It would have been possible, he thought, but for Clayton's mismanagement, to get from Nicaragua a grant to the United States of exclusive and perpetual control over all railroad and canal routes through that country from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Instead, we had pledged ourselves to England "not to do, in all coming time, that which, in the progress of events, our interests, duty, and even safety may compel us to do." He opposed the treaty because it invited European intervention in American affairs; because it denied us the right to fortify any canal that might be built; because its language was equivocal in regard to the British protectorate over the Mosquito coast, and otherwise clearly contrary to the Monroe Doctrine; and because we made an unnecessary promise never to occupy any part of Central America. To all these objections, save the last, time has added force; and the principle of the last is now established in our national policy. That principle Douglas proclaimed so often that it almost rivals the principle of popular sovereignty itself in the matter of the frequency of its appearance in his speeches. "You may make," he declared, "as many treaties as you please to fetter the limbs of this giant Republic, and she will burst them all from her, and her course will be onward to a limit which I will not venture to prescribe." The Alleghanies had not withheld us from the basin of the Mississippi, nor the Mississippi from the plains, nor the Rocky Mountains from the Pacific coast. Now that the Pacific barred our way to the westward, who could say that we might not turn, or ought not to turn, northward or southward? Later, he came to contemplate a time when the Pacific might cease to be a barrier: when our "interests, duty, and even safety" might impel us onward to the islands of the sea. He would make no pledges for the future. Agreements not to annex territory might be reasonable in treaties between European powers, but they were contrary to the spirit of American civilization. "Europe," he said, "is antiquated, decrepit, tottering on the verge of dissolution. When you visit her, the objects which excite your admiration are the relics of past greatness: the broken columns erected to departed power. Here everything is fresh, blooming, expanding, and advancing. We wish a wise, practical policy adapted to our condition and position."
A more ardent and thoroughgoing expansionist is not to be found among eminent Americans of that time, or even of later times. While he was denouncing General Walker's lawless invasion of Central America in 1858, he took pains to make it plain that it was the filibusters' method, and not their object, which he condemned. In fact, he condemned their method chiefly because its tendency was to defeat their object.
He believed that England, notwithstanding the kinship of the two peoples and the similarity of their civilizations, was our rival by necessity, our ill-wisher because of the past. The idea that we were bound to the mother country by ties of gratitude or affection he always combated. He denied her motherhood as a historical proposition, and demanded to know of Senator Butler, of South Carolina, who was moved to eloquence over America's debt to England for a language and a literature, whether he was duly grateful also for English criticism of our institutions, and particularly for the publications of English abolitionists. As to the British claim of a right to search American vessels for slaves, he was for bringing the matter at once to an issue; for denying the right in toto; and if Great Britain chose to treat our resistance as a cause of war, he would be for prolonging the war until the British flag should disappear forever from the American continent and the adjacent islands.
CHAPTER III
THE GREAT QUESTION
On all these questions, alike of domestic and of foreign policy, Douglas took an eminently hopeful, an eminently confident and resolute stand. His opinions were such as befitted a strong, competent, successful man. They were characteristic of the West. They were based on a positive faith in democracy, in our constitution of government, in the American people. In that faith, likewise, he addressed himself to the problem which in his day, as before and after, was perplexing the champions of democracy and giving pause to the well-wishers of the Republic. A later generation has learned to think of that problem as the negro question, a race question; Douglas's generation thought of it merely as the slavery question.
The presidential election of 1848 made a good occasion for men to take account of the question, and of their own minds concerning it. In February, 1848, by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded to the United States the territory out of which California, New Mexico, and Utah have been formed. With the signing of the treaty the material elements of the problem, as it presented itself to that generation, were completely arranged.
In fifteen Southern States and in the District of Columbia slavery was sanctioned and protected by law. In fifteen Northern States slavery was prohibited by law. The foreign slave trade was long since prohibited altogether, though from time to time, in a small way, it was surreptitiously revived. The domestic slave trade, among the slave States and in the District, was still permitted. There was a law on the statute book to compel the return of slaves fleeing into the free States, but certain of its provisions had been pronounced unconstitutional, and it was ineffective. Of the territory acquired from France in 1803, all that part which lay south of the line of 36° 30´, North latitude, with Missouri, which lay north of the line, was either organized into slave States or set apart for the Indians; in all that part which lay north of the line of 36° 30´, except Missouri, slavery was forbidden by a law of Congress passed in 1820. It was competent for Congress to repeal the law at any time, but from the country's long acquiescence in it, and from the circumstances of its passage, which were such that a stigma of bad faith would be fixed upon whichever section should move for its repeal, it seemed to have a force and stability more like the Constitution's itself than that of ordinary laws. There remained the territory got from Mexico, concerning which, although from the beginning of the war the question of slavery in any territory that might come to us at the end of it had been constantly in agitation, Congress had as yet passed no law. What law Congress should make about slavery in California, New Mexico, and Utah was the main question. But there was also a question of the right boundary between New Mexico and Texas, which had been admitted in 1845 as a slave State, with an agreement that she might at any time divide herself up into four States.