Stephen Arnold Douglas

by William Garrott Brown

The contemporaries of Douglas were under a necessity to judge his motives, for they had to pass upon his fitness for high office and great responsibilities, and no other motive than ambition was so natural and obvious an explanation of his course. But it is questionable if any such positive judgment as was necessary, and therefore right, in his contemporaries, is obligatory upon historians. What he did was in accord with a political principle which he had avowed, and it was not in conflict with any moral principle he had ever avowed, for he did not pretend to believe that slavery was wrong. True, he had once thought the Missouri Compromise a sacred compact; but there were signs that he had abandoned that opinion. It is enough to decide that he took a wrong course, and to point out how ambition may very well have led him into it. It is too much to say he knew it was wrong, and took it solely because he was ambitious.

But if he had taken a wrong course he did not fail to do that which will often force us, in spite of ourselves, into admiration for a man in the wrong: he pursued it unwavering to the end. Neither the swelling uproar from without nor a resolute and conspicuously able opposition within the Senate daunted him for a moment. He pressed the bill to its passage with furious energy. He set upon Chase savagely, charging him with bad faith in that he had gained time, by a false pretense of ignorance of the bill, to flood the country with slanderous attacks upon it and upon its author. The audacity of the announcement that the Compromise of 1850 repealed the Compromise of 1820 was well-nigh justified by the skill of his contention. It was a principle, he maintained, and no mere temporary expedient, for which Clay and Webster had striven, which both parties had indorsed, which the country had acquiesced in,—the principle of "popular sovereignty." That principle lay at the base of our institutions; it was illustrated in all the achievements of our past; it, and it alone, would enable us in safety to go on and extend our institutions into new regions. Cass, though he made difficulties about details, supported the bill, and the Southerners played their part well. But Douglas afterwards said, and truly: "I passed the Kansas-Nebraska act myself. I had the authority and power of a dictator throughout the whole controversy in both houses. The speeches were nothing. It was the marshaling and directing of men and guarding from attacks and with ceaseless vigilance preventing surprise."

Chase was the true leader of the opposition, and he was equipped with a most thorough mastery of the slavery question in its historical and constitutional aspects. By shrewd amendments he sought to bring out the division between the Northern and Southern supporters of the bill; for the Southerners held that slave-owners had a constitutional right to go into any Territory with their property,—a right with which neither Congress nor a territorial legislature could interfere. Douglas, however, managed to avoid the danger. He made another change in the important clause. To please Cass and others, he made it declare that the Compromise of 1820 was "inconsistent with" instead of "superseded by" the principles of the later compromise; and then he added the words, "it being the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the inhabitants thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States." That, as Benton said, was a little stump speech incorporated in the bill; and it proved a very effective stump speech indeed.

Neither the logic and the accurate knowledge of Chase, nor the lofty invective of Sumner, nor the smooth eloquence of Everett, nor Seward's rare combination of political adroitness with an alertness to moral forces, matched, in hand to hand debate, the keen-mindedness, the marvelous readiness, and the headlong force of Douglas. Their set speeches were impressive, but in the quick fire, the question-and-answer, the give-and-take of a free discussion, he was the master of them all. When, half an hour after midnight of the third of March, he rose before a full Senate and crowded galleries to close the debate, he was at his best. Often interrupted, he welcomed every interruption with courtesy, and never once failed to put his assailant on the defensive. Now Sumner and now Chase was denying that he had come into office by a sacrifice of principle; now Seward was defending his own State of New York against a charge of infidelity to the compact of 1820; now Everett, friend and biographer and successor of Webster, was protesting that he had not meant to misrepresent Webster's views. Always, after these encounters, Douglas knew how to come back, with a graver tone, to the larger issue, as if they, and not he, were trying to obscure it. A spectator might have fancied that these high-minded men were culprits, and he their inquisitor. Now and then, as when he dealt with the abolitionists, there was no questioning the sincerity of his feeling, and it stirred him to a genuine eloquence. He was not surprised that Boston burned him in effigy. Had not Boston closed her Faneuil Hall upon the aged Webster? Did not Sumner live there? And he turned upon the senator from Massachusetts: "Sir, you will remember that when you came into the Senate, and sought an opportunity to put forth your abolition incendiarism, you appealed to our sense of justice by the sentiment, 'Strike, but hear me first!' But when Mr. Webster went back in 1850 to speak to his constituents in his own self-defense, to tell the truth and to expose his slanderers, you would not hear him, but you struck him first." Again and again, as at the end of a paragraph of unadorned but trenchant sentences the small, firm-knit figure quivered with a leonine energy, the great, swart head was thrown backward, and the deep voice swelled into a tone of triumph or defiance, the listeners could not forbear to applaud. Once, even Seward broke forth: "I have never had so much respect for him as I have to-night."

The vote in the Senate was 27 ayes to 14 noes; but in the House the opposition was dangerously strong, and but for the precaution of securing the support of the administration the bill might have failed. There was a fierce parliamentary battle. Richardson, Douglas's friend and chief lieutenant, kept the House in continuous session thirty-six hours trying to force through a motion to fix a term for the debate. Feeling rose on both sides. Personal encounters were imminent. Douglas, in constant attendance, watched every move of the opposition and was instant with the counter-move. It was a month before the bill could be brought to a vote, and then it passed, with a slight change, by a majority of thirteen. At the end of May, the President signed it, and Douglas, turning from the work of enacting it into law to the harder task of defending it before the country, beheld the whole field of national politics transformed. The Whig party, crushed to earth in 1852, made no move to take a stand on the new issue; it was dead. His own historical Democratic party was everywhere throughout the North in a turmoil that seemed to forebode dissolution. One new party, sprung swiftly and secretly into life on the old issue of enmity to foreigners and Roman Catholics, seemed to stand for the idea that the best way to meet the slavery issue was to run away from it. Another new party, conceived in the spirit of the appeal of the independent Democrats, was struggling to be born. State after State was falling under the power of the Know-Nothings; and those men, Whigs and Democrats alike, who for years had been awaiting an opportunity to fight slavery outside of its breastworks of compromise, were forming at last under the name of Anti-Nebraska men. Before long, they began to call themselves Republicans.

He did not quail. Invited to pronounce the Independence Day oration at Philadelphia, he made of it the first thoroughgoing denunciation of the Know-Nothings that any eminent public man in the country had the courage to make. Democrats everywhere, bewildered by the mystery in which these new adversaries shrouded their designs, were heartened to an aggressive warfare. Some months later, he took the stump in Virginia, where Henry A. Wise had brought the Democrats firmly into line against the only rivals they had in the South, now that the Whigs were giving up the fight. The campaign was a crucial one, and the Know-Nothings never recovered from their defeat. Douglas's course had the merit of consistency as well as courage, for he had always championed the rights of the foreign born.

The Independence Day oration was also his first popular defense of the Kansas-Nebraska bill. But so soon as Congress adjourned he hastened home to face his own people of Illinois. Chicago was once more, as in 1850, a centre of hostility, and he announced that he would speak there the evening of September first. When the time came, flags at half mast and the dismal tolling of church bells welcomed him. A vast and ominously silent crowd was gathered, but not to hear him. Hisses and groans broke in upon his opening sentences. Hour after hour, from eight o'clock until midnight, he stood before them; time and again, as the uproar lessened, his voice combated it; but they would not let him speak. Nothing, in fact, but his resolute bearing saved him from violence. On the way home, his carriage was set upon and he was in danger of his life.

Wherever he went in Northern Illinois, similar scenes were enacted. But he got a hearing, and in the central counties and in "Egypt," the southern part of the State, where the people were largely of Virginian and Kentuckian descent, he was cordially received. He kept his hold upon his party in Illinois, and Illinois, alone of all the Northwestern States, would not go over completely to the opposition. The Democratic candidate for state treasurer was elected. The Know-Nothings and Anti-Nebraska men got a majority of the congressmen, and by the defection of certain state senators who held over from a previous election they were enabled to send Lyman Trumbull, Anti-Nebraska Democrat, to be Douglas's colleague at Washington. That, when compared with the results elsewhere in the North, was a striking proof of Douglas's power with his people. Moreover, the Democrats of the North who remained in the party had accepted his leadership. In the South, the party organization was soon free of any effective opposition. The two wings, so long as they were united, could still control the Senate and elect presidents. All would still be well, if only all went well on those Western plains whither Douglas declared that the slavery question was now banished forever from the halls of Congress.

But all was not going well there. When the Kansas-Nebraska bill passed, Sumner exultantly exclaimed: "It sets freedom and slavery face to face, and bids them grapple." Nebraska was conceded to freedom, but the day Kansas, the southern Territory, was thrown open to settlement, a long, confused, confusing struggle began. The whole country was drawn into it. Blue lodges in the South, emigrant aid societies in the North, hurried opposing forces into the field. The Southerners, aided by colonized voters from Missouri, got control of the territorial legislature and passed a slave code. The Free-Soilers, ignoring the government thus established, gathered in convention at Topeka, formed a free state constitution, and demanded to be admitted into the Union as a State. When a new Congress assembled in December, 1855, there were two governments in Kansas, and the people were separated into hostile camps. Brawls were frequent, and it was clear that very soon, unless the general government intervened, there would be concerted violence. A force of several thousand pro-slavery men, encamped on the Wakarusa River, were threatening Lawrence, the principal Free-Soil town. The Free-Soil men were in a majority, but their course had been in disregard of law. The pro-slavery men were in a minority, they had resorted to violence and fraud, but they had followed the forms of law.

President Pierce, swayed by Jefferson Davis, took the side of slavery. The House was nearly two months organizing, and then the President sent in a message to Congress denouncing the Free-Soilers for resisting the laws. He followed it up with a proclamation, and placed United States troops at the disposal of the regular territorial government. In March, Douglas, from his Committee on Territories, made a long report on all that had occurred. He, too, laid the blame on the emigrant aid societies. He was against the Topeka constitution, and offered, instead, a bill providing for the admission of Kansas, so soon as her population should reach 93,000, which would entitle her to one representative in Congress, with such constitution as her people might lawfully adopt. The House, with an anti-slavery majority, was for admitting Kansas at once with the Topeka constitution. So was the anti-slavery group in the Senate, now swelled into a strong minority. In the fierce debate that followed, Douglas had to defend the results, as well as the theory, of his law. Sumner was the bitterest of his assailants, and their controversy passed all bounds of parliamentary restraint. In Sumner's famous speech on the crime against Kansas, Butler, of South Carolina, was represented as the Don Quixote of slavery, Douglas as its Sancho Panza, "ready to do all its humiliating offices." The day after that speech, Lawrence was sacked, and civil war broke out in Kansas. The next day, Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, assaulted Sumner and beat him down on the floor of the Senate. Ten days later, the Democratic convention met at Cincinnati to name a candidate for the presidency.