45. Spotlight on District Court Judge Clark

Spotlight on District Court Judge Clark

The son of a blacksmith and farmer, Daniel Clark (1809–1891) was born and raised in Stratham, New Hampshire. As a young teenager, Clark enrolled at the prestigious Hampton Academy. He taught school for two years before entering Dartmouth College at age 20, where he graduated in 1834. After studying law in the Exeter offices of George Sullivan (son of Revolutionary General and District Court Judge John Sullivan) and James Bell, he was admitted to the New Hampshire Bar in 1837.

By 1839, Clark had a busy law practice in Manchester, for several years in partnership with his brother, David. He took an active role in Manchester’s government and civic affairs. Between 1842 and 1855, he served several terms in the New Hampshire House of Representatives.

Mid-nineteenth century American politics were embroiled in the dispute over slavery’s expansion into newly admitted states and western territories. Although all the New England states were “free states” by the early 1800s, New Hampshire’s own Franklin Pierce took the office of President in 1853 as a northern Democrat who believed in the constitutionality of slavery. The enactment of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which reshaped national policy in favor of slave states, propelled the formation of the new anti-slavery Republican Party. An early and enthusiastic member, Daniel Clark attended the first Republican Party National Convention and served as a Republican elector for New Hampshire in 1856.

Clark entered the legislature’s contest for United States Senator in 1855, but lost to his former employer, James Bell. Upon Bell’s death in 1857, however, Clark was chosen to take his Republican seat for the remainder of the term. He was re-elected to the Senate in 1861, landing him at the center of national politics during the rise of the Southern rebellion and through the entirety of the Civil War.

In Washington, Clark relied on his powerful oratory skills to persuade his Senate colleagues on the subject of slavery. On February 20, 1860, he delivered a fiery speech in response to a Mississippi senator’s “bold, aggressive and alarming” proposal to ensure federal protection for any slaveholder taking his slaves into the Western Territories. Clark vividly recalled the cause of freedom for which New England’s revolutionary soldiers fought and died as he warned against the South’s attempted march toward legitimizing slave ownership across the nation:

“[I]f this position is yielded, … the time may come, when the slave master may be adjudged under the Constitution, interpreted by a court composed of a majority of Southern judges, to have a right to hold his slaves upon the battlefields of Lexington or Bunker’s Hill, where patriots fell for freedom!”

With Abraham Lincoln’s presidential victory in November, 1860, the imminence of a secession crisis became clear. For many Southern lawmakers, the time for reconciliation had passed. Others maintained that only a constitutional amendment guaranteeing slavery’s unabated existence and rights for its expansion could avert their secessionist agenda. Their Unionist counterparts in Congress furiously penned proposals for compromise, hoping to stave off disunion and war. So desperate was the desire to save the Union that House and Senate committees gave serious consideration to constitutional amendments forever enslaving the Republic itself to the perpetuation of human bondage in designated areas of the country. The proposals were unacceptable to Clark and other Senate Republicans, who opposed any territorial compromise. When pressed in early January for a vote to allow a public referendum on the question, Clark instead drafted and presented two essential resolutions: the first declaring the Constitution “ample for the preservation of the Union” without “concessions to unreasonable demands” or “new guarantees for particular interests”; and the second insisting that the government focus all efforts toward upholding “the existing Union and Constitution.” Clark’s measures passed by just two votes, made possible because six senators from the Deep South whose states had not yet seceded had vowed not to vote on any proposal short of the demand for unfettered rights to maintain and expand the reach of slavery. A cascade of state secessions soon followed, setting the course of American history.

Abraham Lincoln’s presidency and Clark’s second term were just underway when the Confederacy launched its attack on Fort Sumter. On July 10, 1861 Clark authored a resolution to expel ten absent Southern senators who had neither condemned their states’ decisions to secede from the Union, nor withdrawn from the United States Senate:

“They have taken up arms against the Government; … their guns are now within sound of your capital; and shall we sit here in the Senate and deliberate and doubt whether we shall turn out of this Senate the very men who are ready to explode those guns against your capital? … Let them be ejected from the councils of the nation.”

On the following day, the Senate adopted the extraordinary resolution against the traitorous lawmakers by a 32 to 10 vote.

As the horrendous conflict neared its end in the spring of 1864, Clark, who was then President pro tempore of the Senate, took the floor to emphatically support the passage of a constitutional amendment forever prohibiting slavery in the United States and its territories:

“Can a man take fire in his bosom and not be burned? No more can man admit the idea of human bondage into the charter of a free Government and not find it in the end a blackened scroll crumbling to ashes in his grasp…. To restore this Union with slavery in it when we have subdued the rebel armies would be again to build your house on its smoking ruins, when you had not put out the fire which burned it down.”

The proposed amendment was approved by the Senate on April 8, 1864, and by the House of Representatives the following January. The measure was finally ratified by the states as the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution on December 6, 1865.

In 1866, Clark received President Andrew Johnson’s nomination, and the Senate’s unanimous confirmation, to the United States District Court for the District of New Hampshire. While his decisions were never chronicled for publication, he was very well respected as a judge for this Court, where he served for 25 years.

At the meeting of the New Hampshire Bar Association in March, 1900, the Honorable Edgar Aldrich, who had succeeded Judge Clark on the bench, spoke of Clark’s critical role in steering the course of the conflicted nation while refusing to compromise on the question of slavery:

“No person … at all familiar with the important historical events occurring in the state and nation in the last half century can fail to appreciate his great service to his country. Nor can the great lawyers of New Hampshire be enumerated without including his name. … Whether at the Bar or in the Senate he was among the leaders. In my judgment you could not correctly estimate his worth without giving special prominence to his wonderful courage. ... [His] influential action as a member of the senate with reference to the questions before the compromise committee in the winter of 1860-’61 is an illustration of the great powers which he possessed. … One who will stand almost alone and take the responsibility of bold and conspicuous action not only possesses great ability, but a nerve of steel, and moral courage of a rare type. The name of Daniel Clark is a part of the history of this country. He was conspicuous in a great crisis.”