Stephen Arnold Douglas

by William Garrott Brown

But at the end of January, Henry Clay, though he had come back to the scene of his many stirring conflicts in the past minded to be "a calm and quiet looker-on," roused himself to one more essay of that statesmanship of compromise in which he was a master. He made a plan of settlement that covered all the controversies and put it in the form of a series of resolutions. It was to admit California with her free-state constitution; to organize the remainder of the Mexican Cession into Territories, with no restriction as to slavery; to pay Texas a sum of money on condition that she yielded in the dispute over the boundary between her and New Mexico; to prohibit the slave trade, but not slavery, in the District of Columbia; to leave the interstate slave trade alone; and to pass an effective fugitive slave law.

For two days, Clay spoke for his plan. Age, though it had not bereft him of his consummate skill in oratory, added pathos to his genuine fervor of patriotism as in that profound crisis of our affairs he pleaded with his fellow senators and with his divided countrymen. There followed the most notable series of set speeches in the history of Congress. One after another, the old leaders, Calhoun, Webster, Benton, Cass, and the rest,—for all were still there,—rose and solemnly addressed themselves to the state of the country and the plan of settlement. All but Calhoun: now very near his end, he was too weak to stand or speak, and Mason, of Virginia, read for him, while he sat gloomily silent, his last bitter arraignment of the North. He was against the plan. Benton, though on opposite grounds, also found fault with it. Webster, to the rage and sorrow of his own New England, gave it his support. Then the new men spoke. Jefferson Davis, on whom, as Calhoun was borne away to his grave, the mantle of his leadership seemed visibly to fall, steadfastly asserted the Southern claim that slaveholders had a right to go into any Territory with their slaves, but offered, as the extreme concession of the South, to extend the Missouri line to the Pacific if property in slaves were protected below the line. Chase, of Ohio, impressive in appearance but stiff in manner, argued weightily for the constitutionality and rightfulness of the Wilmot Proviso. Seward, of New York, though the shrewdest politician of the anti-slavery forces, enraged the Southerners and startled the country with the announcement that "a higher law than the Constitution" enjoined upon Congress to guard these fresh lands for freedom.

But none of the new men, and none of the old leaders but Clay himself, had such a part as Douglas in the actual settlement. He supported the resolutions, and as chairman of the Committee on Territories he wrote and introduced two bills: one to admit California, and one to organize the Territories of New Mexico and Utah with no restrictions as to slavery and to adjust the dispute with Texas. When Clay was put at the head of a Committee of Thirteen, to which all the subjects of dispute were referred, he was often in consultation with the chairman of the Committee on Territories. Douglas was of opinion that the various measures proposed would have a better chance of passing separately than all in one, but Clay decided to deal with California, the Territories, and the Texas boundary in a single measure. This, with separate bills on the fugitive slave law and the slave trade in the District, he reported early in May. The Omnibus, as the first bill was called, was simply Douglas's two bills joined together with a wafer: the words, "Mr. Clay, from the Committee of Thirteen," were substituted for the words, "Mr. Douglas, from the Committee on Territories." But there was one important change. Douglas's bill gave the territorial legislatures authority over all rightful subjects of legislation, subject to the Constitution, save that they could pass no law interfering with the primary disposal of the soil. Clay's committee, contrary to his wish, added the clause, "nor in respect to African slavery." Douglas moved to strike out the exception. He was voted down, but bided his time, persuaded another senator to renew the motion at a favorable moment, and it passed.

But the Omnibus could not pass. The death of President Taylor, who would probably have vetoed it, brought Fillmore, a friend of the compromise, into the White House; but there were only a handful of senators who favored every one of the measures so combined. Late in July, after months of debate and negotiation had wearied Clay out and driven him from the scene, all but the part relating to Utah was stricken out, and with that single passenger the Omnibus went through the Senate. Then separately, one after another, as Douglas had advised, the other measures were passed. The House quickly accepted them, Fillmore signed them, and the last of the compromises was complete. Jefferson Davis had opposed it, and had often been pitted against Douglas in debate, for they were champions of contrary theories, but at the end he declared: "If any man has a right to be proud of the success of these measures, it is the senator from Illinois." The enterprise, indeed, was Clay's; his was the idea, the initiative, the general plan. It is rightly called Clay's compromise. But the execution of the plan was quite as much Douglas's work as his. When Clay died, no one had a better right than Douglas to inherit his place as the statesman and orator of compromise and conciliation.

In the defense of the settlement he was no less conspicuous. Though in the South such extremists as Yancey and Quitman declared that the so-called compromise was in fact a surrender of Southern rights and a sufficient reason for abandoning the Union, there were Northern men quite as violently exercised over what seemed to them a base truckling to the slave power. The legislature of Illinois had formally instructed her senators to support the Wilmot Proviso, and Douglas had thus been compelled, all through the session, to vote for motion after motion to prohibit slavery outright in the Territories. At the end of the session, when he returned to his home, he found Chicago wrought up to a furor of protest. The city council actually voted to release officials from all obligation to enforce the fugitive slave law and citizens from all obligation to respect it. A mass meeting was about to pass resolutions approving this extraordinary action of the council and denouncing as traitors the senators and representatives who had voted for the law, when Douglas walked upon the stand, announced that the next evening he would publicly defend the measures of compromise, and demanded to be heard before he was condemned. A great audience, the greatest ever assembled in the city, listened to his defense. It was bold, skilful, successful. He avowed his authorship of three of the compromise measures, his approval of the others. He took them up one by one, explained them, called for objections, and answered every objection effectively. At the end, he proposed and carried resolutions pledging the meeting to stand by the Constitution and the laws, and the meeting voted further, with but eight or ten nays, to repudiate the resolutions of the council. The next night, the council met and repealed them.

It seemed, in fact, that in planting himself on the compromise Douglas had rightly forecast the verdict of the country as a whole. An adjourned meeting of a Southern convention which had been called before the settlement with a view to some united and vigorous action took now a tone so mild that it allayed, instead of exciting, the fears of patriots. Jefferson Davis, an opponent, and Foote, a supporter of the settlement, went before the people of Mississippi as rival candidates for the governorship, and Davis was beaten. Yancey in Alabama was overthrown in his own party. Only South Carolina would not be reconciled. Throughout the North, and particularly in New England, attempts to resist the fugitive slave law were sometimes violent and occasionally successful, and Charles Sumner, from Massachusetts, and Wade, from Ohio, were sent to join Seward and Chase and Hale, the aggressive anti-slavery men in the Senate. With Sumner, whose first important speech was an attack upon the law, Douglas instantly engaged in the first of many bitter controversies. An attack on a law so clearly demanded by the Constitution was, he declared, an attack on the Constitution itself, such as no senator could make without breaking his oath of office. But in little more than a year the lower House of Congress voted by a good majority that the compromise measures should be regarded as a permanent settlement. In 1852, the Democrats, assembled in national conventions at Baltimore, indorsed them in their platform. So did the Whigs; and Rufus Choate, their convention orator, was excusable for his hyperbole when he described "with what instantaneous and mighty charm they calmed the madness and anxiety of the hour."

Cass, in his seventieth year, was the leading candidate before the Democratic convention; so far as the leadership of parties can be determined in America, he was still the leader of the party. But Douglas, in his fortieth year, was pressing to the front. In the preliminary campaign he was put forward as the candidate of young America, and other State conventions than that of Illinois commended him. At Baltimore, his supporters were enthusiastic, aggressive, boisterous. His name in the long list of candidates always aroused an applause which showed that he was classed with Cass and Buchanan in the popular estimation, and not with the lesser men. Beginning with twenty votes on the first ballot, he rose steadily until on the thirty-first he led with ninety-two. But neither he nor Cass had a good following from the South. An expediency candidate, acceptable to the South, was found in Franklin Pierce, who had fought in the war with Mexico. Against him the Whigs pitted the commander-in-chief in the war. But Scott was thought to be tainted with free-soil opinions. The Democrats, more thoroughly united, swept the country, and the new administration came into power with a great majority in both houses of Congress.

In neither branch of that Democratic Congress was there another man so fit to take the lead as Douglas. A new senator, coming to Washington in 1852, found him already risen to the first importance there. "His power as a debater," said this observer, "seemed to me unequaled in the Senate. He was industrious, energetic, bold, and skillful in the management of the affairs of his party. He was the acknowledged leader of the Democratic party in the Senate." It should be added that he never lost touch with the lower House. Neither was he unmindful of the President's part in making laws, but no President could be less disposed than Pierce was to set up his will against any measure which might come to him stamped with the party stamp. Douglas's wife died early in 1853, and in the summer he made his journey to Europe. When he returned, he was in a position the most favorable for original and constructive statesmanship. By virtue of his leadership of the Senate, he was in effect the leader of Congress. He had the power of initiative. He was at the age when men are ripest for enterprises of pith and moment. Unhesitatingly, he advanced to the front and centre of the stage. When the session ended, his name was forever associated with a law that upset precedents and traditions, divided old parties and summoned up new ones, made—and unmade—history.

January 4, 1854, Mr. Douglas, from the Committee on Territories, reported a bill to form the Territory of Nebraska out of that part of the Louisiana Purchase which lay west and north of Missouri.