[ CHAPTER VII ]
THE REVOLT OF DOUGLAS
The language of President Buchanan's annual message, the summary dismissal of Acting Governor Stanton, and the resignation of Governor Walker abruptly transferred the whole Lecompton question from Kansas to Washington; and even before the people of the Territory had practically decided it by the respective popular votes of December 21,1857, and January 4,1858, it had become the dominant political issue in the Thirty-fifth Congress, which convened on December 7, 1857. The attitude of Senator Douglas on the new question claimed universal attention. The Dred Scott decision, affirming constitutional sanction and inviolability for slave property in Territories, had rudely damaged his theory. But we have seen how in his Springfield speech he ingeniously sought to repair and rehabilitate "popular sovereignty" by the sophism that a master's abstract constitutional right to slave property in a Territory was a "barren and a worthless right unless sustained, protected, and enforced by appropriate police regulations," which could only be supplied by the local Territorial Legislatures; and that the people of Kansas thus still possessed the power of indirect prohibition.
1857.
To invent and utter this sophism for home consumption among his distant constituents on the 12th of June (a few days before the Lecompton delegates were elected), and in so unobtrusive a manner as scarcely to attract a ripple of public notice, was a light task compared with that which confronted him as Senator, at the meeting of Congress in December, in the light of John Calhoun's doings and powers, of the scandal of the Oxford fraud, and of the indignation of Northern Democrats against the betrayal of Walker and Stanton.
One of his first experiences was a personal quarrel with Buchanan. When he reached Washington, three days before the session, he went to the President to protest against his adopting the Lecompton Constitution and sending it to Congress for acceptance. Buchanan insisted that he must recommend it in his annual message. Douglas replied that he would denounce it as soon as it was read. The President, excited, told him "to remember that no Democrat ever yet differed from an administration of his own choice without being crushed. Beware of the fate of Tallmadge and Rives."
Douglas, Milwaukee Speech, October 13, 1860.
"Mr. President," retorted Douglas, "I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead."
In the election of Mr. Buchanan as President the South had secured a most important ally for the work of pro-slavery reaction. Trained in the belief that the South had hitherto been wronged, he was ready on every occasion to appear as her champion for redress; and Southern politicians were now eager to use his leadership to make their views of public policy and constitutional duty acceptable to the North. Respectable in capacity but feeble in will, he easily submitted to control and guidance from a few Southern leaders of superior intellectual force. In his inaugural, he sought to prepare public opinion for obedience to the Dred Scott decision, and since its publication he had undertaken to interpret its scope and effect. Replying to a memorial from certain citizens of New England, he declared in a public letter, "Slavery existed at that period, and still exists in Kansas, under the Constitution of the United States. This point has at last been finally decided by the highest tribunal known to our laws. How it could ever have been seriously doubted is a mystery."[1] ] In the same letter he affirmed the legality of the Lecompton Convention, though he yet clearly expressed his expectation that the constitution to be framed by it would be submitted to the popular vote for "approbation or rejection."
1857.