When the Democrats of Illinois proposed Douglas's name for the presidency in 1848, no one was disposed to take the suggestion seriously, outside the immediate circle of his friends. To graybeards there was something almost humorous in the suggestion that five years of service in Congress gave a young man of thirty-five a claim to consideration! Within three short years, however, the situation had changed materially. Older aspirants for the chief magistracy were forced, with no little alarm, to acknowledge the rise of a really formidable rival. By midsummer of 1851, competent observers thought that Douglas had the best chance of winning the Democratic nomination. In the judgment of certain Whig editors, he was the strongest man. It was significant of his growing favor, that certain Democrats of the city and county of New York tendered him a banquet, in honor of his distinguished services to the party and his devotion to the Union during the past two years.
Politicians of both parties shared the conviction that unless the Whigs could get together,—which was unlikely,—a nomination at the hands of a national Democratic convention was equivalent to an election. Consequently there were many candidates in the field. The preliminary canvass promised to be eager. It was indeed well under way long before Congress assembled in December, and it continued actively during the session. "The business of the session," wrote one observer in a cynical frame of mind, "will consist mainly in the manoeuvres, intrigues, and competitions for the next Presidency." Events justified the prediction. "A politician does not sneeze without reference to the Presidency," observed the same writer, some weeks after the beginning of the session. "Congress does little else but intrigue for the respective candidates."[[376]]
Prospective candidates who sat in Congress had at least this advantage, over their outside competitors,—they could keep themselves in the public eye by making themselves conspicuous in debate. But the wisdom of such devices was questionable. Those who could not point with confident pride to their record, wisely chose to remain non-committal on matters of personal history. Douglas was one of those who courted publicity. Perhaps as a young man pitted against older rivals, he felt that he had everything to gain thereby and not much to lose. The irrepressible Foote of Mississippi gave all his colleagues a chance to mar their reputations, by injecting into the deliberations of the Senate a discussion of the finality of the compromise measures.[[377]] It speedily appeared that fidelity to the settlement of 1850, from the Southern point of view, consisted in strict adherence to the Fugitive Slave Act.[[378]] This was the touchstone by which Southern statesmen proposed to test their Northern colleagues. Prudence whispered silence into many an ear; but Douglas for one refused to heed her admonitions. Within three weeks after the session began, he was on his feet defending the consistency of his course, with an apparent ingenuousness which carried conviction to the larger audience who read, but did not hear, his declaration of political faith.
Two features of this speech commended it to Democrats: its recognition of the finality of the compromise, and its insistence upon the necessity of banishing the slavery question from politics. "The Democratic party," he asseverated, "is as good a Union party as I want, and I wish to preserve its principles and its organization, and to triumph upon its old issues. I desire no new tests—no interpolations into the old creed."[[379]] For his part, he was resolved never to speak again upon the slavery question in the halls of Congress.
But this was after all a negative programme. Could a campaign be successfully fought without other weapons than the well-worn blunderbusses in the Democratic arsenal? This was a do-nothing policy, difficult to reconcile with the enthusiastic liberalism which Young America was supposed to cherish. Yet Douglas gauged the situation accurately. The bulk of the party wished a return to power more than anything else. To this end, they were willing to toot for old issues and preserve the old party alignment. For four years, the Democratic office-hunters had not tasted of the loaves and fishes within the gift of the executive. They expected liberality in conduct, if not liberalism in creed, from their next President. Douglas shared this political hunger. He had always been a believer in rotation in office, and an exponent of that unhappy, American practice of using public office as the spoil of party victory. In this very session, he put himself on record against permanence in office for the clerks of the Senate, holding that such positions should fall vacant at stated intervals.[[380]]
But had Douglas no policy peculiarly his own, to qualify him for the leadership of his party? Distrustful Whigs accused him of being willing to offer Cuba for the support of the South.[[381]] Indeed, he made no secret of his desire to acquire the Pearl of the Antilles. Still, this was not the sort of issue which it was well to drag into a presidential campaign. Like all the other aspirants for the presidency, Douglas made what capital he could out of the visit of Kossuth and the question of intervention in behalf of Hungary. When the matter fell under discussion in the Senate, Douglas formulated what he considered should be the policy of the government:
"I hold that the principle laid down by Governor Kossuth as the basis of his action—that each State has a right to dispose of her own destiny, and regulate her internal affairs in her own way, without the intervention of any foreign power—is an axiom in the laws of nations which every State ought to recognize and respect.... It is equally clear to my mind, that any violation of this principle by one nation, intervening for the purpose of destroying the liberties of another, is such an infraction of the international code as would authorize any State to interpose, which should conceive that it had sufficient interest in the question to become the vindicator of the laws of nations."[[382]]
Cass had said much the same thing, but with less virility. Douglas scored on his rival in this speech: first, when he declared with a bit of Chauvinism, "I do not deem it material whether the reception of Governor Kossuth give offence to the crowned heads of Europe, provided it does not violate the law of nations, and give just cause of offence"; and again, scorning the suggestion of an alliance with England, "The peculiar position of our country requires that we should have an American policy in our foreign relations, based upon the principles of our own government, and adapted to the spirit of the age."[[383]] There was a stalwart conviction in these utterances which gave promise of confident, masterful leadership. These are qualities which the people of this great democracy have always prized, but rarely discovered, in their Presidents.
It was at this moment in the canvass that the promoters of Douglas's candidacy made a false move. Taking advantage of the popular demonstration over Kossuth and the momentary diversion of public attention from the slavery question to foreign politics, they sought to thrust Douglas upon the Democratic party as the exponent of a progressive foreign policy. They presumed to speak in behalf of "Young America," as against "Old Fogyism." Seizing upon the Democratic Review as their organ, these progressives launched their boom by a sensational article in the January number, entitled "Eighteen-Fifty-Two and the Presidency." Beginning with an arraignment of "Webster's un-American foreign policy, the writer,—or writers,—called upon honest men to put an end to this "Quaker policy." "The time has come for strong, sturdy, clear-headed and honest men to act; and the Republic must have them, should it be compelled, as the colonies were in 1776, to drag the hero of the time out of a hole in a wild forest, [sic] whether in Virginia or the illimitable West." To inaugurate such an era, the presidential chair must be filled by a man, not of the last generation, but of this. He must not be "trammeled with ideas belonging to an anterior era, or a man of merely local fame and local affections, but a statesman who can bring young blood, young ideas, and young hearts to the councils of the Republic. He must not be a mere general, a mere lawyer, a mere wire-puller. "Your beaten horse, whether he ran for a previous presidential cup as first or second," will not do. He must be 'a tried civilian, not a second and third rate general.' "Withal, a practical statesman, not to be discomfited in argument, or led wild by theory, but one who has already, in the councils and tribunals of the nation, reared his front to the dismay of the shallow conservative, to the exposure of the humanitarian incendiary, and the discomfiture of the antiquated rhetorician."
If anyone was so dense as not to recognize the portrait here painted, he had only to turn to an article entitled "Intervention," to find the name of the hero who was to usher in the new era. The author of this paper finds his sentiments so nearly identical with those of Stephen A. Douglas, that he resorts to copious extracts from his speech delivered in the Senate on the welcome of Kossuth, "entertaining no doubt that the American people, the democracy of the country will endorse these doctrines by an overwhelming majority." Still another article in this formidable broadside from the editors of the Democratic Review, deprecated Foote's efforts to thrust the slavery issue again upon Congress, and expressed the pious wish that Southern delegates might join with Northern in the Baltimore convention, to nominate a candidate who would in future "evince the most profound ignorance as to the topographical bearing of that line of discord known as 'Mason and Dixon's.'"