Stephen Arnold Douglas

by William Garrott Brown

At Baltimore, a new set of delegates from the cotton States appeared in place of the seceders, but they were no sooner admitted than another group withdrew, and even Cushing, the chairman, left his seat and followed them. Douglas telegraphed his friends to sacrifice him if it were necessary to save his platform, but the rump convention adopted the platform and nominated him. The two groups of seceders united on the Yancey platform and on Breckinridge, of Kentucky, for a candidate. A new party of sincere but unpractical Union-savers took the field with John Bell, an old Whig, for a candidate, and a platform of patriotic platitudes. The Republicans, guided in ways they themselves did not understand, had put aside Seward and taken Lincoln to be their leader.

The rivals were again confronted, but on cruelly unequal terms. From the first, it was clear that nearly the whole North was going Republican, and that the cotton States were for Breckinridge or disunion. Whatever chance Douglas had in the border States and in the Democratic States of the North was destroyed by the new party. But he knew he was at the head of the true party of Jefferson, he felt that the old Union would not stand if he was beaten. He was the leader of a forlorn hope, but he led it superbly well. He undertook a canvass of the country the like of which no candidate had ever made before. At the very outset of it he was called upon to show his colors in the greater strife that was to follow. At Norfolk, in Virginia, it was demanded of him to say whether the election of a Black Republican President would justify the Southern States in seceding. He answered, no. Pennsylvania was again the pivotal State, and at an election in October the Republicans carried it over all their opponents combined. Douglas was in Iowa when he heard the news. He said calmly to his companions: "Lincoln is the next President. I have no hope and no destiny before me but to do my best to save the Union from overthrow. Now let us turn our course to the South"—and he proceeded through the border States straight to the heart of the kingdom of slavery and cotton. The day before the election, he spoke at Montgomery, Yancey's home; that night, he slept at Mobile. If in 1858 he was like Napoleon the afternoon of Marengo, now he was like Napoleon struggling backward in the darkness toward the lost field of Waterloo. There was a true dignity and a true patriotism in his appeal to his maddened countrymen not to lift their hands against the Union their fathers made:—

"Woodman, spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough."

An old soldier of the Confederacy, scarred with the wounds he took at Bull Run, looking back over a wasted life to the youth he sacrificed in that ill-starred cause, remembers now as he remembers nothing else of the whole year of revolution the last plea of Douglas for the old party, the old Constitution, the old Union.

He carried but one State outright, and got but twelve votes in the electoral college. Lincoln swept the North, Breckinridge the South, and Bell the border States. Nevertheless, in the popular vote, hopeless candidate that he was, he stood next to Lincoln, and none of his competitors had a following so evenly distributed throughout the whole country.

When all was over, he could not rest, for he was still the first man in Congress, but hurried back to Washington and joined in the anxious conferences of such as were striving for a peaceable settlement. When South Carolina seceded, he announced plainly enough that he did not believe in the right of secession or consider that there was any grievance sufficient to justify the act. But he was for concessions if they would save the country from civil war. Crittenden, of Kentucky, coming forward after the manner of Clay with a series of amendments to the Constitution, and another Committee of Thirteen being named, Douglas was ready to play the same part he had played in 1850. But the plan could not pass the Senate, and one after another the cotton States followed South Carolina. Then he labored with the men of the border States, and broke his last lance with Breckinridge, who, when he ceased to be Vice-President, came down for a little while upon the floor as a senator to defend the men whom he was about to join in arms against their country. Douglas engaged him with all the old fire and force, and worsted him in the debate.

His bearing toward Lincoln was generous and manly. When Lincoln, rising to pronounce his first inaugural address, looked awkwardly about him for a place to bestow his hat that he might adjust his glasses to read those noble paragraphs, Douglas came forward and took it from his hand. The graceful courtesy won him praise; and that was his attitude toward the new administration. The day Sumter was fired on, he went to the President to offer his help and counsel. There is reason to believe that during those fearful early days of power and trial Lincoln came into a better opinion of his rival.

The help of Douglas was of moment, for he had the right to speak for the Democrats of the North. On his way homeward, he was everywhere besought to speak. Once, he was aroused from sleep to address an Ohio regiment marching to the front, and his great voice rolled down upon them, aligned beneath him in the darkness, a word of loyalty and courage. At Chicago he spoke firmly and finally, for himself and for his party. While the hope of compromise lingered, he had gone to the extreme of magnanimity, but the time for conciliation was past. "There can be no neutrals in this war," he said: "only patriots and traitors." They were the best words he could have spoken. They were the last he ever spoke to his countrymen, for at once he was stricken down with a swift and mortal illness and hurried to his end. A little while before the end, his wife bent over him for a message to his sons. He roused himself, and said: "Tell them to obey the laws and support the Constitution of the United States." He died on June 11, 1861, in the forty-ninth year of his age.