Stephen Arnold Douglas

by William Garrott Brown

On the annexation of Texas, popular sentiment, even in his own party, was far from unanimous, but the party was, nevertheless, thoroughly committed to it. After the election, when it appeared that Tyler was quite as favorable to the measure as his incoming Democratic successor, Douglas was one of those who came forward with a new plan for annexing territory by joint resolution of Congress, and in January, 1845, he stated as well as it ever has been stated the argument that Texas became ours by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, and was without the consent of her people retroceded to Spain by the treaty of 1819. When President Polk sent in his announcement that war existed by the act of Mexico, Douglas was ready with a defense of that doubtful casus belli and an ardent support of the army bill which followed. His speech on the army bill was an admirable exhibition of his powers, and it was the best speech on that side in the debate. Adams, who interrupted him, was instantly put upon the defensive by a citation from the argument which he himself, as Secretary of State, had made in 1819 for the American claim to the line of the Rio del Norte. When he asked if the treaty of peace and boundaries concluded by Mexico and Texas in 1836 had not since been discarded by the Mexican government, Douglas retorted that he was unaware of any treaty ever made by a Mexican government which was not either violated or repudiated. Adams came finally to acknowledge the unusual powers of the Western "homunculus" as a debater.

But the reputation and the influence won in the House of Representatives were to be extended in a more favorable arena. In 1846, Douglas being now thirty-three years of age, the Illinois legislature elected him United States senator for the six years beginning March 4, 1847. In April, 1847, he was married to Martha, daughter of Colonel Robert Martin, of Rockingham, N.C., a wealthy planter and a large slaveholder. Active as he continued to be in politics, he found time for business as well as love-making. He invested boldly in the lands over which Chicago was now spreading in its rapid growth and made the young city his home. His investments were fortunate, and within a few years he was a wealthy man according to the standard of those times. He used his wealth freely in hospitality, in charity, and in the furtherance of his political enterprises. In the year 1856, the corner-stone of the University of Chicago was laid on land which he had given.

The assembly of which Douglas was now a member had gradually risen to a higher place in our system than the founders intended. The House, partly by reason of its exclusive right to originate measures of a certain class, partly because it was felt to be more accurately representative of the people, had at first a sort of ascendency. The great constructive measures of the first administration were House measures. Even so late as Jefferson's and Madison's administrations, one must look oftenest to the records of that chamber for the main lines of legislative history. But in Jackson's time the Senate profited by its comparative immunity from sudden political changes, by its veto on appointments, and by the greater freedom of debate which its limited membership permitted. It came to stand, as the House could not, for conservatism, for deliberation, for independence of the executive. The advantage thus gained was increased as the growth of the Speaker's power into a virtual premiership and the development of the committee system undermined the importance of the individual representative, and as the more rapid increase of population in the free States destroyed in the House that balance of the sections which in the Senate was still carefully maintained. Moreover, the country no longer sent its strongest men into the White House, and the Supreme Court was no longer favorable to that theory of the government which, as Marshall expounded it, had tended so markedly to elevate the court itself. The upper house had gained not merely as against the lower, but as against the executive and the judiciary. The ablest and most experienced statesmen were apt to be senators; and the Senate was the true battleground in a contest that was beginning to dwarf all others. From the beginning to the end of Douglas's service there, saving a brief, delusive interval after the Compromise of 1850, the slavery question in its territorial phase was constantly uppermost, and in the Senate, if anywhere, those measures must be devised, those compromises agreed on, which should save the country from disunion or war. There was open to him, therefore, a path to eminence which, difficult as it might prove, was at least a plain one. To win among his fellows in the Senate a leadership such as he had readily won among his fellows at school, at Jacksonville, at Springfield, in the legislature and the Democratic organization of Illinois, and such as he was rising to in the lower house when he left it, and then to find and establish the right policy with slavery, and particularly with slavery in the Territories—there lay his path. It was a task that demanded the highest powers, a public service adequate to the loftiest patriotism. How he did, in fact, attempt it, how nearly he succeeded in it, and why he failed in it, are the inquiries with which any study of his life must be chiefly concerned.

But Douglas was too alert and alive to limit his share in legislation to a single subject or class of subjects. Save that he does not appear to have taken up the tariff question in any conspicuous way, he had a leading part in all the important discussions of his time, whether in the Senate or before the people. Unquestionably, his would be the best name to choose if one were attempting to throw into biographical form a political history of the period of his senatorship.

The very day he took his seat, he was appointed chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, and so kept the rôle of sponsor for young commonwealths which he had begun to play in the House. No other public man has ever had so much to do with the organizing of Territories and the admitting of States into the Union; probably no other man ever so completely mastered all the details of such legislation. He reported the bills by which Utah, New Mexico, Washington, Kansas, Nebraska, Oregon, and Minnesota became Territories, and those by which Texas, Iowa, Florida, California, Wisconsin, Oregon, and Minnesota became States. His familiarity with all questions concerning the public domain was not less remarkable. In dealing with both subjects, he seems always to have been guided by his confidence in the Western people themselves. He was for a liberal policy with individual settlers, holding that the government, in disposing of its lands, should aim at development and not at profit; and he was no less liberal in his view of the rights and privileges with which each new political community ought to be invested. As to the lands, he held to such a policy as looked forward to the time when they should be turned into farms and towns and cities. As to the government of the Territories, he held to such a policy with them as looked constantly forward to their becoming States, and his theory was that all the powers of the general government in reference to them were based on its power to admit States into the Union. To that rule of construction, however, he made a very notable exception. Declaring that the Mormons were for the most part aliens by birth, that they were trying to subvert the authority of the United States, that they themselves were unfit for citizenship and their community unfit for membership in the Union, he favored the repeal of the act by which the territorial government of Utah was set up. He went farther, and maintained that only such territory as is set apart to form new States must be governed in accordance with those constitutional clauses which relate to the admission of States, and that territory acquired or held for other purposes could be governed quite without reference to any rights which through statehood, or the expectation of statehood, its inhabitants might claim. This theory of his has assumed in our later history an interest and importance far beyond any it had at the time; but Douglas in that and in many other of his speeches clearly had in mind just such exigencies as have brought us to a practical adoption of his view.

His interest in the government's efforts to develop the country, and particularly the West, by building highways, dredging rivers, and deepening harbors, did not diminish, and he made more than one effort to bring design and system into that legislation. Always mindful of results, he pointed out that the conditions under which the river and harbor bills were framed,—the pressure upon every representative and senator to stand up for the interests of his constituents, and the failure to fix anywhere the responsibility for a general plan,—made it inevitable that such measures would either fail to pass or fail of their objects if they did pass. He suggested, in 1852, a plan which a year or two later, in a long letter to Governor Matteson, of Illinois, he explained and advocated with much force. It was for Congress to consent, as the Constitution provided it might, and as in particular cases it had consented, to the imposition by the States of tonnage duties, the proceeds to be used in deepening harbors. The scheme commended itself for many practical reasons; and it was more consonant with Democratic theory than the practice of direct appropriations by Congress.

However, in his ardent advocacy of a Pacific railroad, Douglas made no question of the government's powers in that connection. True, in 1858, the committee of which he was a member threw the bill into the form of a mail contract in order that it might not run counter to the state-rights views of senators, but he seems to have favored every one of the numerous measures looking to the building of the road which had any prospect of success. At first, he was for three different roads, a northern, a central, and a southern, but it was soon clear that Congress would not go into the matter on so generous a scale. Arguing, then, for a central line, he used a language characteristic of his course on all questions that arose between the sections. "The North," he said, "by bending a little down South, can join it; and the South, by leaning a little to the North, can unite with it, too; and our Southern friends ought to be able to bend and lean a little, as well as to require us to bend and lean all the time, in order to join them."

His practical instinct and his democratic inclinations were both apparent in the plan which he proposed in 1855 for the relief of the Supreme Court. A bill reported by the Committee on the Judiciary freed the justices from their duties on circuit and provided for eleven circuit judges. Douglas proposed, as a substitute, to divide the country into nine circuits, and to establish in each of these a court of appeals which should sit once a year and which should consist of one supreme court justice and the district judges of the circuit, the assignment of each justice to be changed from year to year. His aim was twofold: to relieve the Supreme Court by making the circuit courts the final resort in all cases below a certain importance, and to keep the justices in touch with the people, and familiar with the courts, the procedure, and the local laws in all parts of the country. The scheme, though different in details, is in its main features strikingly like the system of circuit court of appeals which was adopted in 1891.

But the questions, apart from that of slavery, on which Douglas's course has the most interest for a later generation were still questions of our foreign relations. On the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, on the Treaty of Peace with Mexico, on the Oregon Boundary Treaty of 1853, on the negotiations for the purchase of Cuba, on the filibuster expeditions of 1858, and the controversy of that year over Great Britain's reassertion of the right of search—on all these questions he had very positive opinions and maintained them vigorously. In the year 1853, he went abroad, studied the workings of European systems, and made the acquaintance of various foreign statesmen; but he did not change his opinions or his temper of mind. In England, rather than put on court costume, he gave up an opportunity to be presented to the Queen; and in Russia he appears to have made good his contention that, as persons of other nationalities are presented to foreign rulers in the dress which they would wear before their own sovereigns, an American should be presented in such dress as he would wear before the President.

But if he maintained the traditional, old-fashioned American attitude toward "abroad," he was very sure, when he dealt with a particular case, to take a practical and modern line of reasoning. Opposing the treaty of peace with Mexico, he objected to the boundary line, to the promise we made never to acquire any more Mexican territory as we acquired Texas, and to the stipulations about the Indians. His objections were disregarded, and the treaty was ratified; but five years later the United States paid ten million dollars to get it altered in those respects. He vigorously opposed the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty in 1850, when it was ratified, and three years later, when the subject was brought up in open Senate, he stated at length his views on the whole subject of our relations with England and Central America, with Spain and Cuba, with European monarchies and Latin-American states. Whether right or wrong, they are the views on which the American people have acted as practical occasions have arisen and bid fair to act in the future.