Stephen Arnold Douglas

by William Garrott Brown

Douglas began, indeed, with gracious compliments to his opponent, calling him "an amiable, kindly, and intelligent gentleman." Lincoln, unused to praise from such a source, protested he was like the Hoosier with the gingerbread: "He reckoned he liked it better than any other man, and got less of it." But in a moment Douglas was charging that Lincoln and Trumbull, Whig and Democrat, had made a coalition in 1854 to form the Black Republican party and get for themselves the two senatorships from Illinois, and that Trumbull had broken faith with Lincoln. Lincoln in turn made a charge that Douglas had conspired with Presidents Pierce and Buchanan and Chief Justice Taney to spread slavery and make it universal. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was their first step, the Dred Scott decision the second; but one more step, and slavery could be fastened upon States as they had already fastened it upon Territories. Douglas protesting that to bring such a charge, incapable of proof or disproof, was indecent, Lincoln pointed out that Douglas had similarly charged the administration with conspiring to force a slave constitution upon Kansas; and afterwards took up a charge of Trumbull's that Douglas himself had at first conspired with Toombs and other senators to prevent any reference to the people of whatsoever constitution the Kansas convention might adopt. When they moved southward, Douglas charged Lincoln with inconsistency in that he changed his stand to suit the leanings of different communities. Of all these charges and counter-charges, however, none was absolutely proved, and no one now believes those which Douglas brought. But he made them serve, and Lincoln's, though he sustained them with far better evidence, and pressed them home with a wonderful clearness of reasoning,—once, he actually threw his argument into a syllogism,—did no great harm to Douglas.

It was Douglas, too, who began the sparring for a political advantage. He knew that Lincoln's following was heterogeneous. "Their principles," he jeered, "in the north are jet black, in the centre they are in color a decent mulatto, and in lower Egypt they are almost white." His aim, therefore, was to fix upon Lincoln such extreme views as would alarm the more moderate of his followers, since the extremists must take him perforce, as a choice of two evils, even though he fell far short of their radical standard. To this end, Douglas produced certain resolutions which purported to have been adopted by an Anti-Nebraska convention at Springfield in 1854, and would have held Lincoln responsible for them. In a series of questions, he asked whether Lincoln were still opposed to a fugitive slave law, to the admission of any more slave States, and to acquiring any more territory unless the Wilmot Proviso were applied to it, and if he were still for prohibiting slavery outright in all the Territories and in the District of Columbia, and for prohibiting the interstate slave trade. It soon transpired that Lincoln was not present at the Springfield convention, and that the resolutions were not adopted there, but somewhere else, and Douglas had to defend himself against a charge of misrepresentation. Nevertheless, when they met the second time, at Freeport, Lincoln answered the questions. He admitted the right of the South to a fugitive slave law. He would favor abolition in the District only if it were gradual, compensated, and accomplished with the consent of the inhabitants. He was not sure of the right of Congress to prohibit the interstate slave trade. He would oppose the annexation of fresh territory if there were reason to believe it would tend to aggravate the slavery controversy. He could see no way to deny the people of a Territory if slavery were prohibited among them during their territorial life and they nevertheless asked to come into the Union as a slave State. These cautious and hesitating answers displeased the stalwart anti-slavery men. Lincoln would go their lengths in but one particular: he was for prohibiting slavery outright in all the Territories.

Then he brought forward some questions for Douglas to answer. Would Douglas vote to admit Kansas with less than 93,000 inhabitants if she presented a free state constitution? Would he vote to acquire fresh territory without regard to its effect on the slavery dispute? If the Supreme Court should decide against the right of a State to prohibit slavery, would he acquiesce? "Can the people of a United States Territory, in any lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a state constitution?"

Douglas had no great difficulty with the first three questions, and the fourth—the second, as Lincoln read them—he had in fact answered several times already, and in a way to please the Democrats of Illinois. But Lincoln, contrary to the advice of his friends, pressed it on him again with a view to the "all hail hereafter," for it was meant to bring out the inconsistency of the principle of popular sovereignty with the Dred Scott decision, and the difference between the Northern and the Southern Democrats. Douglas answered it as he had before. The people of a Territory, through their legislature, could by unfriendly laws, or merely by denying legislative protection, make it impossible for a slave-owner to hold his slaves among them, no matter what rights he might have under the Constitution. Lincoln declared that the answer was historically false, for slaves had been held in Territories in spite of unfriendly legislation, and pointed out that if the Dred Scott decision was right the members of a territorial legislature, when they took an oath to support the Constitution, bound themselves to grant slavery protection. Later, in a fifth and last question, he asked whether, in case the slave-owners of a Territory demanded of Congress protection for their property, Douglas would vote to give it to them. But Douglas fell back upon his old position that Congress had no right to intervene. He would not break with his supporters in Illinois, but by his "Freeport Doctrine" of unfriendly legislation he had broken forever with the men who were now in control of his party in the Southern States.

It was Lincoln who took the aggressive on principles. A famous paragraph of his speech before the convention which nominated him began with the words: "'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free." That was a direct challenge to Douglas and his whole plan with slavery, and throughout the debate, at every meeting, the doctrine of the divided house was attacked and defended. Douglas declared that Lincoln was inciting half his countrymen to make war upon the other half; that he went for uniformity of domestic institutions everywhere, instead of letting different communities manage their domestic affairs as they chose. But no, Lincoln protested, he was merely for resisting the spread of slavery and putting it in such a state that the public mind would rest in the hope of its ultimate extinction. "But why," cried Douglas, "cannot this government go on as the fathers left it, as it has gone on for more than a century?" Lincoln met him on that ground, and had the better of him in discussing what the fathers meant concerning slavery. They did not mean, he argued, to leave it alone to grow and spread, for they prohibited it in the Northwest Territory, they left the word "slave" out of the Constitution in the hope of a time when there should be no slaves under the flag. Over the true meaning of the Declaration of Independence, however, Douglas had a certain advantage, for Lincoln found the difficulty which candid minds still find in applying the principle of equality to races of unequal strength. Douglas plainly declared that ours is a white man's government. Lincoln admitted such an inferiority in negroes as would forever prevent the two races from living together on terms of perfect social and political equality, and if there must be inequality he was in favor of his own race having the superior place. He could only contend, therefore, for the negro's equality in those rights which are set forth in the Declaration. Douglas made the most of this, and of Lincoln's failure, through a neglect to study the economic character of slavery, to show clearly how the mere restriction of it would lead to its extinction.

But Douglas did not, and perhaps he could not, follow Lincoln when he passed from the Declaration and the Constitution to the "higher law," from the question of rights to the question of right and wrong; for there Lincoln rose not merely above Douglas, but above all that sort of politics which both he and Douglas came out of. There, indeed, was the true difference between these men and their causes. Douglas seems to shrink backward into the past, and Lincoln to come nearer and grow larger as he proclaims it: "That is the real issue. That is the issue which will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world."

Nevertheless, Douglas won the senatorship and kept his hold on the Northern Democrats. Immediately, he made a visit to the South. He got a hearing there, and so made good his boast that he could proclaim his principles anywhere in the Union; but when he returned to Washington he found that the party caucus, controlled by Buchanan and the Southerners, had deposed him from the chairmanship of the Committee on Territories, which he had held so many years, and from this time he was constantly engaged with the enemies he had made by his course on Lecompton and by his Freeport Doctrine. His Northern opponents were no longer in his way. He had overmatched Sumner and Seward in the Senate, and beaten the administration, and held his own with Lincoln, but the unbending and relentless Southerners he could neither beat nor placate. It was men like Jefferson Davis in the Senate, and Yancey at Southern barbecues and conventions, who stood now between him and his ambition. That very slave power which he had served so well was upreared to crush him because he had come to the limit of his subserviency. His plan of squatter sovereignty had not got the Southerners Kansas, or any other slave State, to balance California and Minnesota and Oregon. They demanded of Congress positive protection for slavery in the Territories. The most significant debate of the session was between Douglas on the one side and a group of Southern senators, led by Jefferson Davis, on the other. He stood up against them manfully, and told them frankly that not a single Northern State would vote for any candidate on their platform, and they as flatly informed him that he could not carry a single Southern State on his.

He was too good a politician to yield, even if there had been no other reason to stand firm, but continued to defend the only doctrine on which there was the slightest chance of beating the Republicans in the approaching election. One method he took to defend it was novel, but he has had many imitators among public men of a later day. He wrote out his argument for "Harper's," the most popular magazine of the day. The article is not nearly so good reading as his speeches, but it was widely read. Judge Jeremiah Black, the Attorney-General of Buchanan's cabinet, made a reply to it, and Douglas rejoined; but little of value was added to the discussions in Congress and on the stump. The Southerners, however, would not take warning. As they saw their long ascendency in the government coming to an end, their demands rose higher. Some of them actually began to agitate for a revival of the African slave trade; and this also Douglas had to oppose. His following in the Senate was now reduced to two or three, and one of these, Broderick, of California, a brave and steadfast man, was first defeated by the Southern interest, and then slain in a duel. John Brown's invasion of Virginia somewhat offset the aggressions of the South; but that, too, might have gone for a warning. The elections in the autumn of 1859 were enough to show that the North was no longer disposed to forbearance with slavery. Douglas went as far as any man in reason could go in denouncing John Brown and those who were thought to have set him on; and he supported a new plan for getting Cuba. But Davis, on the very eve of the Democratic convention at Charleston, was pressing upon the Senate a series of resolutions setting forth the extreme demand of the South concerning the Territories. He was as bitter toward Douglas as he was toward the Republicans. At Charleston, Yancey took the same tone with the convention.

Practically the whole mass of the Northern Democrats were for Douglas now, and the mass of Southern Democrats were against him. The party was divided, as the whole country was, by a line that ran from East to West. Yet it was felt that nothing but the success of that party would avert the danger of disunion, and the best judges were of opinion that it could not succeed with any other candidate than Douglas or any other platform than popular sovereignty. His managers at Charleston offered the Cincinnati platform of 1856, with the addition of a demand for Cuba and an indorsement of the Dred Scott decision and of any future decisions of the Supreme Court on slavery in the Territories. But the Southerners would not yield a hair's breadth. Yancey, their orator, upbraided Douglas and his followers with cowardice because they did not dare to tell the North that slavery was right. In that strange way the question of right and wrong was forced again upon the man who strove to ignore it. Senator Pugh, of Ohio, spokesman for Douglas, answered the fire-eaters. "Gentlemen of the South," he cried, "you mistake us! You mistake us! We will not do it." The Douglas platform was adopted, and the men of the cotton States withdrew. On ballot after ballot, a majority of those who remained, and a majority of the whole convention, stood firm for Douglas, but it was decided that two thirds of the whole convention was required to nominate. Men who had followed his fortunes until his ambition was become their hope in life, wearied out with the long deferment, broke down and wept. Finally, it was voted to adjourn to Baltimore. In the interval, Davis and Douglas fell once more into their bitter controversy in the Senate.