealing to his interest in expanding the nation westward,” appointed Upshur as Secretary of State. As the nation’s top diplomat, Abel Parker Upshur pursued an expansionist agenda and employed “proslavery statecraft” that laid the foundation for the annexation of Texas as a slave state, the signing of the Oregon Treaty, and the refueling of national debates over slavery’s place in the United States before the Civil War.^[9]

“For Tyler, Upshur, and [John C. Calhoun] – and for a broad swath of southern leaders, from the dying Andrew Jackson to the youthful Jefferson Davis,” Michael Karp observes, “the foreign policy of slavery was too important to be governed by the restrictive code of conservative republicanism. For these men, as for many southerners during the antebellum and Confederate years, extremism in the international defense of slavery was no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of hemispheric slave power was not virtue.”^[10]

Indeed, Upshur’s main role as Secretary of State was somewhat of an extension from his time as Secretary of the Navy. It involved defending slave societies surrounding the United States – from Cuba to Brazil to Texas – from British anti-slavery. “Cuba deserves attention,” John C. Calhoun wrote Upshur in August 1843. “Great Britain is at work there, as well as in Texas; and both are equally important to our safety.” Simply, though perhaps erroneously, Upsur and the Tyler administration feared a nineteenth-century domino effect: should Great Britain succeed in instigating a slave insurrection in Cuba or Brazil (the second- and third-largest slaveholding societies in the West behind the United States), the whole hemisphere might succumb to anti-slavery. Upshur, for example, sided with the Spanish to stifle any portended enslaved insurrections in Cuba, and kept a steady finger on the pulse of Jamaica should any uprisings develop there.^[11]

On the morning of February 28, 1844, Abel Parker Upshur boarded a symbol of his work as Secretary of Navy and Secretary of State. The U.S.S. Princeton constituted one of the newest additions of the United States’ Navy and the only screw-propeller sloop in the entire fleet. Upshur joined several other dignitaries aboard the vessel including President Tyler. The morning was punctuated by exhibitions of the United States’ newest cannon, the Peacemaker. After an elegant meal, attendees returned to the Princeton’s deck for one more round of celebratory cannon shots. This time, however, the cannon exploded. Shards of iron shot across deck inflicting wounds upon Abel Parker Upshur, who stood near the cannon, and other dignitaries on board. As one eyewitness reported, Upshur “was badly cut over the eye and in his legs…he expired in about three minutes.”^[12]

Abel Parker Upshur did not live to see the products of his expansionist and proslavery efforts as Secretary of State. However, the annexation of Texas and the modernization of the American military remain his main diplomatic legacies. Right beside these is his ardent defense of chattel slavery in the United States.