III
Stephen Arnold Douglas was the Charles James Fox of American politics. He was not a gambler as Fox was. But he went the other gaits and was possessed of a sweetness of disposition which made him, like Fox, loved where he was personally known. No one could resist the bonhomie of Douglas.
They are not all Puritans in New England. Catch a Yankee off his base, quite away from home, and he can be as gay as anybody. Boston and Charleston were in high party times nearest alike of any two American cities.
Douglas was a Green Mountain boy. He was born in Vermont. As Seargent Prentiss had done he migrated beyond the Alleghanies before he came of age, settling in Illinois as Prentiss had settled in Mississippi, to grow into a typical Westerner as Prentiss into a typical Southerner.
There was never a more absurd theory than that, begot of sectional aims and the sectional spirit, which proposed a geographic alignment of Cavalier and Puritan. When sectionalism had brought a kindred people to blows over the institution of African slavery there were Puritans who fought on the Southern side and Cavaliers who fought on the Northern side. What was Stonewall Jackson but a Puritan? What were Custer, Stoneman and Kearny but Cavaliers? Wadsworth was as absolute an aristocrat as Hampton.
In the old days before the war of sections the South was full of typical Southerners of Northern birth. John A. Quitman, who went from New York, and Robert J. Walker, who went from Pennsylvania to Mississippi; James H. Hammond, whose father, a teacher, went from Massachusetts to South Carolina. John Slidell, born and bred in New York, was thirty years old when he went to Louisiana. Albert Sidney Johnston, the rose and expectancy of the young Confederacy--the most typical of rebel soldiers--had not a drop of Southern blood in his veins, born in Kentucky a few months after his father and mother had arrived there from Connecticut. The list might be extended indefinitely.
Climate, which has something to do with temperament, has not so much to do with character as is often imagined. All of us are more or less the creatures of environment. In the South after a fashion the duello flourished. Because it had not flourished in the North there rose a notion that the Northerners would not fight. It proved to those who thought it a costly mistake.
Down to the actual secession of 1860-61 the issue of issues--the issue behind all issues--was the preservation of the Union. Between 1820 and 1850, by a series of compromises, largely the work of Mr. Clay, its threatened disruption had been averted. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill put a sore strain upon conservative elements North and South. The Whig Party went to pieces. Mr. Clay passed from the scene. Had he lived until the presidential election of 1852 he would have given his support to Franklin Pierce, as Daniel Webster did. Mr. Buchanan was not a General Jackson. Judge Douglas, who sought to play the rôle of Mr. Clay, was too late. The secession leaders held the whip hand in the Gulf States. South Carolina was to have her will at last. Crash came the shot in Charleston Harbor and the fall of Sumter. Curiously enough two persons of Kentucky birth--Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis--led the rival hosts of war into which an untenable and indefensible system of slave labor, for which the two sections were equally responsible, had precipitated an unwilling people.
Had Judge Douglas lived he would have been Mr. Lincoln's main reliance in Congress. As a debater his resources and prowess were rarely equaled and never surpassed. His personality, whether in debate or private conversation, was attractive in the highest degree. He possessed a full, melodious voice, convincing fervor and ready wit.
He had married for his second wife the reigning belle of the National Capital, a great-niece of Mrs. Madison, whose very natural ambitions quickened and spurred his own.