In all the subsequent turmoil, Douglas vigorously sustained the Union and the Constitution, both in Congress and before the people. When Sumter was fired upon, he hastened to pledge his influence to Lincoln as well as to the Union. "There are no neutrals in this war—only patriots and traitors." Douglas hurried back to Illinois to unify the state for the Union; he had borrowed $80,000 for his campaign, and he staggered under the burden of debt. Also he had injured his constitution by excess, and burned the candle at both ends by overwork. But above all else was the thought that he had made the great mistake, and lost his place in history, in saying that he did not care whether a new State voted slavery up or voted slavery down. During his last sickness he murmured incessantly, "Failure—I have failed." His last words were: "Telegraph to the President and let the columns move on."
Douglas died on June 3, 1861, at the age of forty-eight. The lesson of his life is the danger of compromise, the peril of refusing adherence to the highest ideals of principle, and the failure of expediency and opportunism.
As Douglas's star went down, Lincoln's star began to climb the sky. It was Douglas himself who held Lincoln's hat while he made his first inaugural address. By the irony of fate it was Chief Justice Taney of the Dred Scott Decision who inaugurated Lincoln into office, that Lincoln might later make Taney's decision forever null and void.
And that no dramatic note might be wanted, both Taney and Douglas heard Lincoln plead with indescribable pathos, majesty and beauty, for the very Union whose existence their words had threatened. "Physically speaking, we [the North and South] cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them. Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws? Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws can among friends? Suppose you go to war? You cannot fight always, and after much loss on both sides and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions as to terms of intercourse are again upon you. In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it. I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriotic grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
But the great debate through arguments was ended. Henceforth, the appeal was to arms.
VIII
REASONS FOR SECESSION: SOUTHERN LEADERS
The seven debates between Lincoln and Douglas convinced both the North and the South: but, confirming the one for union and liberty, it confirmed the other for independence and slavery. Lincoln convinced the North that the Union could not endure permanently half slave and half free; on the other hand, the South saw just as clearly that the Union, if it endured, must become all free or all slave. When the men of light and leading in the North fully understood Lincoln's "House-divided-against-itself" speech, they went over to the Republican party, and nominated and elected Lincoln president, that he might put slavery in a position of gradual extinction, by forbidding its future growth. The South acted with even greater energy and decision, by making ready to secede, and arming her citizens for the defense of slavery. The great debate, through words, had lasted thirty years; now the South made its appeal to regiments of armed men.
At that moment slavery controlled the President, the Cabinet, the Senate and the House. And yet immediately after the election, and before the inauguration of Lincoln, the Secretary of War, Floyd, secretly began the transfer of munitions of war from the nation's arsenals to the Southern States.