3. Lincoln against Douglas.
It has now to be told how the contest with Douglas which concluded Lincoln's labours in Illinois affected the broad stream of political events in America as a whole. Lincoln, as we know, was still only a local personage; Illinois is a State bigger than Ireland, but it is only a little part and was still a rather raw and provincial part of the United States; but Douglas had for years been a national personage, for a time the greatest man among the Democrats, and now, for a reason which did him honour, he was in disgrace with many of his party and on the point of becoming the hero of all moderate Republicans.
We need not follow in much detail the events of the great political world. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise threw it into a ferment, which the continuing disorders in Kansas were in themselves sufficient to keep up. New great names were being made in debate in the Senate; Seward, the most powerful opponent of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, kept his place as the foremost man in the Republican party not by consistency in the stand that he made, but by his mastery of New York political machinery; Sumner of Massachusetts, the friend of John Bright, kept up a continual protest for freedom in turgid, scholarly harangues, which caught the spirit of Cicero's Philippics most successfully in their personal offensiveness. Powerful voices in literature and the Press were heard upon the same side—the New York Tribune, edited by Horace Greeley, acquired, as far as a paper in so large a country can, a national importance. Broadly it may be said that the stirring intellect of America old and young was with the Republicans—it is a pleasant trifle to note that Longfellow gave up a visit to Europe to vote for Frémont as President, and we know the views of Motley and of Lowell and of Darwin's fellow labourer Asa Gray. But fashion and that better and quite different influence, the tone of opinion prevailing in the pleasantest society, inclined always to the Southern view of every question, and these influences were nowhere more felt than among Washington politicians. A strong and respectable group of Southern Senators, of whom Jefferson Davis was the strongest, were the real driving power of the administration. Convivial President Pierce and doting President Buchanan after him were complaisant to their least scrupulous suggestions in a degree hardly credible of honourable men who were not themselves Southerners.
One famous incident of life in Congress must be told to explain the temper of the times. In 1856, during one of the many debates that arose out of Kansas, Sumner recited in the Senate a speech conscientiously calculated to sting the slave-owning Senators to madness. Sumner was a man with brains and with courage and rectitude beyond praise, set off by a powerful and noble frame, but he lacked every minor quality of greatness. He would not call his opponent in debate a skunk, but he would expend great verbal ingenuity in coupling his name with repeated references to that animal's attributes. On this occasion he used to the full both the finer and the most exquisitely tasteless qualities of his eloquence. This sort of thing passed the censorship of many excellent Northern men who would lament Lincoln's lack of refinement; and though from first to last the serious provocation in their disputes lay in the set policy of the Southern leaders, it ought to be realised that they, men who for the most part were quite kind to their slaves and had long ago argued themselves out of any compunction about slavery, were often exposed to intense verbal provocation. Nevertheless, what followed on Sumner's speech is terribly significant of the depravation of Southern honour.
Congressman Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, had an uncle in the Senate; South Carolina, and this Senator in particular, had been specially favoured with self-righteous insolence in Sumner's speech. A day or so later the Senate had just risen and Sumner sat writing at his desk in the Senate chamber in a position in which he could not quickly rise. Brooks walked in, burning with piety towards his State and his uncle, and in the presence, it seems, of Southern Senators who could have stopped him, beat Sumner on the head with a stick with all his might. Sumner was incapacitated by injuries to his spine for nearly five years. Brooks, with a virtuous air, explained in Congress that he had caught Sumner in a helpless attitude because if Sumner had been free to use his superior strength he, Brooks, would have had to shoot him with his revolver. It seems to be hardly an exaggeration to say that the whole South applauded Brooks and exulted. Exuberant Southerners took to challenging Northern men, knowing well that their principles compelled them to refuse duels, but that the refusal would still be humiliating to the North. Brooks himself challenged Burlingame, a distinguished Congressman afterwards sent by Lincoln as Minister to China, who had denounced him. Burlingame accepted, and his second arranged for a rifle duel at a wild spot across the frontier at Niagara. Brooks then drew back; he alleged, perhaps sincerely, that he would have been murdered on his way through the Northern States, but Northern people were a little solaced. The whole disgusting story contains only one pleasant incident. Preston Brooks, who, after numbers of congratulations, testimonials, and presentations, died within a year of his famous exploit, had first confessed himself tired of being a hero to every vulgar bully in the South!
Now, though this dangerous temper burned steadily in the South, and there were always sturdy Republicans ready to provoke it, and questions arising out of slavery would constantly recur to disturb high political circles, it is not to be imagined that opinion in the North, the growing and bustling portion of the States, would remain for years excited about the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. In 1857 men's minds were agitated by a great commercial depression and collapse of credit, and in 1858 there took place one of the most curious (for it would seem to have deserved this cold description) of evanescent religious revivals. Meanwhile, by 1857 the actual bloodshed in Kansas had come to an end under the administration of an able Governor; the enormous majority of settlers in Kansas were now known to be against slavery and it was probably assumed that the legalisation of slavery could not be forced upon them. Prohibition of slavery there by Congress thus began to seem needless, and the Dred Scott judgments raised at least a grave doubt as to whether it was possible. Thus enthusiasm for the original platform of the Republicans was cooling down, and to the further embarrassment of that party, when towards the end of 1857 the Southern leaders attempted a legislative outrage, the great champion of the Northern protest was not a Republican, but Douglas himself.
A Convention had been elected in Kansas to frame a State Constitution. It represented only a fraction of the people, since, for some reason good or bad, the opponents of slavery did not vote in the election. But it was understood that whatever Constitution was framed would be submitted to the popular vote. The Convention framed a Constitution legalising slavery, and its proposals came before Congress backed by the influence of Buchanan. Under them the people of Kansas were to vote whether they would have this Constitution as it stood, or have it with the legalisation of slavery restricted to the slaves who had then been brought into the territory. No opportunity was to be given them of rejecting the Constitution altogether, though Governor Walker, himself in favor of slavery, assured the President that they wished to do so. Ultimately, by way of concession to vehement resistance, the majority in Congress passed an Act under which the people in Kansas were to vote simply for or against the slavery Constitution as it stood, only—if they voted for it, they as a State were to be rewarded with a large grant of public lands belonging to the Union in their territory. Eventually the Kansas people, unmoved by this bribe, rejected the Constitution by a majority of more than 11,000 to 1,800. Now, the Southern leaders, three years before, had eagerly joined with Douglas to claim a right of free choice for the Kansas people. The shamelessness of this attempt to trick them out of it is more significant even than the tale of Preston Brooks. There was no hot blood there; the affair was quietly plotted by respected leaders of the South. They were men in many ways of character and honour, understood by weak men like Buchanan to represent the best traditions of American public life. But, as they showed also in other instances that cannot be related here, slavery had become for them a sacred cause which hallowed almost any means. It is essential to remember this in trying to understand the then political situation.
Douglas here behaved very honourably. He, with his cause of popular sovereignty, could not have afforded to identify himself with the fraud on Kansas, but he was a good enough trickster to have made his protest safely if he had cared to do so. As it was he braved the hatred of Buchanan and the fury of his Southern friends by instant, manly, courageous, and continued opposition. It may therefore seem an ungracious thing that, immediately after this, Lincoln should have accepted the invitation of his friends to oppose Douglas' re-election. To most of the leading Republicans out of Illinois it seemed altogether unwise and undesirable that their party, which had seemed to be losing ground, should do anything but welcome Douglas as an ally. Of these Seward indeed went too far for his friends, and in his sanguine hope that it would work for freedom was ready to submit to the doctrine of "popular sovereignty"; but, except the austere Chase, now Governor of Ohio, who this once, but unfortunately not again, was whole-heartedly with Lincoln, the Republican leaders in the East, and great Republican journals, like the Tribune, declared their wish that Douglas should be re-elected. Why, then, did Lincoln stand against him?
It has often been suggested that his personal feelings towards Douglas played some part in the matter, though no one thinks they played the chief part. Probably they did play a part, and it is a relief to think that Lincoln thoroughly gratified some minor feelings in this contest. Lincoln no doubt enjoyed measuring himself against other men; and it was galling to his ambition to have been so completely outstripped by a man inferior to him in every power except that of rapid success. He had also the deepest distrust for Douglas as a politician, thinking that he had neither principle nor scruple, though Herndon, who knew, declares he neither distrusted nor had cause to distrust Douglas in his professional dealings as a lawyer. He had, by the way, one definite, if trifling, score to wipe off. After their joint debate at Peoria in 1855 Douglas, finding him hard to tackle, suggested to Lincoln that they should both undertake to make no more speeches for the present. Lincoln oddly assented at once, perhaps for no better reason than a ridiculous difficulty, to which he once confessed, in refusing any request whatever. Lincoln of course had kept this agreement strictly, while Douglas had availed himself of the first temptation to break it. Thus on all grounds we may be sure that Lincoln took pleasure in now opposing Douglas. But to go further and say that the two men cordially hated each other is probably to misread both. There is no necessary connection between a keen desire to beat a man and any sort of malignity towards him. That much at least may be learned in English schools, and the whole history of his dealing with men shows that in some school or other Lincoln had learned it very thoroughly. Douglas, too, though an unscrupulous, was not, we may guess, an ungenerous man.
But the main fact of the matter is that Lincoln would have turned traitor to his rooted convictions if he had not stood up and fought Douglas even at this moment when Douglas was deserving of some sympathy. Douglas, it must be observed, had simply acted on his principle that the question between slavery and freedom was to be settled by local, popular choice; he claimed for the white men of Kansas the fair opportunity of voting; given that, he persistently declared, "I do not care whether slavery be voted up or voted down." In Lincoln's settled opinion this moral attitude of indifference to the wrongfulness of slavery, so long as respect was had to the liberties of the privileged race, was, so to say, treason to the basic principle of the American Commonwealth, a treason which had steadily been becoming rife and upon which it was time to stamp.