The great triumvirate left no successors to compare with them in prestige or power. Two survivals from the war of 1812 were still on the scene, Thomas Hart Benton and Lewis Cass. Benton was a North Carolina man who had removed to Nashville, and at the outbreak of the war, enlisted under Andrew Jackson, and got into a disgraceful street fight with him, in the course of which Jackson was nearly killed. Strange to say, that doughty old hero chose to forget the matter long years afterwards, when Benton was in the Senate—a Union senator from the slave state of Missouri.
Cass also served through the war, but at the North; was involved in Hull's surrender of Detroit and broke his sword in rage at the disgrace of it; and was afterwards governor of Michigan and Jackson's secretary of war; then, in 1848, Democratic nominee for President and defeated because of Martin Van Buren's disaffection; finally, in 1857, Buchanan's secretary of state, resigning, in 1860, because that shilly-shally President could not make up his mind to send reinforcements to Bob Anderson at Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor. A man who played many parts, filled many positions, and filled them well, Cass's name deserves to be more widely remembered than it is.
In those days, a strange, pompous and ineffective figure was flitting across the stage, impressing men with a respect and significance which it did not possess, its name, Stephen A. Douglas, nicknamed "The Little Giant," but giant in little else than power to create disturbance. Perhaps no other man ever possessed that power in quite the same degree; nor possessed in a greater degree that fascination of personality which makes friends and gains adherents.
Consumed by a gnawing desire of the presidency, beaten for the nomination in 1852, destroying the serenity of the land two years later by contending that Congress had no right to limit slavery in the territories, in the vain hope of winning southern support, but finding himself instead dubbed traitor and Judas Iscariot, receiving thirty pieces of silver from a club of Ohio women, travelling from Boston to Chicago "by the light of his own effigies," which yelling crowds were burning at the stake, and finally hooted off the stage in his own city, certainly it would seem that Douglas's public career was over forever.
But he managed to live down his blunder and to regain much of his old strength by reason of his winning personality; yet made another blunder when he agreed to meet Abraham Lincoln in debate—and one which cost him the presidency. For his opponent drove him into corners from which he could find no way out except at the risk of offending the South. In those days, one had to be either for or against slavery; there was no middle course, and the man who attempted to find one, fell between two stools, as Douglas himself soon learned.
Last scene of all, pitted against that same Abraham Lincoln who had greased the plank for him and shorn him of his southern support, in the presidential contest of 1860, defeated and wounded to death by it, for he knew that never again would he be within sight of that long-sought prize; yet rising nobly at the last to a height of purest patriotism, declaring for the Union, pledging his support to Lincoln, pointing the way of duty to his million followers, and destroying at a blow the South's hope of a divided North—let us do Stephen A. Douglas, that justice, and render him that meed of praise; for whatever the mistakes and turnings and evasions of his career, that last great work of his outweighed them all.
A man who had a great reputation in his own day as an orator and statesman, but whose polished periods appeal less and less to succeeding generations was Edward Everett—an evidence, perhaps, that the head alone can never win lasting fame. Everett was a New Englander; a Harvard man, graduating with the highest honors; and two years later, pastor of a Unitarian church in Boston. There his eloquence soon attracted attention, and won him a wide reputation. At the age of twenty-one, he was appointed professor of Greek at Harvard; and in 1824, at the age of thirty, he was chosen to represent the Boston district in Congress. He remained there for ten years, served four terms as governor of Massachusetts, was ambassador to England, and then, president of Harvard from 1846-1849; was appointed secretary of state on the death of Daniel Webster in 1852; and finally, in the following year, was elected to the Senate, but was soon forced to resign on account of ill-health.
Soon afterwards, he threw himself into the project to purchase Mount Vernon by private subscription, delivered his oration on Washington 122 times, netting more than $58,000 toward the project; obtained another $10,000 from the Public Ledger by writing for it a weekly article for the period of a year, and added $3,000 more, secured from the readers of that paper. From that time on, he delivered various lectures for philanthropic causes, the receipts aggregating nearly a hundred thousand dollars. They are little read to-day because, in spite of his erudition, polish and high attainments, Everett really had no new message to deliver.
With the coming of the Civil War, another triumvirate emerges to control the destinies of the nation—Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner and William Henry Seward. Stevens and Seward had been introduced to politics by the ineffectual and absurd anti-Masonic party, which flitted across the stage in the early thirties. In 1851, Massachusetts rebuked Daniel Webster for his supposed surrender to the slavery party, made in hope of attaining the presidency, by placing Sumner in his seat in the Senate, and retiring him to private life, where he still remained the most commanding figure in the country.