Frederick Douglass

by Booker T. Washington

The intensity of public interest in and anxiety for the future status of these new states was shown in the instant rush into Kansas from New England of colonists favorable to the cause of free soil, and from the South of colonists favorable to the cause of slavery. Each side appreciated how momentous was the issue. The people of Missouri and other neighboring slave-states knew that it would be difficult, with a free state adjoining them to hold their bond-servants in security. The people of New England and other Northern states understood that the political supremacy of the free-states would be forever lost if the South were able to make slave-ground out of the western territory.

It was an exciting contest and soon proved a gory one. Men from both sections were expecting that the struggle would be attended with bloodshed and they went out armed and prepared for it. Kansas, “bleeding Kansas,” was a battle-ground. It is not necessary here to recount the sanguinary incidents between the cohorts of emancipation and slavery in this neutral territory. Suffice it to say that in the end the cause of free soil triumphed and the contest was merely preliminary to a vaster conflict of which it was a premonitory token.

Before and during these stormy events in Kansas, there was in progress an intellectual conflict which was destined to have a more serious ending. This was the historic debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, both of Illinois. More clearly, perhaps than any other one event, this round of speeches formulated the issue which divided the American people politically on the question of slavery. It revealed to the nation a man who gave to them, for the first time, a frank and clear-cut definition of the issue to which it had been brought by the struggle. Lincoln said in effect: “The Union cannot long endure, half-slave and half-free. It must be all one or all the other, and the public mind can find no resting-place but in the ultimate extinction of slavery.”

Of course, this was but a reiteration of what had been repeatedly said by the Abolitionists during the past twenty-five years, but coming now at a time when there was an unconscious groping of the popular mind toward a definite issue for public action, these clear words seemed to be charged with meaning of tremendous importance. The people of the whole country listened to these Illinois debaters with an interest that seemed prescient of coming events. As the debate progressed, Mr. Lincoln seemed to rise visibly and steadily from the western provincial obscurity he had lived in up to this point, to a prominence in which he appeared for the time to overshadow every one else who had spoken on the great question. The immediate prize to be won in the debate was a seat in the United States Senate; but before its close, this sank into insignificance, and the presidency of the United States, the preservation of the Union, and the fate of slavery, had become the stakes of the contest.

The issues in the coming election already began to shape themselves along the lines enunciated by Mr. Lincoln and Senator Douglas. In due time new political alignments were completed as follows:

(1) The pro-slavery and Union Democrats of the North stood for state sovereignty, or the right of the people of a territory to admit or bar slavery as they saw fit. Senator Douglas was the unquestioned leader of this wing of the Democratic party.

(2) The pro-slavery people of the South stood for the bold declaration that the Constitution of its own force gave the right to carry slaves into any territory of the United States and to hold them there, with or without the consent of the people of the territory. John C. Breckinridge was the leader of the Southern wing of the Democracy.

(3) Abraham Lincoln was chosen to bear the standard of all the people who were opposed to both varieties of pro-slavery Democrats. His doctrine was that the Federal Government had the right to exclude slavery from the territories of the United States, and that this right and power ought to be exercised to keep slavery within the confines of the then existing slave-states.

It will be seen that emancipation was not an issue on the surface of these declarations of principles. The whole question appeared to be: Shall slavery have the power of expansion? If this power were denied, could there be any doubt as to what must ultimately follow? If the people feared the power of slavery to such an extent that they would or could keep it within a restricted territory, would not this principle, when successful, be the first step toward its extirpation? The South more clearly than the North understood that the triumph of Mr. Lincoln would settle nothing. Beneath these platform utterances was the unwritten issue: Slavery’s security of expansion, or its “ultimate extinction.” If the South won in the impending contest, not only would slavery be secured by the right of its extension into the undivided territory west of the Mississippi, but political supremacy might pass permanently from the free-states.

The position of Stephen A. Douglas and his followers was rather anomalous. As the Senator at one time expressed it, he cared not whether the question of extending slavery into the territories was “voted up or voted down”; with him the important thing seemed to be that the people of the new territory should have the opportunity to vote on the question and decide for themselves the character of their institutions.