Stephen Arnold Douglas

by William Garrott Brown

Douglas had won a good following from the South, but Pierce was the first choice of the Southerners. They wanted a servant merely, not a leader, in the White House. But it was no longer a question of the South's preference alone: it was a question of holding the two or three Northern States that were still Democratic. Of these, Pennsylvania was the most important. Buchanan was the choice of the Northern delegates because he was a Pennsylvanian and because, abroad on a foreign mission, he had escaped all responsibility for Kansas. On the first ballot, he led with 135 votes, Pierce was second with 122, and Douglas had but 33, but as before he rose as the balloting proceeded. Pierce's vote fell away; after the fourteenth ballot, his name was withdrawn. On the fifteenth, Buchanan had 168, Douglas 118. Richardson, Douglas's manager, thereupon arose and read a dispatch from his chief directing his friends to obey the will of the majority and give Buchanan the necessary two thirds. Once more, the prize escaped him, though he had bid for it with his country's peace.

But the platform proclaimed the principle of his famous law to be "the only sound and safe solution of the slavery question." He was at the head of his party as Clay had for so many years headed the Whigs. He had the substance of power, the reality of leadership, whosesoever the trappings and the title might be. Every move in Congress was made with a view to its effect in the campaign, and it was he who arranged the issues. Toombs, of Georgia, offered an enabling act of admirable fairness, intended to secure the people of Kansas in their right to have such a state constitution as they might prefer, and Douglas adopted it and held the Senate for it against the House bill to admit Kansas with the Topeka constitution. No agreement could be reached, for the Republicans in their platform had declared for the prohibition of slavery in all the Territories. "Bleeding Kansas" was their war-cry, and Douglas charged, not without reason, that they meant to keep Kansas bleeding until the election. The House went so far as to attach a rider to the army appropriation bill forbidding the President to employ United States troops in aid of the territorial authorities, and would not permit the appropriations to pass in their ordinary form until Congress adjourned and the President was forced to call an extra session.

But the Republican party had not yet gathered into its ranks all those who in their hearts favored its policy. The reality of civil war in Kansas brought a sobering sense of danger to the Union which worked contrary to the angry revolt against the slave power, and Buchanan's appeal to the lovers of the Union in both sections was successful. He was elected, and the Democrats, with a majority in both houses of Congress, got once more a free hand with Kansas and the slavery question.

They had, too, a majority of the Supreme Court, and now for the first time the court came forward with its view of the question. Two days after the inauguration, the Dred Scott decision was handed down, and the territorial controversy passed into a new phase. All parties were forced to reconsider their positions. Douglas, especially, had need of all his adroitness to bring his doctrine of popular sovereignty into accord with the decision; for so far as it went it accorded completely with that extreme Southern view of Calhoun's and Yancey's and Jefferson Davis's which he had never yet, in his striving after an approachment with the South, ventured far enough to accept. The court decided that the Declaration of Independence did not mean negroes when it declared all men to be equal; that no negro could become a citizen of the United States; that the right of property in slaves was affirmed in the Constitution; and that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in any Territory. The announcement that the eighth clause of the Missouri Compromise law was unconstitutional was acceptable enough to the man who had accomplished its repeal, but what became of popular sovereignty if the Constitution itself decreed slavery into the Territories? But Douglas, whether he met the difficulty effectively or not, faced it promptly. Speaking at Springfield in June, he indorsed the decision, not merely as authoritative, but as right; and he claimed that it was in accord with his doctrine. For slavery, he pointed out, was dependent for its existence anywhere upon positive legislation. This the inhabitants of a Territory, acting through their territorial legislature, could grant or deny as they chose. The constitutional right of a slaveholder to take his property into a Territory would avail him nothing if he found there no laws and police regulations to protect it.

The decision was, however, universally and rightly considered a great victory for slavery. It condemned the Republican programme as unconstitutional, and it strengthened the contention of the Southerners. But the Southern leaders were in little need of heartening: no cause ever had bolder and firmer champions. Under cover of the panic of 1857, which drew men's minds away from politics, a group of them were already planning a most daring last attempt to bring Kansas into the Union as a slave State. In the grappling there, freedom had shown itself stronger than slavery. Robert J. Walker, a slaveholder, whom Buchanan and Douglas had persuaded to accept the governorship, reported that the Free-Soilers outnumbered their adversaries three to one. The legislature had provided for the election of delegates to a constitutional convention, and when the question of submitting the constitution to the people arose, the governor, an upright man, promptly announced that it would be submitted, and the administration sustained him. Many Free-Soilers, however, made the mistake of staying away from the polls on election day. The convention, under control of the pro-slavery leaders, met in October at Lecompton, drew up a constitution which safeguarded slavery elaborately, and hit upon an extraordinary way to submit it to the people. The electors were permitted to vote either "for the constitution with slavery," or "for the constitution without slavery," but not against the constitution as a whole. Even if "the constitution without slavery" carried, such slaves as were already held in Kansas could continue to be held.

So far had the Democratic party progressed toward the extreme Southern view, and such was the ascendency of the Southerners over Buchanan, that he would not stand up against the outrageous scheme, and it seemed on the point of succeeding. But Douglas was come now to a parting of the ways. Forced to choose between absolute subserviency to the South and what was left of his principle of popular sovereignty, he remonstrated angrily with the President for breaking faith with Walker and the Kansans. At the end of a stormy interview, Buchanan, stirred out of his wonted placidity, threateningly reminded the senator that no Democrat ever broke with a Democratic administration without being crushed. Douglas scornfully retorted: "Mr. President, I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead." The new Congress was no sooner assembled than the Lecompton programme became the central issue, and Douglas, in flat rebellion against his party's Southern masters, in open defiance of his party's President, was again the man of the hour.

Superb fighter that he was, he had a fighter's best opportunity,—great odds to fight against, and at last a good cause to fight for. The administration proscribed him. The whole South, so lately reciting his praises, rose up against him and reviled him as a traitor. Of his party associates in the Senate, but two or three were brave enough to follow him. Moreover, the panic had swept away his wealth. He was near the end of his term of office, and the trend in Illinois was toward the Republicans. The long tide which had so steadily borne him on to fortune seemed to ebb. Married again but recently, and to the most beautiful woman in Washington, he must have had in mind, as he took up his new rôle, some such thought as that which fortified his favorite hero at Marengo: one battle was lost, but there was time enough to win another.

The Lecompton plotters had reckoned on the opposition of the Republicans. It was Douglas and his handful of followers who confounded them. At once, they accused him of deserting them to make sure of his reëlection to the Senate. But as the debate progressed, and his name kept appearing on the same side with Sumner's and Seward's in the divisions, another notion spread. Horace Greeley and other Republicans began to suggest that he might be the man to lead the new party to victory on a more moderate platform. Throughout the North, people who had abhorred him came first to wonder at him and then to praise him.

But he fought the Lecompton conspiracy from his old base. It was contrary to the principle of the Kansas-Nebraska Act; there had been gross frauds at the election of delegates; the form of submission was a mockery of the electors. He would say nothing for slavery or against it. He cared not "whether slavery was voted up or voted down." Give the people a fair and free chance to form and adopt a constitution, and he would accept it. Let them have a fair vote on the Lecompton constitution, and if they ratified it he would accept that. Ratified it was at the absurd election the convention had ordered, for the great majority of the settlers could not vote their opposition, but when the legislature, now Free-Soil, took the authority to submit it as a whole, the majority against it by far exceeded the highest total of votes the pro-slavery men had ever mustered. Nevertheless, the Senate passed it, Douglas and three other Democrats voting in the negative. His following in the House was greater, and the bill was there amended so as to provide for submitting the constitution to the people. There was a conference, and in its final form the bill offered the people of Kansas a bribe of lands if they would accept the constitution, and threatened them with an indefinite delay of statehood if they should reject it. Douglas, however, after some hesitation, refused to vote for the bill as amended, and when the time came the Kansans, by more than five to one, rejected the constitution and the bribe.

So the session brought no settlement, and Kansas was still the burning issue when Douglas went back to Illinois and took the stump in the senatorial campaign. Victor in a stirring parliamentary contest, this time Chicago welcomed him. But there awaited him treason in the ranks of his own party,—for the administration, beaten in Congress, attacked him at home,—and an opposition now completely formed and led by a man whom Douglas himself, in his own heart, dreaded as he had never dreaded the ablest of his rivals at Washington. The Republicans had taken the unusual course of holding a convention to nominate their candidate for the Senate, and the candidate was Abraham Lincoln.