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+Project Gutenberg's Stephen Arnold Douglas, by William Garrott Brown
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Stephen Arnold Douglas
+
+Author: William Garrott Brown
+
+Release Date: December 20, 2008 [EBook #27579]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Bergquist and The Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ Transcriber's Note
+
+ The punctuation and spelling from the original text have been faithfully
+ preserved. Only obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
+
+
+
+
+The Riverside Biographical Series
+
+   1. ANDREW JACKSON, by W.G. BROWN.
+   2. JAMES B. EADS, by LOUIS HOW.
+   3. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, by PAUL E. MORE.
+   4. PETER COOPER, by R.W. RAYMOND.
+   5. THOMAS JEFFERSON, by H.C. MERWIN.
+   6. WILLIAM PENN, by GEORGE HODGES.
+   7. GENERAL GRANT, by WALTER ALLEN.
+   8. LEWIS AND CLARK, by WILLIAM R. LIGHTON.
+   9. JOHN MARSHALL, by JAMES B. THAYER.
+  10. ALEXANDER HAMILTON, by CHAS. A. CONANT.
+  11. WASHINGTON IRVING, by H.W. BOYNTON.
+  12. PAUL JONES, by HUTCHINS HAPGOOD.
+  13. STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS, by W.G. BROWN.
+  14. SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN, by H.D. SEDGWICK, Jr.
+
+Each about 140 pages, 16mo, with photogravure portrait, 65 cents, _net_;
+_School Edition_, each, 50 cents, _net_.
+
+  HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
+  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+
+
+  The Riverside Biographical Series
+
+  NUMBER 13
+
+  STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS
+
+  BY
+
+  WILLIAM GARROTT BROWN
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+  STEPHEN ARNOLD
+  DOUGLAS
+
+  BY
+
+  WILLIAM GARROTT BROWN
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+  HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
+  The Riverside Press, Cambridge
+  1902
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY WILLIAM GARROTT BROWN
+
+  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+  _Published March, 1902_
+
+
+  TO J.S. JR.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAP.                            PAGE
+
+    I. YOUTH AND THE WEST             1
+
+   II. THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE      31
+
+  III. THE GREAT QUESTION            58
+
+   IV. LEADERSHIP                    82
+
+    V. THE RIVALS                   112
+
+
+  _The portrait is from a photograph by
+  Brady in the Library of the State
+  Department at Washington._
+
+
+
+
+STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+YOUTH AND THE WEST
+
+
+The ten years of American history from 1850 to 1860 have a fascination
+second only to that of the four years which followed. Indeed, unless one
+has a taste for military science, it is a question whether the great war
+itself is more absorbing than the great debate that led up to it;
+whether even Gettysburg and Chickamauga, the March to the Sea, the
+Wilderness, Appomattox, are of more surpassing interest than the
+dramatic political changes,--the downfall of the Whig party, the swift
+rise and the equally swift submergence of the Know-Nothing party, the
+birth of the Republican party, the disruption and overthrow of the
+long-dominant Democratic party,--through which the country came at last
+to see that only the sword could make an end of the long controversy
+between the North and the South.
+
+The first years of the decade were marked by the passing of one group of
+statesmen and the rise of another group. Calhoun's last speech in the
+Senate was read at the beginning of the debate over those measures which
+finally took shape as the Compromise of 1850. The Compromise was the
+last instance of the leadership of Clay. The famous Seventh of March
+speech in defense of it was Webster's last notable oration. These voices
+stilled, many others took up the pregnant theme. Davis and Toombs and
+Stephens and other well-trained Southern statesmen defended slavery
+aggressively; Seward and Sumner and Chase insisted on a hearing for the
+aggressive anti-slavery sentiment; Cass and Buchanan maintained for a
+time their places as leaders in the school of compromise. But from the
+death of Clay to the presidential election of 1860 the most resonant
+voice of them all was the voice of Stephen Arnold Douglas. It is
+scarcely too much to say that during the whole period the centre of the
+stage was his, and his the most stirring part. In 1861, the curtain fell
+upon him still resolute, vigorous, commanding. When it rose again for
+another scene, he was gone so completely that nowadays it is hard for us
+to understand what a place he had. Three biographers writing near the
+time of his death were mainly concerned to explain how he came to be
+first in the minds of his contemporaries. A biographer writing now must
+try to explain why he has been so lightly esteemed by that posterity to
+which they confidently committed his fame. Blind Tom, the negro mimic,
+having once heard him speak, was wont for many years to entertain
+curious audiences by reproducing those swelling tones in which he rolled
+out his defense of popular sovereignty, and it is not improbable that
+Douglas owes to the marvelous imitator of sounds a considerable part of
+such fame as he has among uneducated men in our time. Among historical
+students, however seriously his deserts are questioned, there is no
+question of the importance of his career.
+
+He was born April 23, 1813, at Brandon, Vermont, the son of Stephen
+Arnold Douglas and Sarah Fisk, his wife. His father, a successful
+physician, was doubtless of Scotch descent; but the founder of the
+Douglas family in America was married in Northamptonshire. He landed on
+Cape Ann in 1639-40, but in 1660 he made his home at New London,
+Connecticut. Dr. Douglas's mother was an Arnold of Rhode Island,
+descended from that Governor Arnold who was associated with Roger
+Williams in the founding of the colony. Sarah Fisk's mother was also an
+Arnold, and of the same family. Their son was therefore of good New
+England stock, and amply entitled to his middle name. Dr. Douglas died
+suddenly of apoplexy in July, 1813; it is said that he held the infant
+Stephen in his arms when he was stricken. His widow made her home with a
+bachelor brother on a farm near Brandon, and the boy's early years were
+passed in an environment familiar to readers of American biography--the
+simplicity, the poverty, the industry, and the serious-mindedness of
+rural New England. He was delicate, with a little bit of a body and a
+very large head, but quick-witted and precocious, and until he was
+fifteen years of age his elders permitted him to look forward to a
+collegiate education and a professional career.
+
+But by that time the uncle was married, and an heir was born to him.
+Stephen was therefore made to understand that the expense of his
+education could be met only from his mother's limited means. He promptly
+resolved to learn a trade, walked fourteen miles to the neighboring town
+of Middlebury, and apprenticed himself to a cabinet-maker. He worked at
+cabinet-making two years, and afterwards, even when he had risen so high
+that many of his countrymen were willing he should try his hand at
+making cabinets of men, he protested that those two years were by far
+the happiest of his life, and that he would never willingly have
+exchanged his place in the Middlebury workshop for any other place
+whatsoever. As it was, he left it because he was not strong enough for
+that sort of work.
+
+The following year he pursued his studies at the academy of Brandon.
+Then his mother married again, and he went with her to the home of his
+stepfather, Gehazi Granger, Esquire, near Canandaigua, New York, and
+finished his schooling at the Canandaigua Academy, which appears to have
+been an excellent one. Meanwhile, he also read law, and showed great
+proficiency both in his classical and his legal studies. Not much is on
+record concerning his schoolboy life. It is known, however, that he had
+a way of making his fellows like him, so that they of their own accord
+put him forward, and that he had a lively interest in politics. It is
+said that even so early as the campaign of 1828, when he was but
+fifteen, he organized a band of his playmates to make war on the "coffin
+handbills" wherewith the Adams men sought to besmirch the military fame
+of General Jackson, already become his hero. At Canandaigua, four years
+later, he espoused the same cause in debating clubs, and won an
+ascendency among his fellows by his readiness and the extent of his
+information. In the life of another man, these boyish performances
+might be set down merely as signs of promise; but Douglas was so soon
+immersed in real politics, and rose to distinction with such astounding
+swiftness, that his performances as a schoolboy may well be accounted
+the actual beginning, and not merely a premonition, of his career. He
+was only twenty, when, in June, 1833, he set forth to enter upon it.
+
+Save that he was going West, he does not seem to have had any
+destination clearly in mind. He carried letters to certain persons in
+Cleveland, and stopped there to see them, and so made the acquaintance
+of Sherlock J. Andrews, a leading lawyer of the town, who persuaded him
+to remain and read law in his office until a year should elapse and he
+could be admitted to the Ohio bar. However, in less than a week he fell
+ill of a fever which did not leave him until the expense of it had
+well-nigh emptied his slender purse. His physicians, fearing he was too
+slight and delicate for Western hardships, urged him to go back to
+Canandaigua, but when he left Cleveland he again turned westward,
+resolved in his own mind never to go back without the evidences of
+success in his life. It is doubtful if among all the thousands who in
+those days were constantly faring westward, from New England towns and
+the parishes of Virginia and the Carolinas, there ever was a youth more
+resolutely and boldly addressed to opportunity than he. Poor, broken in
+health, almost diminutive in physical stature, and quite unknown, he
+made his way first to Cincinnati, then to Louisville, then to St. Louis,
+in search of work. Coming almost to the end of his resources, he
+reasoned that it would be best for him to seek some country town, where
+his expenses would be slight; and guided merely by a book of travel he
+had read he fixed on a town which, as it happened, bore the name of his
+political patron saint. In November, 1833, being now twenty years and
+six months old, he arrived at Jacksonville, Illinois, with a sum total
+of thirty-seven cents in his pocket. The glimpses we get of him during
+his wanderings, from the recollections of certain men with whom he made
+acquaintance in stages and on river steamboats, make a curious and
+striking picture of American character. The feverish, high-strung boy
+was never dismayed and never a dreamer, but always confident,
+purposeful, good-humored.
+
+He found no work at Jacksonville, and walked to Winchester, sixteen
+miles to the southwestward, where he hoped to get work as a teacher. The
+next morning, seeing a crowd assembled in the public square of the
+village, he pushed his way to the centre and learned that there was to
+be an auction of the wares of a merchant who had recently died. The
+auctioneer was in need of a clerk to keep the record of the sales, and
+the place was offered to the young stranger. He took it, served three
+days, earned six dollars, made acquaintance with the farmers gathered
+for the sale, and got a chance in the talk about politics to display
+those qualities which he never failed to display when opportunity
+offered--the utmost readiness in debate, good-natured courtesy, and keen
+political instinct. A school was arranged for him, and within a week he
+had forty pupils entered for three months. A lawyer of the place
+befriended him with the loan of some books, and he gave his evenings to
+law and politics. When the three months were ended, he went back to
+Jacksonville and opened an office. March 4, 1834, he was licensed to
+practice, and from that time he rose faster than any man in Illinois, if
+not in the whole country, notwithstanding that he rose on the lines
+along which many and many another young American was struggling toward
+prominence, and notwithstanding that Illinois was exceptionally full, as
+later years were to prove, of young men fitted for such careers as
+Douglas sought--notwithstanding, too, that there had already drifted to
+New Salem, in the very next county, a young Kentuckian destined to such
+eminence that the Illinois of those years is oftenest studied now for
+light on him, and is most amply revealed to us in the books about him.
+
+But for the very reason that Douglas rose so fast it is not necessary,
+in order to understand how or why he rose, to study the conditions and
+men he had to deal with so carefully as they have done who seek to
+explain for us the slower progress of that strange career with which his
+is indissolubly associated. Jacksonville, which was to be his home for a
+few years, was a small country town, but it was the county seat of
+Morgan, one of the two wealthiest and most populous counties in the
+State. A few years earlier, that whole region had been a frontier, but
+the first roughness was now worn away. True, the whole northern half of
+Illinois was practically unsettled, and Chicago was but three years old,
+and not yet important. But it appears that the general character of the
+central counties was already fixed, and what followed was of the nature
+of growth rather than change. Certain small towns, like Springfield,
+were to become cities, and certain others, like New Salem, were to
+disappear. Railroads were not yet, though many were planning, and
+manufactures were chiefly of the domestic sort. But in the matter of the
+opportunities it presented to aspiring youth the country was already
+Western, and no longer wild Western. Hunting shirts and moccasins were
+disappearing. Knives in one's belt had gone out of fashion. The merely
+adventurous were passing beyond the Mississippi, and the field was open
+to the enterprising, the speculative, the ambitious.
+
+Enterprise and speculation were in the air, and ambition, if it took a
+political turn, must perforce take account of them. The whole country
+was prosperous, and Illinois was possessed with the fever of development
+then epidemic throughout the West and the South. If one examines the
+legislation of any of the States west of the Alleghanies during the
+second administration of President Jackson, by far the most numerous
+category of bills will be found to deal with internal improvements,
+particularly railroads and canals. Money, however, was needed for these
+things, and Illinois, like all new countries, had to look backward to
+older communities for capital. President Jackson had but lately made his
+final assault upon the National Bank, the principal dispenser of
+capital, by the removal of the deposits, and public opinion was much
+divided on his course, when Douglas opened his law office and began to
+discuss public questions with his neighbors. While he still lived at
+Winchester, he had helped to get subscribers for a Democratic newspaper
+at Jacksonville, and he soon called upon the editor, who was first
+surprised at his visitor's youthful appearance and then, as he himself
+tells us, at "the strength of his mind, the development of his
+intellect, and his comprehensive knowledge of the political history of
+his country."
+
+Boy as he looked, and boy as he was, for he had not yet passed his
+twenty-first birthday, Douglas actually got the leadership of the
+Jackson party in that neighborhood before he had lived there a month. An
+enthusiastic supporter of the President's policy on the bank question,
+he talked about the matter so well on Saturdays, when, according to the
+Western and Southern custom, the country people flocked into town, that
+he was put forward to move the Jackson resolutions at a mass meeting of
+Democrats which he and his friend, the editor, had contrived to bring
+about. There was a great crowd. Josiah Lamborn, an orator of some
+reputation, opposed the resolutions. Douglas replied in an hour's
+speech, discomfited Lamborn, and so swept his audience that they seized
+upon him and bore him on their shoulders out of the room and around the
+public square. He was the "Little Giant" from that day, and the speech
+became a Democratic tradition. Of course, in after years, the men who
+could say they heard it could not be expected to admit that he ever made
+a better speech in his life.
+
+Within a year, he was so well known that he was chosen to the office of
+public prosecutor, or district attorney, of the first judicial circuit,
+the most important in Illinois, and his successful candidacy for the
+place is all the more remarkable because he was chosen by the
+legislature, and not by his neighbors of the circuit. Moreover, his
+competitor, John J. Hardin, was one of the foremost men of Illinois. It
+is true that Hardin was a Whig, and that by this time there was a
+pretty clear division between Whigs and Jackson men on offices as well
+as measures, so that the contest was a party as well as a personal
+affair; but from auctioneer's clerk to district attorney was a promotion
+hardly to be won in a year by a youth of qualities less than
+extraordinary.
+
+The election was in February, 1835, and Douglas held the office the
+better part of two years. A justice of the supreme court had declared,
+on hearing of the legislature's choice, that the stripling could not
+fill the place because he was no lawyer and had no law books.
+Nevertheless, he was an efficient prosecutor. No record of his service
+is available, but there was a tradition in later years that not one of
+his indictments was quashed. Certainly, his work in the courts of the
+district increased his reputation and strengthened his hold on his own
+party. In the spring of 1836, the Democrats of Morgan held a convention
+to nominate candidates for the six seats in the house of representatives
+to which the county was entitled. This was a novel proceeding, for the
+system of conventions to nominate for office was not yet developed; the
+first of the national party conventions was held in preparation for the
+presidential campaign of 1832. Douglas was a leader in the movement, and
+as a result of it he himself was drawn into the contest. Morgan was a
+Whig county, but the solid front of the Democracy so alarmed the Whigs
+that they also abandoned the old plan of letting any number of
+candidates take the field and united upon a ticket with Hardin at its
+head. No man on the Democratic ticket was a match for Hardin. One of the
+candidates was withdrawn, therefore, and Douglas took his place, and he
+and Hardin canvassed the county together in a series of joint debates.
+Mainly through his championship, the convention plan was approved, and
+the Democrats won the election; but Hardin's vote was greater than the
+weakest Democrat's, and so the rivalry between him and Douglas was
+continued in the legislature, where they took their seats in December,
+1836.
+
+In that same house of representatives were John A. McClernand, James
+Shields, William A. Richardson, and other men who rose to national
+distinction. Abraham Lincoln, a Whig representative from Sangamon
+County, was already well known for his ungainly length of body, for his
+habit of reasoning in parables which were now scriptural and now vulgar
+to the point of obscenity, and for a quaint and rare honesty. He was
+four years older than the new member from Morgan, and nearly two feet
+taller. Douglas, many years later, declared that he was drawn to Lincoln
+by a strong sympathy, for they were both young men making an uphill
+struggle in life. Lincoln, at his first sight of Douglas, during the
+contest with Hardin for the attorneyship, pronounced him "the least man
+he ever saw."
+
+Douglas was the youngest member of an unusual house, but he at once took
+his place among the leaders. When the governor's message, animadverting
+severely on the President's course with the Bank, brought on a
+discussion of national party questions, he and Hardin seem to have won
+the chief honors of the debate. He was appointed chairman of the
+Committee on Petitions, to which numerous applications for divorce were
+referred, and introduced a resolution which passed and which put an end
+to divorces by act of the legislature. On the great question of the
+hour, the question of development and internal improvements, he declared
+that the State ought to attempt no improvement which it could not afford
+to construct and to own. He favored a few specific enterprises and the
+making of careful surveys and estimates before any others should be
+taken up. But it was the very height of "flush times" in Illinois, and
+the legislature added millions to the vast sums in which the State was
+already committed to the support of canals, railroads, river
+improvements, and banks. It was but a few weeks from the adjournment in
+March to the great financial panic of 1837, which crushed every one of
+the state-aided banks, stopped the railroad building and river dredging,
+and finally left Illinois burdened with an enormous debt. There was a
+special session of the legislature in the summer, occasioned by the
+depression and hard times which had followed so hard upon the flush
+times of the winter, but Douglas was not there to tax his associates
+with their unwisdom. He had taken another step in his unexampled career
+of office-holding by accepting from President Van Buren the office of
+register of public lands at Springfield, the growing town in Sangamon
+County which the legislature had just made the capital of the State, and
+where, within a few years, Shields, McClernand, Lincoln, and other
+rising young men were gathered.
+
+From this time, Douglas and Lincoln knew each other well, for they lived
+together several years in an atmosphere of intimate personal scrutiny.
+For searching study of one's fellows, for utter disregard of all
+superficial _criteria_ of character and conventional standards of
+conduct, there is but one sort of life to be compared with the life of a
+Southern or Western town, and that is the life of students in a
+boarding-school or a small college. In such communities there is little
+division into classes, as of rich and poor, educated and illiterate,
+well and obscurely born. On the steps of the court-house, in the
+post-office while the daily mail is sorted, in the corner drug store on
+Sundays, in lawyers' offices, on the curbstone,--wherever a group of men
+is assembled,--there is the freest talk on every possible subject; and
+the lives of men are open to their fellows as they cannot be in cities
+by reason of the mass or in country districts by reason of the solitude
+and the shyness which solitude breeds. Against Douglas there was the
+presumption, which every New England man who goes southward or westward
+has to live down, that he would in some measure hold himself aloof from
+his fellows. But the prejudice was quickly dispelled. No man entered
+more readily into close personal relations with whomsoever he
+encountered. In all our accounts of him he is represented as surrounded
+with intimates. Not without the power of impressing men with his dignity
+and seriousness of purpose, we nevertheless hear of him sitting on the
+knee of an eminent judge during a recess of the court; dancing from end
+to end of a dinner-table with the volatile Shields--the same who won
+laurels in the Mexican War, a seat in the United States Senate, and the
+closest approach anybody ever won to victory in battle over Stonewall
+Jackson; and engaging, despite his height of five feet and his weight of
+a hundred pounds, in personal encounters with Stuart, Lincoln's athletic
+law partner, and a corpulent attorney named Francis.
+
+On equal terms he mingled in good-humored rivalry with a group of
+uncommonly resourceful men, and he passed them all in the race for
+advancement. There is some reason to believe that Lincoln, strange as it
+seems, was his successful rival in a love affair, but otherwise Douglas
+left Lincoln far behind. Buoyant, good-natured, never easily abashed,
+his maturity and _savoir faire_ were accentuated by the smallness of his
+stature. His blue eyes and his dark, abundant hair heightened his
+physical charm of boyishness; his virile movements, his face,
+heavy-browed, round, and strong, and his well-formed, uncommonly large
+head gave him an aspect of intellectual power. He had a truly Napoleonic
+trick of attaching men to his fortunes. He was a born leader, beyond
+question; and he himself does not seem ever to have doubted his fitness
+to lead, or ever to have agonized over the choice of a path and the
+responsibilities of leadership. Principles he had--the principles of
+Jefferson and Jackson as he understood them. These, apparently, he held
+sufficient for every problem and every emergency of political life.
+
+He believed in party organization quite as firmly as he believed in
+party principles, and in the summer of 1837 he had a hand in building up
+the machinery of conventions and committees through which the Illinois
+Democrats have governed themselves ever since. He defended Van Buren's
+plan of a sub-treasury when many even of those who had supported
+Jackson's financial measures wavered in the face of the disfavor into
+which hard times had brought the party in power, and in November,
+although the Springfield congressional district, even before the panic,
+had shown a Whig majority of 3000, he accepted the Democratic nomination
+for the seat in Congress to be filled at the election in August, 1838,
+and threw himself with the utmost ardor into the canvass. The district
+was the largest in the whole country, for it included all the northern
+counties of the State. His opponent was John T. Stuart, Lincoln's law
+partner, and for five months the two spoke six days every week without
+covering the whole of the great region they aspired to represent. The
+northern counties had been filling up with immigrants, and more than
+36,000 votes were cast. Many ballots were thrown out on technicalities;
+most of the election officials were Whigs. After weeks of uncertainty,
+Stuart was declared elected by a majority of five. The moral effect,
+however, was a triumph for Douglas, who at the time of his nomination
+was not of the age required of congressmen.
+
+He announced that he would now devote himself to his profession. But it
+was by this time very difficult, even if he so wished, to withdraw from
+politics. He was constantly in council with the leaders of his party,
+and belonged to a sort of "third house" at Springfield which nowadays
+would probably be called a lobby. During the winter there was an angry
+controversy between the Democratic governor and the Whig senate over the
+question of the governor's right to appoint a secretary of state, the
+senate refusing to confirm his nomination of McClernand on the ground
+that the office was not vacant. The question was brought before the
+supreme court, whose Whig majority, by deciding against the governor,
+strengthened a growing feeling of discontent with the whole judiciary
+among the Democrats, and Douglas took strong ground in favor of
+reorganizing the court. In March, addressing a great meeting at
+Springfield, he defended the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798,
+and when the presidential campaign opened in November he had a debate
+with Lincoln and other Whig orators. He was, in fact, the leading
+Democratic orator throughout the campaign in Illinois, and there is no
+doubt that his enthusiasm and his shrewdness had much to do with the
+result there. Of all the Northern States, only Illinois and New
+Hampshire went for Van Buren.
+
+Meanwhile, however, he had practiced law with such success that no
+account of the Illinois bar of those days omits his name from the list
+of eminent attorneys. It was noted that whereas Lincoln was never very
+successful save in those cases where his client's cause was just, a
+client with but a slender claim upon the court's favor found Douglas a
+far better advocate. He never seems to have given much time to the
+reading of law or to the ordinary drudgery of preparing cases for trial,
+but he mastered the main facts of his cases with the utmost facility,
+and his mind went at once to the points that were sure to affect the
+decision. Early in his experience as a lawyer he had to be content with
+fees that seem absurdly small; once, he rode from Springfield to
+Bloomington to argue a case, and got but five dollars for his services.
+But he was a first-rate man of business, and soon had a good income from
+his profession.
+
+In January, 1841, the legislature, now Democratic in both branches,
+removed the Whig incumbent from the office of secretary of state, and
+the governor at once appointed Douglas to succeed him. That office,
+however, he held less than a month, for the legislature had also
+reconstructed the supreme court in such a way as to increase the number
+of judges, and in February, being then less than twenty-eight years old,
+he was named for one of the new places. One of the reasons why the court
+was reconstructed was its opposition to the Democratic position on the
+franchise question. Douglas, arguing a famous franchise case before it,
+had made himself the champion of unnaturalized inhabitants claiming the
+right to vote, and had thus established himself in the good-will of a
+large and increasing constituency throughout the State. Under the new
+law, each justice was assigned to a particular circuit,--Douglas to the
+westernmost, whose principal town was Quincy, on the Illinois River,
+where he made his home.
+
+The Mormon settlement of Nauvoo was in that circuit, and the most
+interesting of all the cases brought before Judge Douglas grew out of
+the troubles between the followers of Joe Smith and their neighbors. On
+one occasion, Joe Smith was himself on trial, and the Christian populace
+of the neighborhood, long incensed against him and his people, broke
+into the court-room clamoring for his life. The sheriff, a feeble-bodied
+and spiritless official, showed signs of yielding, and the judge,
+promptly assuming a power not vested in his office, appointed a stalwart
+Kentuckian sheriff, and ordered him to summon a _posse_ and clear the
+room. By these means the defendant's life was saved, and Douglas,
+notwithstanding various decisions of his against them, earned the
+gratitude of the religious enthusiasts. There is a story that some years
+later, when he was no longer a judge, but a major in a militia regiment
+sent on an expedition against Nauvoo, he was ordered to take a hundred
+men and arrest the "twelve apostles." The Mormons, outnumbering the
+militia, were fortified for defense. Major Douglas, however, proceeded
+alone into their lines, persuaded the twelve to enter their apostolic
+coach and come with him to the Christian camp, and so brought about an
+agreement which prevented a fight.
+
+Both as a judge and as a member of the council of revision Douglas stood
+out with commendable firmness against the popular feeling, strong
+throughout the country during the hard times, and which in some of the
+States got a complete ascendency over courts and legislatures, in favor
+of the relief of debtors. He enforced the old laws for the collection of
+debts, and he baulked several legislative schemes to defraud creditors
+of their due by declaring the new laws unconstitutional. For the rest,
+his decisions have seemed to competent critics to show that he possessed
+unusual legal ability and grasp of principles and a corresponding power
+of statement, scant as his legal training was.
+
+According to the American usage, he was "Judge Douglas" all the rest of
+his life, but the state bench no more satisfied his ambition than the
+other state offices he had held. In December, 1842, when the legislature
+proceeded to ballot for a United States senator, his name was presented,
+though again his age fell short of the legal requirement, and on the
+last ballot he had fifty-one votes against the fifty-six which elected
+his successful competitor. The next year, being nominated for the lower
+house of Congress, he accepted, and at once resigned his place on the
+bench, though the district had a Whig complexion. At the end of a
+canvass which left both himself and his opponent, Browning, seriously
+ill, he was elected by a majority of several hundred.
+
+On his way to Washington, he visited Cleveland, where his westward
+journey had come so near an abortive ending, and then his home-folk at
+Canandaigua. He was but thirty years old, yet he had held five important
+political offices, he had risen to high rank in his profession, he was
+the leader of the dominant party in a great State; and all this he had
+done alone, unaided. Few aged men have brought back such laurels from
+their Western fortune-seeking. In December, 1843, he took his seat in
+the House of Representatives and began to display before the whole
+country the same brilliant spectacle of daring, energy, and success
+which had captivated the people of Illinois.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE
+
+
+It was the aggressive energy of the man, unrestrained by such formality
+as was still observed by the public men of the older Eastern
+communities, which most impressed those who have left on record their
+judgments of the young Western congressman. The aged Adams, doubtless
+the best representative of the older school in either branch of
+Congress, gave a page of his diary to one of Douglas's early speeches.
+"His face was convulsed,"--so the merciless diary runs,--"his
+gesticulation frantic, and he lashed himself into such a heat that if
+his body had been made of combustible matter it would have burnt out. In
+the midst of his roaring, to save himself from choking, he stripped and
+cast away his cravat, unbuttoned his waistcoat, and had the air and
+aspect of a half-naked pugilist. And this man comes from a judicial
+bench, and passes for an eloquent orator!" On another occasion, the same
+critic tells us, Douglas "raved an hour about democracy and anglophobia
+and universal empire." Adams had been professor of rhetoric and oratory
+at Harvard College, and he was the last man in the country to appreciate
+an oratorical manner that departed from the established rules and
+traditions of the art. Ampère, a French traveler, thought Douglas a
+perfect representative of the energetic builders of the Western
+commonwealths, and predicted that he would come into power when it
+should be the turn of the West to dominate the country. "Small, black,
+stocky," so this observer described him, "his speech is full of nervous
+power, his action simple and strong." Douglas, however, quickly adapted
+himself to his new environment,--no man in the country excelled him in
+that art,--and took on all the polish which the Washington of that day
+demanded, without any loss of fighting spirit or any abandonment of his
+democratic manners and principles.
+
+He soon got a good opportunity to plant himself on a powerful popular
+sentiment by urging, in a really excellent speech, that the country
+should repay to the aged Jackson the fine which had been imposed upon
+him for contempt of court during the defense of New Orleans. An
+experienced opponent found him ready with a taking retort to every
+interruption. It being objected that there was absolutely no precedent
+for refunding the fine, "I presume," he replied, "that no case can be
+found on record, or traced by tradition, where a fine, imposed upon a
+general for saving his country, at the peril of his life and reputation,
+has ever been refunded." When he visited The Hermitage during the
+following summer, Jackson singled him out of a distinguished party and
+thanked him, not without reason, for defending his course at New Orleans
+better than he himself had ever been able to defend it. Douglas won
+further distinction during the session by defending, in a report from
+the committee on elections, the right of the several States to determine
+how their representatives in Congress should be chosen. Later, in a
+debate with John J. Hardin, his rival in Congress as in the Illinois
+legislature, he contrasted the Whig and Democratic positions on the
+questions of the day with so much force and skill that the speech was
+used as the principal Democratic document in the presidential campaign
+of 1844.
+
+In Congress, distinction does not always, or usually, imply power; but
+Douglas was consummately fit for the sort of struggling by which things
+are in fact accomplished at Washington. Whatever the matter in hand, his
+mind always moved with lightning rapidity to positive views. He was
+never without a clear purpose, and he had the skill and the temper to
+manage men. He knew how to conciliate opponents, to impress the
+thoughtful, to threaten the timid, to button-hole and flatter and
+cajole. He breathed freely the heated air of lobbies and committee
+rooms. Fast as his reputation grew, his actual importance in legislation
+grew faster still. At the beginning of his second term he was appointed
+chairman of the House Committee on Territories, and so was charged in
+an especial way with the affairs of the remoter West. In the course of
+that service, he framed many laws which have affected very notably the
+development of our younger commonwealths. He was particularly opposed to
+the policy of massing the Indians in reservations west of the
+Mississippi, fearing that the new Northwest, the Oregon country, over
+which we were still in controversy with Great Britain, would thus be
+isolated. To prevent this, he introduced during his first term a bill to
+organize into a territory that part of the Louisiana Purchase which lay
+north and west of Missouri. As yet, however, there were scarcely any
+white settlers in the region, and no interest could be enlisted in
+support of the bill. But he renewed his motion year after year until
+finally, as we shall see, he made it the most celebrated measure of his
+time.
+
+His advocacy of the internal improvements needed for the development of
+the West brought him in opposition to a powerful element in his own
+party. Adams, writing in his diary under date of April 17, 1844, says:
+"The Western harbor bill was taken up, and the previous question was
+withdrawn for the _homunculus_ Douglas to poke out a speech in favor of
+the constitutionality of appropriations for the improvement of Western
+rivers and harbors. The debate was continued between the conflicting
+absurdities of the Southern Democracy, which is slavery, and the Western
+Democracy, which is knavery." Under the leadership of Jackson and other
+Southerners, the Democrats, notwithstanding their long ascendency, had
+adhered to their position on internal improvements more consistently,
+perhaps, than to any other of the contentions which they had made before
+they came into power. Douglas did not, indeed, commit himself to that
+interpretation of the Constitution which justified appropriations for
+any enterprise which could be considered a contribution to the "general
+welfare," and he protested against various items in river and harbor
+bills. But as a rule he voted for the bills.
+
+He was particularly interested in the scheme for building a railroad
+which should run north and south the entire length of Illinois, and
+favored a grant of public lands to aid the State in the enterprise. For
+years, however, he had to contend with a corporation which had got from
+the State a charter for such a railroad and was now trying to get help
+from Congress. In 1843, and for several sessions thereafter, bills were
+introduced to give aid directly to the Great Western Railway Company,
+and it was mainly the work of Douglas that finally secured a majority in
+Congress for the plan of granting lands to the State, and not to the
+company. That was in 1851. To his chagrin, however, the promoters of the
+company then persuaded the Illinois legislature to pass a bill
+transferring to them whatever lands Congress might grant to the State
+for the railroad. He at once sent for Holbrook, the leading man in the
+company, and informed him that no bill would be permitted to pass until
+he and his associates should first execute a release of all the rights
+they had obtained from the legislature. Such a release they were at last
+forced to sign, the bill passed, and the Illinois Central was built. It
+became an important agency in the development, not of Illinois merely,
+but of the whole Mississippi Valley; and it is the most notable material
+result of Douglas's skill in legislation. But throughout the whole
+course of his service at Washington he never neglected, in his concern
+about the great national questions with which his name is forever
+associated, the material interests of the people whom he especially
+represented. His district and his State never had cause to complain of
+his devotion to his party and his country.
+
+But the questions which had the foremost place while he was a member of
+the lower house were questions of our foreign relations, and as it
+happened they were questions to which he could give himself freely
+without risking his distinctive rôle as the champion of the newer West.
+The Oregon boundary dispute and the proposed annexation of Texas were
+uppermost in the campaign of 1844, and on both it was competent for him
+to argue that an aggressive policy was demanded by Western interests and
+Western sentiment. It was in discussing the Oregon boundary that he
+first took the attitude of bitter opposition to all European, and
+particularly to all English interference in the affairs of the American
+continents which he steadily maintained thereafter. The long-standing
+agreement with Great Britain for joint occupation of the Oregon country
+he characterized as in practice an agreement for non-occupation. Arguing
+in favor of giving notice of the termination of the convention, he
+shrewdly pointed out that as the British settlers were for the most part
+fur-traders and the American settlements were agricultural, we would
+"squat them out" if no hindrance were put upon the westward movement of
+our pioneers. He would at once organize a territorial government for
+Oregon, and take measures to protect it; if Great Britain threatened
+war, he would put the country in a state of defense. "If war comes," he
+cried, "let it come. We may regret the necessity which produced it, but
+when it does come, I would administer to our citizens Hannibal's oath of
+eternal enmity. I would blot out the lines on the map which now mark our
+territorial boundaries on this continent, and make the area of liberty
+as broad as the continent itself." He even broke with the Polk
+administration when it retreated from the advanced position which the
+party had taken during the campaign, and was one of a hardy ten who, in
+the debate over the resolutions that led to the final settlement, voted
+for a substitute declaration that the question was "no longer a subject
+of negotiation and compromise." There can be little doubt that his
+hostility to England, as well as his robust Americanism, commended him
+at that time to the mass of his countrymen everywhere but in the
+commercial East.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+The material elements of the problem, then, were comparatively simple,
+and the immediately pressing questions were easily phrased; but the
+intangible element of public opinion was uncommonly hard to estimate. So
+far as the great parties were concerned, it was impossible to fix upon
+either of them any general theory about slavery or any definite policy
+with it. Up to this time, both had apparently gone on the understanding
+that it was not a proper issue in political contests. A small group of
+unpractical men had, in fact, tried to build up a party on the issue of
+opposition to it, but they had no prospect of carrying a single
+electoral vote. The adherents of the old parties were agreed on one
+thing: that there was no lawful way for Congress or the people of the
+free States to interfere with slavery in the slave States. They were
+divided among themselves, inside of party lines, on the fugitive slave
+law, on the interstate slave trade, on slavery and the slave trade in
+the District of Columbia, and on slavery in the Territories.
+
+But if party lines did not yet accurately represent the divisions of
+opinion on these questions, there was, nevertheless, a grouping of men
+according to their opinions on the general question which already had
+its effects in politics. Every thoughtful American of that day belonged
+to one or another of several groups according to the view he took of two
+things: slavery itself, and the body of law and usage that had grown up
+about it. There were the abolitionists, who believed slavery to be so
+utterly wrong that they were ready to go all lengths to get rid of it,
+violating the Constitution, breaking the compromises, endangering the
+Union. There were the Southern fire-eaters, who not only believed
+slavery right but were similarly willing to go all lengths to defend and
+extend it. There were the moderate men who made up the bulk of the two
+great parties in the North, who believed slavery wrong but felt
+themselves bound by the compromises of the Constitution which protected
+it where it already existed and debarred from any method of attacking it
+which might bring the Union into danger. There were the moderate men of
+the South, Whigs and Democrats alike, who believed either that slavery
+was right or at least that there was no better state possible for the
+mass of the blacks, but who were yet devoted to the Union and respected
+their constitutional obligations. Finally, there were men so constituted
+that they could decline to take any thought whether slavery were right
+or wrong, and could deal with every question that arose concerning it as
+a question of expediency merely, or of law and precedent.
+
+To which of these groups should Douglas join himself? Up to this time,
+his public record was too meagre to show clearly where he stood. In
+1845, when the bill to annex Texas was before the House, he had offered
+an amendment extending the compromise line of 1820 through the new
+State, so that if Texas were ever divided slavery would be prohibited in
+such State or States as should be formed north of that line. Both in
+the House and in the Senate he had voted against the famous resolution
+of Mr. David Wilmot to exclude slavery from any territory that we might
+get from Mexico, and he continued to oppose that motion, in whatever
+form it appeared, until the legislature of Illinois instructed him to
+favor it. In 1848, he voted for the so-called Clayton Compromise, which
+proposed to organize California, Oregon, and New Mexico into Territories
+and merely extend over them the Constitution and laws of the United
+States so far as these should prove applicable; but he also voted for
+the bill to organize the Territory of Oregon with a clause prohibiting
+slavery. By his speeches, no less than by his votes, he was committed to
+the position that the Missouri Compromise was a final settlement so far
+as the Louisiana Purchase was concerned, and that the compromise line
+ought to be extended through the Mexican Cession to the Pacific. He was
+not clearly committed on any other of the points at issue between the
+friends and the opponents of slavery.
+
+But he had roundly denounced the abolitionists, and he had married the
+daughter of a slaveholder. The day after his wedding his father-in-law
+presented him a deed to a plantation in Mississippi and a number of
+slaves. He gave it back, not, so he declared, because he thought it
+wrong to hold slaves, but because he did not know how to govern them or
+to manage a plantation. His wife soon fell heir to the land and negroes,
+and at her death they passed to her children under a will which
+requested that the blacks be not sold but kept and cared for by the
+testator's descendants. Douglas, as the guardian of his infant children,
+respected their grandfather's wishes. For that reason he was called a
+slaveholder, and a fellow senator once openly accused him of shaping his
+course as a public man to accord with his private interests. He denied
+and disproved the charge, but proudly added: "I implore my enemies, who
+so ruthlessly invade the private sanctuary, to do me the favor to
+believe that I have no wish, no aspiration, to be considered purer or
+better than she who was, or they who are, slaveholders."
+
+He was of those who could be indifferent to the moral quality of
+slavery. He could favor whatever policy the Constitution required, or
+precedents favored, or public expediency demanded; if his enemies were
+to be believed, he could take whatever course ambition and self-interest
+impelled him to. Never once during his long wrestling with the slavery
+question did he concede that any account should be taken of the moral
+character of the institution, or intimate that he believed it wrong for
+one man to hold another man in bondage.
+
+The Democratic National Convention of 1848, though its platform was as
+vague as it could be made, nominated a candidate who was committed to a
+particular plan with slavery in the Territories. The candidate was Lewis
+Cass, of Michigan, and his plan was set forth in a letter to one
+Nicholson, of Nashville, Tennessee, of date December 24, 1847. The plan
+appeared to be a very simple one. It was to leave the people of each
+Territory, so soon as it should be organized, free to regulate their
+domestic institutions as they chose. He favored it for two reasons:
+first, because Congress had no right to interfere; and second, because
+the people themselves were the best judges of what institutions they
+ought to have. That was the barest form of the doctrine which its
+opponents in derision named "squatter sovereignty." It was contrary to
+the doctrine of the Wilmot Proviso, which invoked the authority of
+Congress to exclude slavery from all the Territories, and contrary,
+also, to whatever doctrine or no doctrine was implied in the motion to
+extend the compromise line to the Pacific, exercising the authority of
+Congress to exclude slavery north of the line and forbearing to exercise
+it south of the line. It was equally contrary to a third doctrine which
+was brought before the convention. William L. Yancey, a delegate from
+Alabama, offered a resolution to the effect that neither Congress nor
+any territorial legislature had any right to exclude slave property from
+the Territories. This was a mild statement of the extreme Southern
+doctrine that slaves were property, so recognized by the Constitution,
+and that a slaveholder had the right to take his slaves anywhere but
+into a State where slavery was forbidden.
+
+The doctrine of Cass seemed to accord best with that democratic theory
+of the government which Douglas had always professed. It accorded well
+with his faith in the builders of the West. It alone, of all the
+doctrines advanced, accorded fully with his attitude of indifference to
+the moral quality of slavery. He soon embraced it, therefore, and for
+the rest of his life he was oftenest occupied embodying it in
+legislation, defending it, restating it to suit new conditions,
+modifying it to meet fresh exigencies. Cass, though his authorship of
+the doctrine is disputed, was at first held responsible for it, and he
+advocated it with great ability. But in the end men well-nigh forgot who
+the author of the principle was, so preëminent was Douglas as its
+defender. He made it his, whosesoever it was at first, and his it will
+always be in history.
+
+During the session of 1848-49, he introduced a bill to admit California
+as a State, leaving the people to settle the slavery question as they
+pleased. But his first great opportunity came in the session of 1849-50.
+
+Cass had been beaten in the election. Zachary Taylor, the successful
+candidate of the Whigs, was a Southerner and a slaveholder, but he was
+elected on a non-committal platform, and he had never declared, if
+indeed he had ever formed, any opinions on the questions in dispute. His
+first message merely notified Congress that California, whither people
+were rushing from all parts of the country in search of gold, had of her
+own motion made ready for statehood; he expressed a hope that New Mexico
+would shortly follow her example, and recommended that both be admitted
+into the Union with such constitutions as they might present.
+Immediately, the House, where the free-soilers held a balance of power,
+fell into a long wrangle over the speakership; and the Senate was soon
+in fierce debate over certain anti-slavery resolutions presented from
+the legislature of Vermont. The North seemed to be united on the Wilmot
+Proviso as it had never before been united on any measure of opposition
+to slavery, and the South, fearing to lose the fruits of her many
+victories in statesmanship, in diplomacy, and on Mexican battlefields,
+was threatening disunion if, by the admission of California as a free
+State with no slave State to balance, her equality of representation in
+the Senate should be destroyed. The portents were all of disagreement,
+struggle, disaster.
+
+But at the end of January, Henry Clay, though he had come back to the
+scene of his many stirring conflicts in the past minded to be "a calm
+and quiet looker-on," roused himself to one more essay of that
+statesmanship of compromise in which he was a master. He made a plan of
+settlement that covered all the controversies and put it in the form of
+a series of resolutions. It was to admit California with her free-state
+constitution; to organize the remainder of the Mexican Cession into
+Territories, with no restriction as to slavery; to pay Texas a sum of
+money on condition that she yielded in the dispute over the boundary
+between her and New Mexico; to prohibit the slave trade, but not
+slavery, in the District of Columbia; to leave the interstate slave
+trade alone; and to pass an effective fugitive slave law.
+
+For two days, Clay spoke for his plan. Age, though it had not bereft him
+of his consummate skill in oratory, added pathos to his genuine fervor
+of patriotism as in that profound crisis of our affairs he pleaded with
+his fellow senators and with his divided countrymen. There followed the
+most notable series of set speeches in the history of Congress. One
+after another, the old leaders, Calhoun, Webster, Benton, Cass, and the
+rest,--for all were still there,--rose and solemnly addressed themselves
+to the state of the country and the plan of settlement. All but Calhoun:
+now very near his end, he was too weak to stand or speak, and Mason, of
+Virginia, read for him, while he sat gloomily silent, his last bitter
+arraignment of the North. He was against the plan. Benton, though on
+opposite grounds, also found fault with it. Webster, to the rage and
+sorrow of his own New England, gave it his support. Then the new men
+spoke. Jefferson Davis, on whom, as Calhoun was borne away to his grave,
+the mantle of his leadership seemed visibly to fall, steadfastly
+asserted the Southern claim that slaveholders had a right to go into any
+Territory with their slaves, but offered, as the extreme concession of
+the South, to extend the Missouri line to the Pacific if property in
+slaves were protected below the line. Chase, of Ohio, impressive in
+appearance but stiff in manner, argued weightily for the
+constitutionality and rightfulness of the Wilmot Proviso. Seward, of New
+York, though the shrewdest politician of the anti-slavery forces,
+enraged the Southerners and startled the country with the announcement
+that "a higher law than the Constitution" enjoined upon Congress to
+guard these fresh lands for freedom.
+
+But none of the new men, and none of the old leaders but Clay himself,
+had such a part as Douglas in the actual settlement. He supported the
+resolutions, and as chairman of the Committee on Territories he wrote
+and introduced two bills: one to admit California, and one to organize
+the Territories of New Mexico and Utah with no restrictions as to
+slavery and to adjust the dispute with Texas. When Clay was put at the
+head of a Committee of Thirteen, to which all the subjects of dispute
+were referred, he was often in consultation with the chairman of the
+Committee on Territories. Douglas was of opinion that the various
+measures proposed would have a better chance of passing separately than
+all in one, but Clay decided to deal with California, the Territories,
+and the Texas boundary in a single measure. This, with separate bills on
+the fugitive slave law and the slave trade in the District, he reported
+early in May. The Omnibus, as the first bill was called, was simply
+Douglas's two bills joined together with a wafer: the words, "Mr. Clay,
+from the Committee of Thirteen," were substituted for the words, "Mr.
+Douglas, from the Committee on Territories." But there was one important
+change. Douglas's bill gave the territorial legislatures authority over
+all rightful subjects of legislation, subject to the Constitution, save
+that they could pass no law interfering with the primary disposal of the
+soil. Clay's committee, contrary to his wish, added the clause, "nor in
+respect to African slavery." Douglas moved to strike out the exception.
+He was voted down, but bided his time, persuaded another senator to
+renew the motion at a favorable moment, and it passed.
+
+But the Omnibus could not pass. The death of President Taylor, who would
+probably have vetoed it, brought Fillmore, a friend of the compromise,
+into the White House; but there were only a handful of senators who
+favored every one of the measures so combined. Late in July, after
+months of debate and negotiation had wearied Clay out and driven him
+from the scene, all but the part relating to Utah was stricken out, and
+with that single passenger the Omnibus went through the Senate. Then
+separately, one after another, as Douglas had advised, the other
+measures were passed. The House quickly accepted them, Fillmore signed
+them, and the last of the compromises was complete. Jefferson Davis had
+opposed it, and had often been pitted against Douglas in debate, for
+they were champions of contrary theories, but at the end he declared:
+"If any man has a right to be proud of the success of these measures, it
+is the senator from Illinois." The enterprise, indeed, was Clay's; his
+was the idea, the initiative, the general plan. It is rightly called
+Clay's compromise. But the execution of the plan was quite as much
+Douglas's work as his. When Clay died, no one had a better right than
+Douglas to inherit his place as the statesman and orator of compromise
+and conciliation.
+
+In the defense of the settlement he was no less conspicuous. Though in
+the South such extremists as Yancey and Quitman declared that the
+so-called compromise was in fact a surrender of Southern rights and a
+sufficient reason for abandoning the Union, there were Northern men
+quite as violently exercised over what seemed to them a base truckling
+to the slave power. The legislature of Illinois had formally instructed
+her senators to support the Wilmot Proviso, and Douglas had thus been
+compelled, all through the session, to vote for motion after motion to
+prohibit slavery outright in the Territories. At the end of the session,
+when he returned to his home, he found Chicago wrought up to a furor of
+protest. The city council actually voted to release officials from all
+obligation to enforce the fugitive slave law and citizens from all
+obligation to respect it. A mass meeting was about to pass resolutions
+approving this extraordinary action of the council and denouncing as
+traitors the senators and representatives who had voted for the law,
+when Douglas walked upon the stand, announced that the next evening he
+would publicly defend the measures of compromise, and demanded to be
+heard before he was condemned. A great audience, the greatest ever
+assembled in the city, listened to his defense. It was bold, skilful,
+successful. He avowed his authorship of three of the compromise
+measures, his approval of the others. He took them up one by one,
+explained them, called for objections, and answered every objection
+effectively. At the end, he proposed and carried resolutions pledging
+the meeting to stand by the Constitution and the laws, and the meeting
+voted further, with but eight or ten nays, to repudiate the resolutions
+of the council. The next night, the council met and repealed them.
+
+It seemed, in fact, that in planting himself on the compromise Douglas
+had rightly forecast the verdict of the country as a whole. An adjourned
+meeting of a Southern convention which had been called before the
+settlement with a view to some united and vigorous action took now a
+tone so mild that it allayed, instead of exciting, the fears of
+patriots. Jefferson Davis, an opponent, and Foote, a supporter of the
+settlement, went before the people of Mississippi as rival candidates
+for the governorship, and Davis was beaten. Yancey in Alabama was
+overthrown in his own party. Only South Carolina would not be
+reconciled. Throughout the North, and particularly in New England,
+attempts to resist the fugitive slave law were sometimes violent and
+occasionally successful, and Charles Sumner, from Massachusetts, and
+Wade, from Ohio, were sent to join Seward and Chase and Hale, the
+aggressive anti-slavery men in the Senate. With Sumner, whose first
+important speech was an attack upon the law, Douglas instantly engaged
+in the first of many bitter controversies. An attack on a law so clearly
+demanded by the Constitution was, he declared, an attack on the
+Constitution itself, such as no senator could make without breaking his
+oath of office. But in little more than a year the lower House of
+Congress voted by a good majority that the compromise measures should be
+regarded as a permanent settlement. In 1852, the Democrats, assembled in
+national conventions at Baltimore, indorsed them in their platform. So
+did the Whigs; and Rufus Choate, their convention orator, was excusable
+for his hyperbole when he described "with what instantaneous and mighty
+charm they calmed the madness and anxiety of the hour."
+
+Cass, in his seventieth year, was the leading candidate before the
+Democratic convention; so far as the leadership of parties can be
+determined in America, he was still the leader of the party. But
+Douglas, in his fortieth year, was pressing to the front. In the
+preliminary campaign he was put forward as the candidate of young
+America, and other State conventions than that of Illinois commended
+him. At Baltimore, his supporters were enthusiastic, aggressive,
+boisterous. His name in the long list of candidates always aroused an
+applause which showed that he was classed with Cass and Buchanan in the
+popular estimation, and not with the lesser men. Beginning with twenty
+votes on the first ballot, he rose steadily until on the thirty-first he
+led with ninety-two. But neither he nor Cass had a good following from
+the South. An expediency candidate, acceptable to the South, was found
+in Franklin Pierce, who had fought in the war with Mexico. Against him
+the Whigs pitted the commander-in-chief in the war. But Scott was
+thought to be tainted with free-soil opinions. The Democrats, more
+thoroughly united, swept the country, and the new administration came
+into power with a great majority in both houses of Congress.
+
+In neither branch of that Democratic Congress was there another man so
+fit to take the lead as Douglas. A new senator, coming to Washington in
+1852, found him already risen to the first importance there. "His power
+as a debater," said this observer, "seemed to me unequaled in the
+Senate. He was industrious, energetic, bold, and skillful in the
+management of the affairs of his party. He was the acknowledged leader
+of the Democratic party in the Senate." It should be added that he never
+lost touch with the lower House. Neither was he unmindful of the
+President's part in making laws, but no President could be less disposed
+than Pierce was to set up his will against any measure which might come
+to him stamped with the party stamp. Douglas's wife died early in 1853,
+and in the summer he made his journey to Europe. When he returned, he
+was in a position the most favorable for original and constructive
+statesmanship. By virtue of his leadership of the Senate, he was in
+effect the leader of Congress. He had the power of initiative. He was at
+the age when men are ripest for enterprises of pith and moment.
+Unhesitatingly, he advanced to the front and centre of the stage. When
+the session ended, his name was forever associated with a law that upset
+precedents and traditions, divided old parties and summoned up new ones,
+made--and unmade--history.
+
+January 4, 1854, Mr. Douglas, from the Committee on Territories,
+reported a bill to form the Territory of Nebraska out of that part of
+the Louisiana Purchase which lay west and north of Missouri.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+LEADERSHIP
+
+
+There was nothing new in the main proposal. A bill to organize this same
+Territory had passed the House the year before. It was generally
+conceded that the region ought to have a territorial government. Vast as
+it was, it had less than a thousand white inhabitants, but the overland
+route to the Pacific ran across it, and there was sure to be a rapid
+immigration into it so soon as it should be thrown open to settlers.
+What was both new and startling was a clause permitting the inhabitants
+of the Territory, whenever it should be admitted to statehood, to decide
+for themselves whether they would have slavery or not. The eighth
+section of the Compromise Act of 1820 provided that slavery should never
+exist anywhere in the Louisiana Purchase north of 36° 30´, North
+latitude, save in the State of Missouri.
+
+In the report which accompanied the bill, Douglas declared that it was
+based on the principles of the compromise measures of 1850. Those
+measures, he maintained, affirmed three propositions: questions relating
+to slavery in the Territories and in States to be formed out of them
+should be left to the people thereof; cases involving title to slaves
+and questions of personal freedom should be left to the local courts,
+with a right of appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States; the
+mandate of the Constitution concerning fugitive slaves applied to
+Territories as well as States. Three days later, these propositions were
+incorporated in the bill.
+
+January 16, Archibald Dixon, a senator from Kentucky, offered an
+amendment expressly repealing the eighth section of the Missouri
+Compromise law. Douglas remonstrated, but in a few days he called on
+Dixon, the two senators went for a drive, and in the course of it
+Douglas promised to accept the amendment. He was satisfied, so Dixon
+reported his conversation, that the Missouri Compromise was
+unconstitutional and that it was unfair to the South. "This proceeding,"
+he said, "may end my political career, but, acting under the sense of
+duty which animates me, I am prepared to make the sacrifice. I will do
+it." January 22, with several other congressmen, he called on Jefferson
+Davis, Secretary of War, and was by him conducted to the White House.
+Contrary to his usage, for it was Sunday, the President granted them an
+interview. At the end of it, he promised to support the repeal. The next
+day, Douglas reported a substitute for the Nebraska bill. It provided
+for two Territories, Kansas and Nebraska, instead of one; and it
+declared the eighth section of the Missouri Compromise law to be
+inoperative because it was "superseded by" the principles of the
+compromise of 1850.
+
+At the report and the bill in its first form the anti-slavery men in
+Congress took instant alarm. By the time the substitute was presented,
+the whole country knew that something extraordinary was afoot. Without
+a sign of any popular demand, without preliminary agitation or debate,
+Douglas, of Illinois, had set himself to repeal the Missouri Compromise.
+He had undertaken to throw open to slavery a great region long
+consecrated to freedom. He had written the bill of his own motion, by
+himself, in his own house. The South had not asked for the concession,
+the North had not in any wise consented to it. For a little while, in
+fact, the Southern leaders seemed to distrust the bill, for they
+distrusted Douglas; one or two of them, like Sam Houston, of Texas,
+resisted it to the last, declaring it was sure in the end to do the
+South more harm than good. But for the most part they came quickly into
+line behind Douglas, though they never generally accepted his principle
+of popular sovereignty. As to the North, the challenge of the
+Kansas-Nebraska bill met there with such a response as no Southern
+aggression had yet provoked. Through every avenue of expression--through
+the press and the pulpit, in petitions to Congress, in angry protests
+of public meetings and solemn resolves of legislatures--a hostile and
+outraged public opinion broke upon Douglas and his bill. His own party
+could not be held in line. Scores of Democratic newspapers turned
+against him. Save the legislature of Illinois, no Northern assembly,
+representative or other, that could speak with any show of authority,
+dared to support him. No Southern fire-eater was ever half so reviled.
+He could have traveled from Boston to Chicago, so he afterwards
+declared, by the light of his own burning effigies.
+
+But the firmest and clearest protest of all came from the sturdy little
+band of anti-slavery men in Congress. The day after Douglas proposed his
+substitute, it came up for debate, and Chase, of Ohio, speaking for the
+opposition, asked for more time to examine the new provisions. Douglas
+granted a week, and the next day there appeared in various newspapers an
+address to the country entitled "An Appeal of the Independent Democrats
+in Congress." Chase was the principal author of it; he and Sumner and
+four representatives signed it. They denounced the bill as a breach of
+faith, infringing the historical compact of 1820, and as part of a plot
+to extend the area of slavery; and they accused Douglas of hazarding the
+dearest interests of the American people in a presidential game.
+
+That judgment of him and of the bill was probably accepted by a majority
+of his contemporaries. For lack of Southern support, he had missed the
+Democratic nomination in 1852. It seemed clear that whatever Northern
+candidate the South should prefer would be nominated in 1856. His rivals
+were all, in one way or another, commending themselves to the South.
+Pierce was hand in glove with Davis and other Southern leaders. Marcy,
+in the Department of State, and Buchanan, in a foreign mission, were
+both working for the annexation of Cuba, a favorite Southern measure. It
+was suspected that Cass, old as he was, had it in mind to move the
+repeal when Douglas went ahead of him.
+
+The contemporaries of Douglas were under a necessity to judge his
+motives, for they had to pass upon his fitness for high office and
+great responsibilities, and no other motive than ambition was so natural
+and obvious an explanation of his course. But it is questionable if any
+such positive judgment as was necessary, and therefore right, in his
+contemporaries, is obligatory upon historians. What he did was in accord
+with a political principle which he had avowed, and it was not in
+conflict with any moral principle he had ever avowed, for he did not
+pretend to believe that slavery was wrong. True, he had once thought the
+Missouri Compromise a sacred compact; but there were signs that he had
+abandoned that opinion. It is enough to decide that he took a wrong
+course, and to point out how ambition may very well have led him into
+it. It is too much to say he knew it was wrong, and took it solely
+because he was ambitious.
+
+But if he had taken a wrong course he did not fail to do that which will
+often force us, in spite of ourselves, into admiration for a man in the
+wrong: he pursued it unwavering to the end. Neither the swelling uproar
+from without nor a resolute and conspicuously able opposition within the
+Senate daunted him for a moment. He pressed the bill to its passage with
+furious energy. He set upon Chase savagely, charging him with bad faith
+in that he had gained time, by a false pretense of ignorance of the
+bill, to flood the country with slanderous attacks upon it and upon its
+author. The audacity of the announcement that the Compromise of 1850
+repealed the Compromise of 1820 was well-nigh justified by the skill of
+his contention. It was a principle, he maintained, and no mere temporary
+expedient, for which Clay and Webster had striven, which both parties
+had indorsed, which the country had acquiesced in,--the principle of
+"popular sovereignty." That principle lay at the base of our
+institutions; it was illustrated in all the achievements of our past;
+it, and it alone, would enable us in safety to go on and extend our
+institutions into new regions. Cass, though he made difficulties about
+details, supported the bill, and the Southerners played their part well.
+But Douglas afterwards said, and truly: "I passed the Kansas-Nebraska
+act myself. I had the authority and power of a dictator throughout the
+whole controversy in both houses. The speeches were nothing. It was the
+marshaling and directing of men and guarding from attacks and with
+ceaseless vigilance preventing surprise."
+
+Chase was the true leader of the opposition, and he was equipped with a
+most thorough mastery of the slavery question in its historical and
+constitutional aspects. By shrewd amendments he sought to bring out the
+division between the Northern and Southern supporters of the bill; for
+the Southerners held that slave-owners had a constitutional right to go
+into any Territory with their property,--a right with which neither
+Congress nor a territorial legislature could interfere. Douglas,
+however, managed to avoid the danger. He made another change in the
+important clause. To please Cass and others, he made it declare that the
+Compromise of 1820 was "inconsistent with" instead of "superseded by"
+the principles of the later compromise; and then he added the words,
+"it being the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate
+slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to
+leave the inhabitants thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their
+domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution
+of the United States." That, as Benton said, was a little stump speech
+incorporated in the bill; and it proved a very effective stump speech
+indeed.
+
+Neither the logic and the accurate knowledge of Chase, nor the lofty
+invective of Sumner, nor the smooth eloquence of Everett, nor Seward's
+rare combination of political adroitness with an alertness to moral
+forces, matched, in hand to hand debate, the keen-mindedness, the
+marvelous readiness, and the headlong force of Douglas. Their set
+speeches were impressive, but in the quick fire, the
+question-and-answer, the give-and-take of a free discussion, he was the
+master of them all. When, half an hour after midnight of the third of
+March, he rose before a full Senate and crowded galleries to close the
+debate, he was at his best. Often interrupted, he welcomed every
+interruption with courtesy, and never once failed to put his assailant
+on the defensive. Now Sumner and now Chase was denying that he had come
+into office by a sacrifice of principle; now Seward was defending his
+own State of New York against a charge of infidelity to the compact of
+1820; now Everett, friend and biographer and successor of Webster, was
+protesting that he had not meant to misrepresent Webster's views.
+Always, after these encounters, Douglas knew how to come back, with a
+graver tone, to the larger issue, as if they, and not he, were trying to
+obscure it. A spectator might have fancied that these high-minded men
+were culprits, and he their inquisitor. Now and then, as when he dealt
+with the abolitionists, there was no questioning the sincerity of his
+feeling, and it stirred him to a genuine eloquence. He was not surprised
+that Boston burned him in effigy. Had not Boston closed her Faneuil Hall
+upon the aged Webster? Did not Sumner live there? And he turned upon
+the senator from Massachusetts: "Sir, you will remember that when you
+came into the Senate, and sought an opportunity to put forth your
+abolition incendiarism, you appealed to our sense of justice by the
+sentiment, 'Strike, but hear me first!' But when Mr. Webster went back
+in 1850 to speak to his constituents in his own self-defense, to tell
+the truth and to expose his slanderers, you would not hear him, but _you
+struck him first_." Again and again, as at the end of a paragraph of
+unadorned but trenchant sentences the small, firm-knit figure quivered
+with a leonine energy, the great, swart head was thrown backward, and
+the deep voice swelled into a tone of triumph or defiance, the listeners
+could not forbear to applaud. Once, even Seward broke forth: "I have
+never had so much respect for him as I have to-night."
+
+The vote in the Senate was 27 ayes to 14 noes; but in the House the
+opposition was dangerously strong, and but for the precaution of
+securing the support of the administration the bill might have failed.
+There was a fierce parliamentary battle. Richardson, Douglas's friend
+and chief lieutenant, kept the House in continuous session thirty-six
+hours trying to force through a motion to fix a term for the debate.
+Feeling rose on both sides. Personal encounters were imminent. Douglas,
+in constant attendance, watched every move of the opposition and was
+instant with the counter-move. It was a month before the bill could be
+brought to a vote, and then it passed, with a slight change, by a
+majority of thirteen. At the end of May, the President signed it, and
+Douglas, turning from the work of enacting it into law to the harder
+task of defending it before the country, beheld the whole field of
+national politics transformed. The Whig party, crushed to earth in 1852,
+made no move to take a stand on the new issue; it was dead. His own
+historical Democratic party was everywhere throughout the North in a
+turmoil that seemed to forebode dissolution. One new party, sprung
+swiftly and secretly into life on the old issue of enmity to foreigners
+and Roman Catholics, seemed to stand for the idea that the best way to
+meet the slavery issue was to run away from it. Another new party,
+conceived in the spirit of the appeal of the independent Democrats, was
+struggling to be born. State after State was falling under the power of
+the Know-Nothings; and those men, Whigs and Democrats alike, who for
+years had been awaiting an opportunity to fight slavery outside of its
+breastworks of compromise, were forming at last under the name of
+Anti-Nebraska men. Before long, they began to call themselves
+Republicans.
+
+He did not quail. Invited to pronounce the Independence Day oration at
+Philadelphia, he made of it the first thoroughgoing denunciation of the
+Know-Nothings that any eminent public man in the country had the courage
+to make. Democrats everywhere, bewildered by the mystery in which these
+new adversaries shrouded their designs, were heartened to an aggressive
+warfare. Some months later, he took the stump in Virginia, where Henry
+A. Wise had brought the Democrats firmly into line against the only
+rivals they had in the South, now that the Whigs were giving up the
+fight. The campaign was a crucial one, and the Know-Nothings never
+recovered from their defeat. Douglas's course had the merit of
+consistency as well as courage, for he had always championed the rights
+of the foreign born.
+
+The Independence Day oration was also his first popular defense of the
+Kansas-Nebraska bill. But so soon as Congress adjourned he hastened home
+to face his own people of Illinois. Chicago was once more, as in 1850, a
+centre of hostility, and he announced that he would speak there the
+evening of September first. When the time came, flags at half mast and
+the dismal tolling of church bells welcomed him. A vast and ominously
+silent crowd was gathered, but not to hear him. Hisses and groans broke
+in upon his opening sentences. Hour after hour, from eight o'clock until
+midnight, he stood before them; time and again, as the uproar lessened,
+his voice combated it; but they would not let him speak. Nothing, in
+fact, but his resolute bearing saved him from violence. On the way home,
+his carriage was set upon and he was in danger of his life.
+
+Wherever he went in Northern Illinois, similar scenes were enacted. But
+he got a hearing, and in the central counties and in "Egypt," the
+southern part of the State, where the people were largely of Virginian
+and Kentuckian descent, he was cordially received. He kept his hold upon
+his party in Illinois, and Illinois, alone of all the Northwestern
+States, would not go over completely to the opposition. The Democratic
+candidate for state treasurer was elected. The Know-Nothings and
+Anti-Nebraska men got a majority of the congressmen, and by the
+defection of certain state senators who held over from a previous
+election they were enabled to send Lyman Trumbull, Anti-Nebraska
+Democrat, to be Douglas's colleague at Washington. That, when compared
+with the results elsewhere in the North, was a striking proof of
+Douglas's power with his people. Moreover, the Democrats of the North
+who remained in the party had accepted his leadership. In the South, the
+party organization was soon free of any effective opposition. The two
+wings, so long as they were united, could still control the Senate and
+elect presidents. All would still be well, if only all went well on
+those Western plains whither Douglas declared that the slavery question
+was now banished forever from the halls of Congress.
+
+But all was not going well there. When the Kansas-Nebraska bill passed,
+Sumner exultantly exclaimed: "It sets freedom and slavery face to face,
+and bids them grapple." Nebraska was conceded to freedom, but the day
+Kansas, the southern Territory, was thrown open to settlement, a long,
+confused, confusing struggle began. The whole country was drawn into it.
+Blue lodges in the South, emigrant aid societies in the North, hurried
+opposing forces into the field. The Southerners, aided by colonized
+voters from Missouri, got control of the territorial legislature and
+passed a slave code. The Free-Soilers, ignoring the government thus
+established, gathered in convention at Topeka, formed a free state
+constitution, and demanded to be admitted into the Union as a State.
+When a new Congress assembled in December, 1855, there were two
+governments in Kansas, and the people were separated into hostile camps.
+Brawls were frequent, and it was clear that very soon, unless the
+general government intervened, there would be concerted violence. A
+force of several thousand pro-slavery men, encamped on the Wakarusa
+River, were threatening Lawrence, the principal Free-Soil town. The
+Free-Soil men were in a majority, but their course had been in disregard
+of law. The pro-slavery men were in a minority, they had resorted to
+violence and fraud, but they had followed the forms of law.
+
+President Pierce, swayed by Jefferson Davis, took the side of slavery.
+The House was nearly two months organizing, and then the President sent
+in a message to Congress denouncing the Free-Soilers for resisting the
+laws. He followed it up with a proclamation, and placed United States
+troops at the disposal of the regular territorial government. In March,
+Douglas, from his Committee on Territories, made a long report on all
+that had occurred. He, too, laid the blame on the emigrant aid
+societies. He was against the Topeka constitution, and offered, instead,
+a bill providing for the admission of Kansas, so soon as her population
+should reach 93,000, which would entitle her to one representative in
+Congress, with such constitution as her people might lawfully adopt. The
+House, with an anti-slavery majority, was for admitting Kansas at once
+with the Topeka constitution. So was the anti-slavery group in the
+Senate, now swelled into a strong minority. In the fierce debate that
+followed, Douglas had to defend the results, as well as the theory, of
+his law. Sumner was the bitterest of his assailants, and their
+controversy passed all bounds of parliamentary restraint. In Sumner's
+famous speech on the crime against Kansas, Butler, of South Carolina,
+was represented as the Don Quixote of slavery, Douglas as its Sancho
+Panza, "ready to do all its humiliating offices." The day after that
+speech, Lawrence was sacked, and civil war broke out in Kansas. The next
+day, Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, assaulted Sumner and beat him
+down on the floor of the Senate. Ten days later, the Democratic
+convention met at Cincinnati to name a candidate for the presidency.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE RIVALS
+
+
+Hamilton and Jefferson, Clay and Jackson, Douglas and Lincoln,--these
+are the three great rivalries of American politics. The third was not
+the least. If it fell short of the others in variety of confrontments,
+if it was not so long drawn out, or accompanied with so frequent and
+imposing alignments and realignments of vast contending forces on a
+broad and national field, it surpassed them in the clearness of the sole
+and vital issue it involved, in a closer contact and measuring of
+powers, in the complete and subtle correspondence of the characters of
+the rivals to the causes for which they fought.
+
+Douglas was the very type of that instant success which waits on ability
+undistracted by doubt and undeterred by the fear of doing wrong; the
+best exemplar of that American statesmanship which accepted things as
+they were and made the most of them. Facile, keen, effective, he had
+found life a series of opportunities easily embraced. Precocious in
+youth, marvelously active in manhood, he had learned without study,
+resolved without meditation, accomplished without toil. Whatever
+obstacles he had found in his path, he had either adroitly avoided them
+or boldly overleaped them, but never laboriously uprooted them. Whatever
+subject he had taken in hand, he had swiftly compassed it, but rarely
+probed to the heart of it. With books he dealt as he dealt with men,
+getting from them quickly what he liked or needed; he was as unlikely to
+pore over a volume, and dog-ear and annotate it, as he was with
+correspondence and slow talk and silences to draw out a friendship. Yet
+he was not cold or mean, but capable of hero-worship, following with
+ardor the careers of great conquerors like Cæsar and Napoleon, and
+capable, too, of loyalty to party and to men. He had great personal
+magnetism: young men, especially, he charmed and held as no other public
+man could, now Clay was dead. His habits were convivial, and the
+vicious indulgence of his strong and masculine appetites, the only
+relaxation he craved in the intervals of his fierce activities, had
+caused him frequent illnesses; but he was still a young man, even by
+American standards, for the eminence he had attained. At the full of his
+extraordinary powers, battling for the high place he had and the higher
+he aspired to, there was nowhere to be seen his equal as a debater or a
+politician,--nowhere but in the ungainly figure, now once more erected
+into a posture of rivalry and defiance, of the man whom he had long ago
+outstripped and left behind him in the home of their common beginnings.
+
+Slower of growth, and devoid altogether of many brilliant qualities
+which his rival possessed, Lincoln nevertheless outreached him by the
+measure of the two gifts the other lacked: the twin gifts of humor and
+of brooding melancholy. Bottomed by the one in homeliness, his character
+was by the other drawn upward to the height of human nobility and
+aspiration. His great capacity of pain, which but for his buffoonery
+would no doubt have made him mad, was the source of his rarest
+excellencies. Familiar with squalor, and hospitable to vulgarity, his
+mind was yet tenanted by sorrow, a place of midnight wrestlings. In him,
+as never before in any other man, were high and low things mated, and
+awkwardness and ungainliness and uncouthness justified in their uses. At
+once coarser than his rival and infinitely more refined and gentle, he
+had mastered lessons which the other had never found the need of
+learning, or else had learned too readily and then dismissed. He had
+thoroughness for the other's competence; insight into human nature, and
+a vast sympathy, for the other's facile handling of men; a deep devotion
+to the right for the other's loyalty to party platforms. The very core
+of his nature was truth, and he himself is reported to have said of
+Douglas that he cared less for the truth, as the truth, than any other
+man he knew.
+
+Hanging for some years upon the heels of his rival's rapid ascent,
+Lincoln had entered the House as Douglas left it for the Senate, but at
+the end of the term he retired from politics baffled and discouraged.
+Tortured with the keen apprehension of a form and grace into which he
+could never mould his crudeness, tantalized with a sense that there must
+be a way for him to get a hold on his fellows and make a figure in the
+history of his times, he had watched the power of Douglas grow and the
+fame of Douglas spread until it seemed that Douglas's voice was always
+speaking and Douglas's hand was everywhere. Patiently working out the
+right and wrong of the fateful question Douglas dealt with so boldly, he
+came into the impregnable position of such as hated slavery and yet
+forbore to violate its sanctuary. Suddenly, with the repeal of the
+Missouri Compromise, Douglas himself had opened a path for him. He went
+back into politics, and took a leading part in the Anti-Nebraska
+movement. Whenever opportunity offered, he combated Douglas on the
+stump. The year Trumbull won the senatorship, Lincoln had first come
+within a few votes of it. Risen now to the leadership of the
+Republicans in Illinois, he awaited Douglas at Chicago, listened to his
+opening speech, answered it the next evening, followed him into the
+centre of the State, and finally proposed a series of joint debates
+before the people. Douglas hesitated, but accepted, and named seven
+meeting-places: Ottawa and Freeport, in the northern stronghold of the
+Republicans; Galesburg, Quincy, and Charleston, in a region where both
+parties had a good following; and Jonesboro and Alton, which were in
+"Egypt." The first meeting was at Ottawa, in August; the last, at Alton,
+in the middle of October. Meanwhile, both spoke incessantly at other
+places, Douglas oftener than once a day. First the fame of Douglas, and
+then Lincoln's unexpected survival of the early meetings, drew the eyes
+of the whole country upon these two foremost Americans of their
+generation, face to face there on the Western prairie, fighting out the
+great question of the times.
+
+Elevated side by side on wooden platforms in the open air, thrown into
+relief against the low prairie sky line, the two figures take strong
+hold upon the imagination: the one lean, long-limbed, uncommonly tall;
+the other scarce five feet high, but compact, manful, instinct with
+energy, and topped with its massive head. In voice and gesture and
+manner, Douglas was incomparably the superior, as he was, too, in the
+ready command of a language never, indeed, ornate or imaginative, and
+sometimes of the quality of political commonplace, but always forcible
+and always intelligible to his audience. Lincoln had the sense of words,
+the imagination, the intensity of feeling, which go to the making of
+great literature; but for his masterpieces he always needed time. His
+voice was high and strained, his gestures ungraceful, his manner
+painful, save in the recital of those passages which he had carefully
+prepared or when he was freed of his self-consciousness by anger or
+enthusiasm. Neither of them, in any single speech, could be compared to
+Webster in the other of the two most famous American debates, but the
+series was a remarkable exhibition of forensic power. The interest grew
+as the struggle lengthened. People traveled great distances to hear
+them. At every meeting-place, a multitude of farmers and dwellers in
+country towns, with here and there a sprinkling of city-folk, crowded
+about the stand where "Old Abe" and the "Little Giant" turned and
+twisted and fenced for an opening, grappled and drew apart, clinched and
+strained and staggered,--but neither fell. The wonder grew that Lincoln
+stood up so well under the onslaughts of Douglas, at once skillful and
+reckless, held him off with so firm a hand, gripped him so shrewdly.
+Now, the wonder is that Douglas, wrestling with the man and the cause of
+a century, kept his feet and held his own.
+
+He was fighting, too, with an enemy in the rear. When he turned to
+strike at the administration, Lincoln would call out: "Go it, husband!
+Go it, bear!" Apart from that diversion, however, the debate, long and
+involved as it was, followed but three general lines. The whole is
+resolvable into three elements,--personalities, politics, and
+principles. There were the attacks which each made upon the other's
+record; the efforts which each made to weaken the other's position
+before the people; and the contrary views which were advanced.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+It was a hard time to die. War was at hand, and his strong nature
+stirred at the call. Plunged in his youth into affairs, and wonted all
+his life to action, he had played a man's part in great events, and
+greater were impending. He had taken many blows of men and circumstance,
+and stormy times might bring redress. He was a leader, and for want of
+him a great party must go leaderless and stumbling to a long series of
+defeats. He was a true American, and his country was in danger. He was
+ambitious, and his career was not rightly finished. He was the second
+man in the Republic, and he might yet be the first.
+
+But first he never could have been while Lincoln lived, nor ever could
+have got a hold like Lincoln's on his kind. His place is secure among
+the venturesome, strong, self-reliant men who in various ages and
+countries have for a time hastened, or stayed, or diverted from its
+natural channel the great stream of affairs. The sin of his ambition is
+forgiven him for the good end he made. But for all his splendid energy
+and his brilliant parts, for all the charm of his bold assault on
+fortune and his dauntless bearing in adversity, we cannot turn from him
+to his rival but with changed and softened eyes. For Lincoln, indeed, is
+one of the few men eminent in politics whom we admit into the hidden
+places of our thought; and there, released from that coarse clay which
+prisoned him, we companion him forever with the gentle and heroic of
+older lands. Douglas abides without.
+
+
+
+
+  The Riverside Press
+
+  _Electrotyped and printed by H.O. Houghton & Co._
+
+  _Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A._
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Stephen Arnold Douglas, by William Garrott Brown
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+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Stephen Arnold Douglas, by William Garrott Brown.
+    </title>
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Stephen Arnold Douglas, by William Garrott Brown
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Stephen Arnold Douglas
+
+Author: William Garrott Brown
+
+Release Date: December 20, 2008 [EBook #27579]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Bergquist and The Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="tn">
+
+<p class="center"><big><b>Transcriber&#8217;s Note</b></big></p>
+
+<p class="center">The punctuation and spelling from the original text have been faithfully preserved. Only obvious
+typographical errors have been corrected.</p>
+
+</div>
+<hr />
+
+
+
+<div class="bbox">
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="The Riverside Biographical Series">
+<tr><td align='center' colspan='2'><span class="oldeng"><big>The Riverside Biographical Series</big></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center' colspan='2'>&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>1.</td><td align='left'>ANDREW JACKSON, by <span class="smcap">W.G. Brown.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>2.</td><td align='left'>JAMES B. EADS, by <span class="smcap">Louis How.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>3.</td><td align='left'>BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, by <span class="smcap">Paul E. More.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>4.</td><td align='left'>PETER COOPER, by <span class="smcap">R.W. Raymond.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>5.</td><td align='left'>THOMAS JEFFERSON, by <span class="smcap">H.C. Merwin.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>6.</td><td align='left'>WILLIAM PENN, by <span class="smcap">George Hodges.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>7.</td><td align='left'>GENERAL GRANT, by <span class="smcap">Walter Allen.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>8.</td><td align='left'>LEWIS AND CLARK, by <span class="smcap">William R. Lighton.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>9.</td><td align='left'>JOHN MARSHALL, by <span class="smcap">James B. Thayer.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>10.</td><td align='left'>ALEXANDER HAMILTON, by <span class="smcap">Chas. A. Conant</span>.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>11.</td><td align='left'>WASHINGTON IRVING, by <span class="smcap">H.W. Boynton</span>.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>12.</td><td align='left'>PAUL JONES, by <span class="smcap">Hutchins Hapgood</span>.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>13.</td><td align='left'>STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS, by <span class="smcap">W.G. Brown</span>.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>14.</td><td align='left'>SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN, by <span class="smcap">H.D. Sedgwick</span>, Jr.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left' colspan='2'>Each about 140 pages, 16mo, with photogravure<br /> portrait, 65 cents, <i>net</i>;
+<i>School Edition</i>, each,<br /> 50 cents, <i>net</i>.</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<p class="center">
+HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN &amp; CO.<br />
+<span class="smcap">Boston and New York</span><br />
+</p></div>
+<hr />
+
+<p class="center"><span class="oldeng"><big>The Riverside Biographical Series</big></span></p>
+
+<p class="center">NUMBER 13<br /></p>
+
+<p class="center"><big>STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS</big></p>
+
+<p class="center"><small>BY</small></p>
+
+<p class="center">WILLIAM GARROTT BROWN</p>
+
+<hr />
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<img src="images/photo.jpg" width="600" height="949" alt="Stephen Douglas" title="" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h1>STEPHEN ARNOLD<br />
+DOUGLAS<br /><br /></h1>
+
+<p class="center"><small>BY</small><br />
+<br />
+<big>WILLIAM GARROTT BROWN</big><br />
+<br /></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 150px;">
+<img src="images/illo.jpg" width="150" height="193" alt="" title="Illo" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="center"><small>BOSTON AND NEW YORK<br />
+HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY<br />
+<span class="oldeng">The Riverside Press, Cambridge</span><br />
+1902</small><br />
+</p>
+<hr />
+<p class="center"><br /><br /><small>COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY WILLIAM GARROTT BROWN<br />
+
+ALL RIGHTS RESERVED<br /><br />
+
+<i>Published March, 1902</i></small><br /><br /></p>
+<hr />
+<p class="center"><br /><br /><span class="smcap">To J.S. Jr.</span><br /><br /></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" width="50%" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="Contents">
+<tr>
+ <td align='right'><small>CHAP.</small></td>
+ <td align='right' colspan='2'><small>PAGE</small></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td align='right'>I.</td>
+ <td align='left'><span class="smcap">Youth and the West</span></td>
+ <td align='right'><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td align='right'>II.</td>
+ <td align='left'><span class="smcap">The House and the Senate</span></td>
+ <td align='right'><a href="#Page_31">31</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td align='right'>III.</td>
+ <td align='left'><span class="smcap">The Great Question</span></td>
+ <td align='right'><a href="#Page_58">58</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td align='right'>IV.</td>
+ <td align='left'><span class="smcap">Leadership</span></td>
+ <td align='right'><a href="#Page_82">82</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td align='right'>V.</td>
+ <td align='left'><span class="smcap">The Rivals</span></td>
+ <td align='right'><a href="#Page_112">112</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table></div>
+<p class="content"><i>The portrait is from a photograph by<br />
+Brady in the Library of the State<br />
+Department at Washington.</i></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="STEPHEN_ARNOLD_DOUGLAS" id="STEPHEN_ARNOLD_DOUGLAS"></a>STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h3>YOUTH AND THE WEST</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> ten years of American history from 1850 to 1860 have a fascination
+second only to that of the four years which followed. Indeed, unless one
+has a taste for military science, it is a question whether the great war
+itself is more absorbing than the great debate that led up to it;
+whether even Gettysburg and Chickamauga, the March to the Sea, the
+Wilderness, Appomattox, are of more surpassing interest than the
+dramatic political changes,&mdash;the downfall of the Whig party, the swift
+rise and the equally swift submergence of the Know-Nothing party, the
+birth of the Republican party, the disruption and overthrow of the
+long-dominant Democratic party,&mdash;through which the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> country came at last
+to see that only the sword could make an end of the long controversy
+between the North and the South.</p>
+
+<p>The first years of the decade were marked by the passing of one group of
+statesmen and the rise of another group. Calhoun's last speech in the
+Senate was read at the beginning of the debate over those measures which
+finally took shape as the Compromise of 1850. The Compromise was the
+last instance of the leadership of Clay. The famous Seventh of March
+speech in defense of it was Webster's last notable oration. These voices
+stilled, many others took up the pregnant theme. Davis and Toombs and
+Stephens and other well-trained Southern statesmen defended slavery
+aggressively; Seward and Sumner and Chase insisted on a hearing for the
+aggressive anti-slavery sentiment; Cass and Buchanan maintained for a
+time their places as leaders in the school of compromise. But from the
+death of Clay to the presidential election of 1860 the most resonant
+voice of them all was the voice of Stephen Arnold Douglas. It is
+scarcely too much to say that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span> during the whole period the centre of the
+stage was his, and his the most stirring part. In 1861, the curtain fell
+upon him still resolute, vigorous, commanding. When it rose again for
+another scene, he was gone so completely that nowadays it is hard for us
+to understand what a place he had. Three biographers writing near the
+time of his death were mainly concerned to explain how he came to be
+first in the minds of his contemporaries. A biographer writing now must
+try to explain why he has been so lightly esteemed by that posterity to
+which they confidently committed his fame. Blind Tom, the negro mimic,
+having once heard him speak, was wont for many years to entertain
+curious audiences by reproducing those swelling tones in which he rolled
+out his defense of popular sovereignty, and it is not improbable that
+Douglas owes to the marvelous imitator of sounds a considerable part of
+such fame as he has among uneducated men in our time. Among historical
+students, however seriously his deserts are questioned, there is no
+question of the importance of his career.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span></p><p>He was born April 23, 1813, at Brandon, Vermont, the son of Stephen
+Arnold Douglas and Sarah Fisk, his wife. His father, a successful
+physician, was doubtless of Scotch descent; but the founder of the
+Douglas family in America was married in Northamptonshire. He landed on
+Cape Ann in 1639&ndash;40, but in 1660 he made his home at New London,
+Connecticut. Dr. Douglas's mother was an Arnold of Rhode Island,
+descended from that Governor Arnold who was associated with Roger
+Williams in the founding of the colony. Sarah Fisk's mother was also an
+Arnold, and of the same family. Their son was therefore of good New
+England stock, and amply entitled to his middle name. Dr. Douglas died
+suddenly of apoplexy in July, 1813; it is said that he held the infant
+Stephen in his arms when he was stricken. His widow made her home with a
+bachelor brother on a farm near Brandon, and the boy's early years were
+passed in an environment familiar to readers of American biography&mdash;the
+simplicity, the poverty, the industry, and the serious-mindedness of
+rural<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> New England. He was delicate, with a little bit of a body and a
+very large head, but quick-witted and precocious, and until he was
+fifteen years of age his elders permitted him to look forward to a
+collegiate education and a professional career.</p>
+
+<p>But by that time the uncle was married, and an heir was born to him.
+Stephen was therefore made to understand that the expense of his
+education could be met only from his mother's limited means. He promptly
+resolved to learn a trade, walked fourteen miles to the neighboring town
+of Middlebury, and apprenticed himself to a cabinet-maker. He worked at
+cabinet-making two years, and afterwards, even when he had risen so high
+that many of his countrymen were willing he should try his hand at
+making cabinets of men, he protested that those two years were by far
+the happiest of his life, and that he would never willingly have
+exchanged his place in the Middlebury workshop for any other place
+whatsoever. As it was, he left it because he was not strong enough for
+that sort of work.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span></p><p>The following year he pursued his studies at the academy of Brandon.
+Then his mother married again, and he went with her to the home of his
+stepfather, Gehazi Granger, Esquire, near Canandaigua, New York, and
+finished his schooling at the Canandaigua Academy, which appears to have
+been an excellent one. Meanwhile, he also read law, and showed great
+proficiency both in his classical and his legal studies. Not much is on
+record concerning his schoolboy life. It is known, however, that he had
+a way of making his fellows like him, so that they of their own accord
+put him forward, and that he had a lively interest in politics. It is
+said that even so early as the campaign of 1828, when he was but
+fifteen, he organized a band of his playmates to make war on the "coffin
+handbills" wherewith the Adams men sought to besmirch the military fame
+of General Jackson, already become his hero. At Canandaigua, four years
+later, he espoused the same cause in debating clubs, and won an
+ascendency among his fellows by his readiness and the extent of his
+information.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> In the life of another man, these boyish performances
+might be set down merely as signs of promise; but Douglas was so soon
+immersed in real politics, and rose to distinction with such astounding
+swiftness, that his performances as a schoolboy may well be accounted
+the actual beginning, and not merely a premonition, of his career. He
+was only twenty, when, in June, 1833, he set forth to enter upon it.</p>
+
+<p>Save that he was going West, he does not seem to have had any
+destination clearly in mind. He carried letters to certain persons in
+Cleveland, and stopped there to see them, and so made the acquaintance
+of Sherlock J. Andrews, a leading lawyer of the town, who persuaded him
+to remain and read law in his office until a year should elapse and he
+could be admitted to the Ohio bar. However, in less than a week he fell
+ill of a fever which did not leave him until the expense of it had
+well-nigh emptied his slender purse. His physicians, fearing he was too
+slight and delicate for Western hardships, urged him to go back to
+Canandaigua,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> but when he left Cleveland he again turned westward,
+resolved in his own mind never to go back without the evidences of
+success in his life. It is doubtful if among all the thousands who in
+those days were constantly faring westward, from New England towns and
+the parishes of Virginia and the Carolinas, there ever was a youth more
+resolutely and boldly addressed to opportunity than he. Poor, broken in
+health, almost diminutive in physical stature, and quite unknown, he
+made his way first to Cincinnati, then to Louisville, then to St. Louis,
+in search of work. Coming almost to the end of his resources, he
+reasoned that it would be best for him to seek some country town, where
+his expenses would be slight; and guided merely by a book of travel he
+had read he fixed on a town which, as it happened, bore the name of his
+political patron saint. In November, 1833, being now twenty years and
+six months old, he arrived at Jacksonville, Illinois, with a sum total
+of thirty-seven cents in his pocket. The glimpses we get of him during
+his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>wanderings, from the recollections of certain men with whom he made
+acquaintance in stages and on river steamboats, make a curious and
+striking picture of American character. The feverish, high-strung boy
+was never dismayed and never a dreamer, but always confident,
+purposeful, good-humored.</p>
+
+<p>He found no work at Jacksonville, and walked to Winchester, sixteen
+miles to the southwestward, where he hoped to get work as a teacher. The
+next morning, seeing a crowd assembled in the public square of the
+village, he pushed his way to the centre and learned that there was to
+be an auction of the wares of a merchant who had recently died. The
+auctioneer was in need of a clerk to keep the record of the sales, and
+the place was offered to the young stranger. He took it, served three
+days, earned six dollars, made acquaintance with the farmers gathered
+for the sale, and got a chance in the talk about politics to display
+those qualities which he never failed to display when opportunity
+offered&mdash;the utmost readiness in debate, good-natured courtesy, and keen
+political<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> instinct. A school was arranged for him, and within a week he
+had forty pupils entered for three months. A lawyer of the place
+befriended him with the loan of some books, and he gave his evenings to
+law and politics. When the three months were ended, he went back to
+Jacksonville and opened an office. March 4, 1834, he was licensed to
+practice, and from that time he rose faster than any man in Illinois, if
+not in the whole country, notwithstanding that he rose on the lines
+along which many and many another young American was struggling toward
+prominence, and notwithstanding that Illinois was exceptionally full, as
+later years were to prove, of young men fitted for such careers as
+Douglas sought&mdash;notwithstanding, too, that there had already drifted to
+New Salem, in the very next county, a young Kentuckian destined to such
+eminence that the Illinois of those years is oftenest studied now for
+light on him, and is most amply revealed to us in the books about him.</p>
+
+<p>But for the very reason that Douglas rose so fast it is not necessary,
+in order to understand<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> how or why he rose, to study the conditions and
+men he had to deal with so carefully as they have done who seek to
+explain for us the slower progress of that strange career with which his
+is indissolubly associated. Jacksonville, which was to be his home for a
+few years, was a small country town, but it was the county seat of
+Morgan, one of the two wealthiest and most populous counties in the
+State. A few years earlier, that whole region had been a frontier, but
+the first roughness was now worn away. True, the whole northern half of
+Illinois was practically unsettled, and Chicago was but three years old,
+and not yet important. But it appears that the general character of the
+central counties was already fixed, and what followed was of the nature
+of growth rather than change. Certain small towns, like Springfield,
+were to become cities, and certain others, like New Salem, were to
+disappear. Railroads were not yet, though many were planning, and
+manufactures were chiefly of the domestic sort. But in the matter of the
+opportunities it presented to aspiring youth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> the country was already
+Western, and no longer wild Western. Hunting shirts and moccasins were
+disappearing. Knives in one's belt had gone out of fashion. The merely
+adventurous were passing beyond the Mississippi, and the field was open
+to the enterprising, the speculative, the ambitious.</p>
+
+<p>Enterprise and speculation were in the air, and ambition, if it took a
+political turn, must perforce take account of them. The whole country
+was prosperous, and Illinois was possessed with the fever of development
+then epidemic throughout the West and the South. If one examines the
+legislation of any of the States west of the Alleghanies during the
+second administration of President Jackson, by far the most numerous
+category of bills will be found to deal with internal improvements,
+particularly railroads and canals. Money, however, was needed for these
+things, and Illinois, like all new countries, had to look backward to
+older communities for capital. President Jackson had but lately made his
+final assault upon the National Bank, the principal dispenser of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>
+capital, by the removal of the deposits, and public opinion was much
+divided on his course, when Douglas opened his law office and began to
+discuss public questions with his neighbors. While he still lived at
+Winchester, he had helped to get subscribers for a Democratic newspaper
+at Jacksonville, and he soon called upon the editor, who was first
+surprised at his visitor's youthful appearance and then, as he himself
+tells us, at "the strength of his mind, the development of his
+intellect, and his comprehensive knowledge of the political history of
+his country."</p>
+
+<p>Boy as he looked, and boy as he was, for he had not yet passed his
+twenty-first birthday, Douglas actually got the leadership of the
+Jackson party in that neighborhood before he had lived there a month. An
+enthusiastic supporter of the President's policy on the bank question,
+he talked about the matter so well on Saturdays, when, according to the
+Western and Southern custom, the country people flocked into town, that
+he was put forward to move the Jackson resolutions at a mass meeting of
+Democrats<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> which he and his friend, the editor, had contrived to bring
+about. There was a great crowd. Josiah Lamborn, an orator of some
+reputation, opposed the resolutions. Douglas replied in an hour's
+speech, discomfited Lamborn, and so swept his audience that they seized
+upon him and bore him on their shoulders out of the room and around the
+public square. He was the "Little Giant" from that day, and the speech
+became a Democratic tradition. Of course, in after years, the men who
+could say they heard it could not be expected to admit that he ever made
+a better speech in his life.</p>
+
+<p>Within a year, he was so well known that he was chosen to the office of
+public prosecutor, or district attorney, of the first judicial circuit,
+the most important in Illinois, and his successful candidacy for the
+place is all the more remarkable because he was chosen by the
+legislature, and not by his neighbors of the circuit. Moreover, his
+competitor, John J. Hardin, was one of the foremost men of Illinois. It
+is true that Hardin was a Whig, and that by this time<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> there was a
+pretty clear division between Whigs and Jackson men on offices as well
+as measures, so that the contest was a party as well as a personal
+affair; but from auctioneer's clerk to district attorney was a promotion
+hardly to be won in a year by a youth of qualities less than
+extraordinary.</p>
+
+<p>The election was in February, 1835, and Douglas held the office the
+better part of two years. A justice of the supreme court had declared,
+on hearing of the legislature's choice, that the stripling could not
+fill the place because he was no lawyer and had no law books.
+Nevertheless, he was an efficient prosecutor. No record of his service
+is available, but there was a tradition in later years that not one of
+his indictments was quashed. Certainly, his work in the courts of the
+district increased his reputation and strengthened his hold on his own
+party. In the spring of 1836, the Democrats of Morgan held a convention
+to nominate candidates for the six seats in the house of representatives
+to which the county was entitled. This was a novel proceeding, for the
+system of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> conventions to nominate for office was not yet developed; the
+first of the national party conventions was held in preparation for the
+presidential campaign of 1832. Douglas was a leader in the movement, and
+as a result of it he himself was drawn into the contest. Morgan was a
+Whig county, but the solid front of the Democracy so alarmed the Whigs
+that they also abandoned the old plan of letting any number of
+candidates take the field and united upon a ticket with Hardin at its
+head. No man on the Democratic ticket was a match for Hardin. One of the
+candidates was withdrawn, therefore, and Douglas took his place, and he
+and Hardin canvassed the county together in a series of joint debates.
+Mainly through his championship, the convention plan was approved, and
+the Democrats won the election; but Hardin's vote was greater than the
+weakest Democrat's, and so the rivalry between him and Douglas was
+continued in the legislature, where they took their seats in December,
+1836.</p>
+
+<p>In that same house of representatives were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> John A. McClernand, James
+Shields, William A. Richardson, and other men who rose to national
+distinction. Abraham Lincoln, a Whig representative from Sangamon
+County, was already well known for his ungainly length of body, for his
+habit of reasoning in parables which were now scriptural and now vulgar
+to the point of obscenity, and for a quaint and rare honesty. He was
+four years older than the new member from Morgan, and nearly two feet
+taller. Douglas, many years later, declared that he was drawn to Lincoln
+by a strong sympathy, for they were both young men making an uphill
+struggle in life. Lincoln, at his first sight of Douglas, during the
+contest with Hardin for the attorneyship, pronounced him "the least man
+he ever saw."</p>
+
+<p>Douglas was the youngest member of an unusual house, but he at once took
+his place among the leaders. When the governor's message, animadverting
+severely on the President's course with the Bank, brought on a
+discussion of national party questions, he and Hardin seem to have won
+the chief <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>honors of the debate. He was appointed chairman of the
+Committee on Petitions, to which numerous applications for divorce were
+referred, and introduced a resolution which passed and which put an end
+to divorces by act of the legislature. On the great question of the
+hour, the question of development and internal improvements, he declared
+that the State ought to attempt no improvement which it could not afford
+to construct and to own. He favored a few specific enterprises and the
+making of careful surveys and estimates before any others should be
+taken up. But it was the very height of "flush times" in Illinois, and
+the legislature added millions to the vast sums in which the State was
+already committed to the support of canals, railroads, river
+improvements, and banks. It was but a few weeks from the adjournment in
+March to the great financial panic of 1837, which crushed every one of
+the state-aided banks, stopped the railroad building and river dredging,
+and finally left Illinois burdened with an enormous debt. There was a
+special session of the legislature in the summer, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>occasioned by the
+depression and hard times which had followed so hard upon the flush
+times of the winter, but Douglas was not there to tax his associates
+with their unwisdom. He had taken another step in his unexampled career
+of office-holding by accepting from President Van Buren the office of
+register of public lands at Springfield, the growing town in Sangamon
+County which the legislature had just made the capital of the State, and
+where, within a few years, Shields, McClernand, Lincoln, and other
+rising young men were gathered.</p>
+
+<p>From this time, Douglas and Lincoln knew each other well, for they lived
+together several years in an atmosphere of intimate personal scrutiny.
+For searching study of one's fellows, for utter disregard of all
+superficial <i>criteria</i> of character and conventional standards of
+conduct, there is but one sort of life to be compared with the life of a
+Southern or Western town, and that is the life of students in a
+boarding-school or a small college. In such communities there is little
+division into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> classes, as of rich and poor, educated and illiterate,
+well and obscurely born. On the steps of the court-house, in the
+post-office while the daily mail is sorted, in the corner drug store on
+Sundays, in lawyers' offices, on the curbstone,&mdash;wherever a group of men
+is assembled,&mdash;there is the freest talk on every possible subject; and
+the lives of men are open to their fellows as they cannot be in cities
+by reason of the mass or in country districts by reason of the solitude
+and the shyness which solitude breeds. Against Douglas there was the
+presumption, which every New England man who goes southward or westward
+has to live down, that he would in some measure hold himself aloof from
+his fellows. But the prejudice was quickly dispelled. No man entered
+more readily into close personal relations with whomsoever he
+encountered. In all our accounts of him he is represented as surrounded
+with intimates. Not without the power of impressing men with his dignity
+and seriousness of purpose, we nevertheless hear of him sitting on the
+knee of an <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>eminent judge during a recess of the court; dancing from end
+to end of a dinner-table with the volatile Shields&mdash;the same who won
+laurels in the Mexican War, a seat in the United States Senate, and the
+closest approach anybody ever won to victory in battle over Stonewall
+Jackson; and engaging, despite his height of five feet and his weight of
+a hundred pounds, in personal encounters with Stuart, Lincoln's athletic
+law partner, and a corpulent attorney named Francis.</p>
+
+<p>On equal terms he mingled in good-humored rivalry with a group of
+uncommonly resourceful men, and he passed them all in the race for
+advancement. There is some reason to believe that Lincoln, strange as it
+seems, was his successful rival in a love affair, but otherwise Douglas
+left Lincoln far behind. Buoyant, good-natured, never easily abashed,
+his maturity and <i>savoir faire</i> were accentuated by the smallness of his
+stature. His blue eyes and his dark, abundant hair heightened his
+physical charm of boyishness; his virile movements, his face,
+heavy-browed, round, and strong, and his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> well-formed, uncommonly large
+head gave him an aspect of intellectual power. He had a truly Napoleonic
+trick of attaching men to his fortunes. He was a born leader, beyond
+question; and he himself does not seem ever to have doubted his fitness
+to lead, or ever to have agonized over the choice of a path and the
+responsibilities of leadership. Principles he had&mdash;the principles of
+Jefferson and Jackson as he understood them. These, apparently, he held
+sufficient for every problem and every emergency of political life.</p>
+
+<p>He believed in party organization quite as firmly as he believed in
+party principles, and in the summer of 1837 he had a hand in building up
+the machinery of conventions and committees through which the Illinois
+Democrats have governed themselves ever since. He defended Van Buren's
+plan of a sub-treasury when many even of those who had supported
+Jackson's financial measures wavered in the face of the disfavor into
+which hard times had brought the party in power, and in November,
+although the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> Springfield congressional district, even before the panic,
+had shown a Whig majority of 3000, he accepted the Democratic nomination
+for the seat in Congress to be filled at the election in August, 1838,
+and threw himself with the utmost ardor into the canvass. The district
+was the largest in the whole country, for it included all the northern
+counties of the State. His opponent was John T. Stuart, Lincoln's law
+partner, and for five months the two spoke six days every week without
+covering the whole of the great region they aspired to represent. The
+northern counties had been filling up with immigrants, and more than
+36,000 votes were cast. Many ballots were thrown out on technicalities;
+most of the election officials were Whigs. After weeks of uncertainty,
+Stuart was declared elected by a majority of five. The moral effect,
+however, was a triumph for Douglas, who at the time of his nomination
+was not of the age required of congressmen.</p>
+
+<p>He announced that he would now devote himself to his profession. But it
+was by this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> time very difficult, even if he so wished, to withdraw from
+politics. He was constantly in council with the leaders of his party,
+and belonged to a sort of "third house" at Springfield which nowadays
+would probably be called a lobby. During the winter there was an angry
+controversy between the Democratic governor and the Whig senate over the
+question of the governor's right to appoint a secretary of state, the
+senate refusing to confirm his nomination of McClernand on the ground
+that the office was not vacant. The question was brought before the
+supreme court, whose Whig majority, by deciding against the governor,
+strengthened a growing feeling of discontent with the whole judiciary
+among the Democrats, and Douglas took strong ground in favor of
+reorganizing the court. In March, addressing a great meeting at
+Springfield, he defended the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798,
+and when the presidential campaign opened in November he had a debate
+with Lincoln and other Whig orators. He was, in fact, the leading
+Democratic orator<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> throughout the campaign in Illinois, and there is no
+doubt that his enthusiasm and his shrewdness had much to do with the
+result there. Of all the Northern States, only Illinois and New
+Hampshire went for Van Buren.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, however, he had practiced law with such success that no
+account of the Illinois bar of those days omits his name from the list
+of eminent attorneys. It was noted that whereas Lincoln was never very
+successful save in those cases where his client's cause was just, a
+client with but a slender claim upon the court's favor found Douglas a
+far better advocate. He never seems to have given much time to the
+reading of law or to the ordinary drudgery of preparing cases for trial,
+but he mastered the main facts of his cases with the utmost facility,
+and his mind went at once to the points that were sure to affect the
+decision. Early in his experience as a lawyer he had to be content with
+fees that seem absurdly small; once, he rode from Springfield to
+Bloomington to argue a case, and got but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> five dollars for his services.
+But he was a first-rate man of business, and soon had a good income from
+his profession.</p>
+
+<p>In January, 1841, the legislature, now Democratic in both branches,
+removed the Whig incumbent from the office of secretary of state, and
+the governor at once appointed Douglas to succeed him. That office,
+however, he held less than a month, for the legislature had also
+reconstructed the supreme court in such a way as to increase the number
+of judges, and in February, being then less than twenty-eight years old,
+he was named for one of the new places. One of the reasons why the court
+was reconstructed was its opposition to the Democratic position on the
+franchise question. Douglas, arguing a famous franchise case before it,
+had made himself the champion of unnaturalized inhabitants claiming the
+right to vote, and had thus established himself in the good-will of a
+large and increasing constituency throughout the State. Under the new
+law, each justice was assigned to a particular circuit,&mdash;Douglas to the
+westernmost,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> whose principal town was Quincy, on the Illinois River,
+where he made his home.</p>
+
+<p>The Mormon settlement of Nauvoo was in that circuit, and the most
+interesting of all the cases brought before Judge Douglas grew out of
+the troubles between the followers of Joe Smith and their neighbors. On
+one occasion, Joe Smith was himself on trial, and the Christian populace
+of the neighborhood, long incensed against him and his people, broke
+into the court-room clamoring for his life. The sheriff, a feeble-bodied
+and spiritless official, showed signs of yielding, and the judge,
+promptly assuming a power not vested in his office, appointed a stalwart
+Kentuckian sheriff, and ordered him to summon a <i>posse</i> and clear the
+room. By these means the defendant's life was saved, and Douglas,
+notwithstanding various decisions of his against them, earned the
+gratitude of the religious enthusiasts. There is a story that some years
+later, when he was no longer a judge, but a major in a militia regiment
+sent on an expedition against Nauvoo, he was ordered to take a hundred
+men and arrest the "twelve<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> apostles." The Mormons, outnumbering the
+militia, were fortified for defense. Major Douglas, however, proceeded
+alone into their lines, persuaded the twelve to enter their apostolic
+coach and come with him to the Christian camp, and so brought about an
+agreement which prevented a fight.</p>
+
+<p>Both as a judge and as a member of the council of revision Douglas stood
+out with commendable firmness against the popular feeling, strong
+throughout the country during the hard times, and which in some of the
+States got a complete ascendency over courts and legislatures, in favor
+of the relief of debtors. He enforced the old laws for the collection of
+debts, and he baulked several legislative schemes to defraud creditors
+of their due by declaring the new laws unconstitutional. For the rest,
+his decisions have seemed to competent critics to show that he possessed
+unusual legal ability and grasp of principles and a corresponding power
+of statement, scant as his legal training was.</p>
+
+<p>According to the American usage, he was "Judge Douglas" all the rest of
+his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> life, but the state bench no more satisfied his ambition than the
+other state offices he had held. In December, 1842, when the legislature
+proceeded to ballot for a United States senator, his name was presented,
+though again his age fell short of the legal requirement, and on the
+last ballot he had fifty-one votes against the fifty-six which elected
+his successful competitor. The next year, being nominated for the lower
+house of Congress, he accepted, and at once resigned his place on the
+bench, though the district had a Whig complexion. At the end of a
+canvass which left both himself and his opponent, Browning, seriously
+ill, he was elected by a majority of several hundred.</p>
+
+<p>On his way to Washington, he visited Cleveland, where his westward
+journey had come so near an abortive ending, and then his home-folk at
+Canandaigua. He was but thirty years old, yet he had held five important
+political offices, he had risen to high rank in his profession, he was
+the leader of the dominant party in a great State; and all this he had
+done alone, unaided. Few aged<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> men have brought back such laurels from
+their Western fortune-seeking. In December, 1843, he took his seat in
+the House of Representatives and began to display before the whole
+country the same brilliant spectacle of daring, energy, and success
+which had captivated the people of Illinois.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h3>THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> was the aggressive energy of the man, unrestrained by such formality
+as was still observed by the public men of the older Eastern
+communities, which most impressed those who have left on record their
+judgments of the young Western congressman. The aged Adams, doubtless
+the best representative of the older school in either branch of
+Congress, gave a page of his diary to one of Douglas's early speeches.
+"His face was convulsed,"&mdash;so the merciless diary runs,&mdash;"his
+gesticulation frantic, and he lashed himself into such a heat that if
+his body had been made of combustible matter it would have burnt out. In
+the midst of his roaring, to save himself from choking, he stripped and
+cast away his cravat, unbuttoned his waistcoat, and had the air and
+aspect of a half-naked pugilist. And this man comes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> from a judicial
+bench, and passes for an eloquent orator!" On another occasion, the same
+critic tells us, Douglas "raved an hour about democracy and anglophobia
+and universal empire." Adams had been professor of rhetoric and oratory
+at Harvard College, and he was the last man in the country to appreciate
+an oratorical manner that departed from the established rules and
+traditions of the art. Amp&egrave;re, a French traveler, thought Douglas a
+perfect representative of the energetic builders of the Western
+commonwealths, and predicted that he would come into power when it
+should be the turn of the West to dominate the country. "Small, black,
+stocky," so this observer described him, "his speech is full of nervous
+power, his action simple and strong." Douglas, however, quickly adapted
+himself to his new environment,&mdash;no man in the country excelled him in
+that art,&mdash;and took on all the polish which the Washington of that day
+demanded, without any loss of fighting spirit or any abandonment of his
+democratic manners and principles.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span></p><p>He soon got a good opportunity to plant himself on a powerful popular
+sentiment by urging, in a really excellent speech, that the country
+should repay to the aged Jackson the fine which had been imposed upon
+him for contempt of court during the defense of New Orleans. An
+experienced opponent found him ready with a taking retort to every
+interruption. It being objected that there was absolutely no precedent
+for refunding the fine, "I presume," he replied, "that no case can be
+found on record, or traced by tradition, where a fine, imposed upon a
+general for saving his country, at the peril of his life and reputation,
+has ever been refunded." When he visited The Hermitage during the
+following summer, Jackson singled him out of a distinguished party and
+thanked him, not without reason, for defending his course at New Orleans
+better than he himself had ever been able to defend it. Douglas won
+further distinction during the session by defending, in a report from
+the committee on elections, the right of the several States to determine
+how their representatives<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> in Congress should be chosen. Later, in a
+debate with John J. Hardin, his rival in Congress as in the Illinois
+legislature, he contrasted the Whig and Democratic positions on the
+questions of the day with so much force and skill that the speech was
+used as the principal Democratic document in the presidential campaign
+of 1844.</p>
+
+<p>In Congress, distinction does not always, or usually, imply power; but
+Douglas was consummately fit for the sort of struggling by which things
+are in fact accomplished at Washington. Whatever the matter in hand, his
+mind always moved with lightning rapidity to positive views. He was
+never without a clear purpose, and he had the skill and the temper to
+manage men. He knew how to conciliate opponents, to impress the
+thoughtful, to threaten the timid, to button-hole and flatter and
+cajole. He breathed freely the heated air of lobbies and committee
+rooms. Fast as his reputation grew, his actual importance in legislation
+grew faster still. At the beginning of his second term he was appointed
+chairman of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> House Committee on Territories, and so was charged in
+an especial way with the affairs of the remoter West. In the course of
+that service, he framed many laws which have affected very notably the
+development of our younger commonwealths. He was particularly opposed to
+the policy of massing the Indians in reservations west of the
+Mississippi, fearing that the new Northwest, the Oregon country, over
+which we were still in controversy with Great Britain, would thus be
+isolated. To prevent this, he introduced during his first term a bill to
+organize into a territory that part of the Louisiana Purchase which lay
+north and west of Missouri. As yet, however, there were scarcely any
+white settlers in the region, and no interest could be enlisted in
+support of the bill. But he renewed his motion year after year until
+finally, as we shall see, he made it the most celebrated measure of his
+time.</p>
+
+<p>His advocacy of the internal improvements needed for the development of
+the West brought him in opposition to a powerful element in his own
+party. Adams, writing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> in his diary under date of April 17, 1844, says:
+"The Western harbor bill was taken up, and the previous question was
+withdrawn for the <i>homunculus</i> Douglas to poke out a speech in favor of
+the constitutionality of appropriations for the improvement of Western
+rivers and harbors. The debate was continued between the conflicting
+absurdities of the Southern Democracy, which is slavery, and the Western
+Democracy, which is knavery." Under the leadership of Jackson and other
+Southerners, the Democrats, notwithstanding their long ascendency, had
+adhered to their position on internal improvements more consistently,
+perhaps, than to any other of the contentions which they had made before
+they came into power. Douglas did not, indeed, commit himself to that
+interpretation of the Constitution which justified appropriations for
+any enterprise which could be considered a contribution to the "general
+welfare," and he protested against various items in river and harbor
+bills. But as a rule he voted for the bills.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span></p><p>He was particularly interested in the scheme for building a railroad
+which should run north and south the entire length of Illinois, and
+favored a grant of public lands to aid the State in the enterprise. For
+years, however, he had to contend with a corporation which had got from
+the State a charter for such a railroad and was now trying to get help
+from Congress. In 1843, and for several sessions thereafter, bills were
+introduced to give aid directly to the Great Western Railway Company,
+and it was mainly the work of Douglas that finally secured a majority in
+Congress for the plan of granting lands to the State, and not to the
+company. That was in 1851. To his chagrin, however, the promoters of the
+company then persuaded the Illinois legislature to pass a bill
+transferring to them whatever lands Congress might grant to the State
+for the railroad. He at once sent for Holbrook, the leading man in the
+company, and informed him that no bill would be permitted to pass until
+he and his associates should first execute a release of all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> the rights
+they had obtained from the legislature. Such a release they were at last
+forced to sign, the bill passed, and the Illinois Central was built. It
+became an important agency in the development, not of Illinois merely,
+but of the whole Mississippi Valley; and it is the most notable material
+result of Douglas's skill in legislation. But throughout the whole
+course of his service at Washington he never neglected, in his concern
+about the great national questions with which his name is forever
+associated, the material interests of the people whom he especially
+represented. His district and his State never had cause to complain of
+his devotion to his party and his country.</p>
+
+<p>But the questions which had the foremost place while he was a member of
+the lower house were questions of our foreign relations, and as it
+happened they were questions to which he could give himself freely
+without risking his distinctive r&ocirc;le as the champion of the newer West.
+The Oregon boundary dispute and the proposed annexation of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> Texas were
+uppermost in the campaign of 1844, and on both it was competent for him
+to argue that an aggressive policy was demanded by Western interests and
+Western sentiment. It was in discussing the Oregon boundary that he
+first took the attitude of bitter opposition to all European, and
+particularly to all English interference in the affairs of the American
+continents which he steadily maintained thereafter. The long-standing
+agreement with Great Britain for joint occupation of the Oregon country
+he characterized as in practice an agreement for non-occupation. Arguing
+in favor of giving notice of the termination of the convention, he
+shrewdly pointed out that as the British settlers were for the most part
+fur-traders and the American settlements were agricultural, we would
+"squat them out" if no hindrance were put upon the westward movement of
+our pioneers. He would at once organize a territorial government for
+Oregon, and take measures to protect it; if Great Britain threatened
+war, he would put the country in a state of defense. "If<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> war comes," he
+cried, "let it come. We may regret the necessity which produced it, but
+when it does come, I would administer to our citizens Hannibal's oath of
+eternal enmity. I would blot out the lines on the map which now mark our
+territorial boundaries on this continent, and make the area of liberty
+as broad as the continent itself." He even broke with the Polk
+administration when it retreated from the advanced position which the
+party had taken during the campaign, and was one of a hardy ten who, in
+the debate over the resolutions that led to the final settlement, voted
+for a substitute declaration that the question was "no longer a subject
+of negotiation and compromise." There can be little doubt that his
+hostility to England, as well as his robust Americanism, commended him
+at that time to the mass of his countrymen everywhere but in the
+commercial East.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>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 <i>casus belli</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> 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 "<i>homunculus</i>" as a debater.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>
+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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>But Douglas was too alert and alive to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The very day he took his seat, he was appointed chairman of the Senate
+Committee on Territories, and so kept the r&ocirc;le 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>However, in his ardent advocacy of a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>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."</p>
+
+<p>His practical instinct and his democratic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>But the questions, apart from that of slavery, on which Douglas's course
+has the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>But if he maintained the traditional,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>It would have been possible, he thought,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> 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 <i>in
+toto</i>; 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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h3>THE GREAT QUESTION</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">On</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The presidential election of 1848 made a good occasion for men to take
+account of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&deg; 30&acute;,
+North <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>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&deg; 30&acute;, 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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The material elements of the problem, then, were comparatively simple,
+and the immediately pressing questions were easily phrased; but the
+intangible element of public opinion was uncommonly hard to estimate. So
+far as the great parties were concerned, it was impossible to fix upon
+either of them any general theory about slavery or any definite policy
+with it. Up to this time, both had apparently gone on the understanding
+that it was not a proper issue in political contests. A small group of
+unpractical men had, in fact, tried to build up a party on the issue of
+opposition to it, but they had no prospect of carrying a single
+electoral vote. The adherents of the old parties were agreed on one
+thing: that there was no lawful way for Congress or the people of the
+free States to interfere with slavery in the slave States. They were
+divided among themselves, inside of party lines, on the fugitive slave
+law, on the interstate slave trade, on slavery and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> slave trade in
+the District of Columbia, and on slavery in the Territories.</p>
+
+<p>But if party lines did not yet accurately represent the divisions of
+opinion on these questions, there was, nevertheless, a grouping of men
+according to their opinions on the general question which already had
+its effects in politics. Every thoughtful American of that day belonged
+to one or another of several groups according to the view he took of two
+things: slavery itself, and the body of law and usage that had grown up
+about it. There were the abolitionists, who believed slavery to be so
+utterly wrong that they were ready to go all lengths to get rid of it,
+violating the Constitution, breaking the compromises, endangering the
+Union. There were the Southern fire-eaters, who not only believed
+slavery right but were similarly willing to go all lengths to defend and
+extend it. There were the moderate men who made up the bulk of the two
+great parties in the North, who believed slavery wrong but felt
+themselves bound by the compromises of the Constitution which protected<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>
+it where it already existed and debarred from any method of attacking it
+which might bring the Union into danger. There were the moderate men of
+the South, Whigs and Democrats alike, who believed either that slavery
+was right or at least that there was no better state possible for the
+mass of the blacks, but who were yet devoted to the Union and respected
+their constitutional obligations. Finally, there were men so constituted
+that they could decline to take any thought whether slavery were right
+or wrong, and could deal with every question that arose concerning it as
+a question of expediency merely, or of law and precedent.</p>
+
+<p>To which of these groups should Douglas join himself? Up to this time,
+his public record was too meagre to show clearly where he stood. In
+1845, when the bill to annex Texas was before the House, he had offered
+an amendment extending the compromise line of 1820 through the new
+State, so that if Texas were ever divided slavery would be prohibited in
+such State or States as should be formed north of that line. Both in
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> House and in the Senate he had voted against the famous resolution
+of Mr. David Wilmot to exclude slavery from any territory that we might
+get from Mexico, and he continued to oppose that motion, in whatever
+form it appeared, until the legislature of Illinois instructed him to
+favor it. In 1848, he voted for the so-called Clayton Compromise, which
+proposed to organize California, Oregon, and New Mexico into Territories
+and merely extend over them the Constitution and laws of the United
+States so far as these should prove applicable; but he also voted for
+the bill to organize the Territory of Oregon with a clause prohibiting
+slavery. By his speeches, no less than by his votes, he was committed to
+the position that the Missouri Compromise was a final settlement so far
+as the Louisiana Purchase was concerned, and that the compromise line
+ought to be extended through the Mexican Cession to the Pacific. He was
+not clearly committed on any other of the points at issue between the
+friends and the opponents of slavery.</p>
+
+<p>But he had roundly denounced the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>abolitionists, and he had married the
+daughter of a slaveholder. The day after his wedding his father-in-law
+presented him a deed to a plantation in Mississippi and a number of
+slaves. He gave it back, not, so he declared, because he thought it
+wrong to hold slaves, but because he did not know how to govern them or
+to manage a plantation. His wife soon fell heir to the land and negroes,
+and at her death they passed to her children under a will which
+requested that the blacks be not sold but kept and cared for by the
+testator's descendants. Douglas, as the guardian of his infant children,
+respected their grandfather's wishes. For that reason he was called a
+slaveholder, and a fellow senator once openly accused him of shaping his
+course as a public man to accord with his private interests. He denied
+and disproved the charge, but proudly added: "I implore my enemies, who
+so ruthlessly invade the private sanctuary, to do me the favor to
+believe that I have no wish, no aspiration, to be considered purer or
+better than she who was, or they who are, slaveholders."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span></p><p>He was of those who could be indifferent to the moral quality of
+slavery. He could favor whatever policy the Constitution required, or
+precedents favored, or public expediency demanded; if his enemies were
+to be believed, he could take whatever course ambition and self-interest
+impelled him to. Never once during his long wrestling with the slavery
+question did he concede that any account should be taken of the moral
+character of the institution, or intimate that he believed it wrong for
+one man to hold another man in bondage.</p>
+
+<p>The Democratic National Convention of 1848, though its platform was as
+vague as it could be made, nominated a candidate who was committed to a
+particular plan with slavery in the Territories. The candidate was Lewis
+Cass, of Michigan, and his plan was set forth in a letter to one
+Nicholson, of Nashville, Tennessee, of date December 24, 1847. The plan
+appeared to be a very simple one. It was to leave the people of each
+Territory, so soon as it should be organized, free to regulate their
+domestic institutions as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> they chose. He favored it for two reasons:
+first, because Congress had no right to interfere; and second, because
+the people themselves were the best judges of what institutions they
+ought to have. That was the barest form of the doctrine which its
+opponents in derision named "squatter sovereignty." It was contrary to
+the doctrine of the Wilmot Proviso, which invoked the authority of
+Congress to exclude slavery from all the Territories, and contrary,
+also, to whatever doctrine or no doctrine was implied in the motion to
+extend the compromise line to the Pacific, exercising the authority of
+Congress to exclude slavery north of the line and forbearing to exercise
+it south of the line. It was equally contrary to a third doctrine which
+was brought before the convention. William L. Yancey, a delegate from
+Alabama, offered a resolution to the effect that neither Congress nor
+any territorial legislature had any right to exclude slave property from
+the Territories. This was a mild statement of the extreme Southern
+doctrine that slaves were property, so recognized by the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> Constitution,
+and that a slaveholder had the right to take his slaves anywhere but
+into a State where slavery was forbidden.</p>
+
+<p>The doctrine of Cass seemed to accord best with that democratic theory
+of the government which Douglas had always professed. It accorded well
+with his faith in the builders of the West. It alone, of all the
+doctrines advanced, accorded fully with his attitude of indifference to
+the moral quality of slavery. He soon embraced it, therefore, and for
+the rest of his life he was oftenest occupied embodying it in
+legislation, defending it, restating it to suit new conditions,
+modifying it to meet fresh exigencies. Cass, though his authorship of
+the doctrine is disputed, was at first held responsible for it, and he
+advocated it with great ability. But in the end men well-nigh forgot who
+the author of the principle was, so pre&euml;minent was Douglas as its
+defender. He made it his, whosesoever it was at first, and his it will
+always be in history.</p>
+
+<p>During the session of 1848&ndash;49, he introduced a bill to admit California
+as a State,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> leaving the people to settle the slavery question as they
+pleased. But his first great opportunity came in the session of 1849&ndash;50.</p>
+
+<p>Cass had been beaten in the election. Zachary Taylor, the successful
+candidate of the Whigs, was a Southerner and a slaveholder, but he was
+elected on a non-committal platform, and he had never declared, if
+indeed he had ever formed, any opinions on the questions in dispute. His
+first message merely notified Congress that California, whither people
+were rushing from all parts of the country in search of gold, had of her
+own motion made ready for statehood; he expressed a hope that New Mexico
+would shortly follow her example, and recommended that both be admitted
+into the Union with such constitutions as they might present.
+Immediately, the House, where the free-soilers held a balance of power,
+fell into a long wrangle over the speakership; and the Senate was soon
+in fierce debate over certain anti-slavery resolutions presented from
+the legislature of Vermont. The North seemed to be united on the Wilmot
+Proviso as it had never before<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> been united on any measure of opposition
+to slavery, and the South, fearing to lose the fruits of her many
+victories in statesmanship, in diplomacy, and on Mexican battlefields,
+was threatening disunion if, by the admission of California as a free
+State with no slave State to balance, her equality of representation in
+the Senate should be destroyed. The portents were all of disagreement,
+struggle, disaster.</p>
+
+<p>But at the end of January, Henry Clay, though he had come back to the
+scene of his many stirring conflicts in the past minded to be "a calm
+and quiet looker-on," roused himself to one more essay of that
+statesmanship of compromise in which he was a master. He made a plan of
+settlement that covered all the controversies and put it in the form of
+a series of resolutions. It was to admit California with her free-state
+constitution; to organize the remainder of the Mexican Cession into
+Territories, with no restriction as to slavery; to pay Texas a sum of
+money on condition that she yielded in the dispute over the boundary
+between her and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> New Mexico; to prohibit the slave trade, but not
+slavery, in the District of Columbia; to leave the interstate slave
+trade alone; and to pass an effective fugitive slave law.</p>
+
+<p>For two days, Clay spoke for his plan. Age, though it had not bereft him
+of his consummate skill in oratory, added pathos to his genuine fervor
+of patriotism as in that profound crisis of our affairs he pleaded with
+his fellow senators and with his divided countrymen. There followed the
+most notable series of set speeches in the history of Congress. One
+after another, the old leaders, Calhoun, Webster, Benton, Cass, and the
+rest,&mdash;for all were still there,&mdash;rose and solemnly addressed themselves
+to the state of the country and the plan of settlement. All but Calhoun:
+now very near his end, he was too weak to stand or speak, and Mason, of
+Virginia, read for him, while he sat gloomily silent, his last bitter
+arraignment of the North. He was against the plan. Benton, though on
+opposite grounds, also found fault with it. Webster, to the rage and
+sorrow of his own New England,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> gave it his support. Then the new men
+spoke. Jefferson Davis, on whom, as Calhoun was borne away to his grave,
+the mantle of his leadership seemed visibly to fall, steadfastly
+asserted the Southern claim that slaveholders had a right to go into any
+Territory with their slaves, but offered, as the extreme concession of
+the South, to extend the Missouri line to the Pacific if property in
+slaves were protected below the line. Chase, of Ohio, impressive in
+appearance but stiff in manner, argued weightily for the
+constitutionality and rightfulness of the Wilmot Proviso. Seward, of New
+York, though the shrewdest politician of the anti-slavery forces,
+enraged the Southerners and startled the country with the announcement
+that "a higher law than the Constitution" enjoined upon Congress to
+guard these fresh lands for freedom.</p>
+
+<p>But none of the new men, and none of the old leaders but Clay himself,
+had such a part as Douglas in the actual settlement. He supported the
+resolutions, and as chairman of the Committee on Territories he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> wrote
+and introduced two bills: one to admit California, and one to organize
+the Territories of New Mexico and Utah with no restrictions as to
+slavery and to adjust the dispute with Texas. When Clay was put at the
+head of a Committee of Thirteen, to which all the subjects of dispute
+were referred, he was often in consultation with the chairman of the
+Committee on Territories. Douglas was of opinion that the various
+measures proposed would have a better chance of passing separately than
+all in one, but Clay decided to deal with California, the Territories,
+and the Texas boundary in a single measure. This, with separate bills on
+the fugitive slave law and the slave trade in the District, he reported
+early in May. The Omnibus, as the first bill was called, was simply
+Douglas's two bills joined together with a wafer: the words, "Mr. Clay,
+from the Committee of Thirteen," were substituted for the words, "Mr.
+Douglas, from the Committee on Territories." But there was one important
+change. Douglas's bill gave the territorial legislatures authority over
+all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> rightful subjects of legislation, subject to the Constitution, save
+that they could pass no law interfering with the primary disposal of the
+soil. Clay's committee, contrary to his wish, added the clause, "nor in
+respect to African slavery." Douglas moved to strike out the exception.
+He was voted down, but bided his time, persuaded another senator to
+renew the motion at a favorable moment, and it passed.</p>
+
+<p>But the Omnibus could not pass. The death of President Taylor, who would
+probably have vetoed it, brought Fillmore, a friend of the compromise,
+into the White House; but there were only a handful of senators who
+favored every one of the measures so combined. Late in July, after
+months of debate and negotiation had wearied Clay out and driven him
+from the scene, all but the part relating to Utah was stricken out, and
+with that single passenger the Omnibus went through the Senate. Then
+separately, one after another, as Douglas had advised, the other
+measures were passed. The House quickly accepted them, Fillmore<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> signed
+them, and the last of the compromises was complete. Jefferson Davis had
+opposed it, and had often been pitted against Douglas in debate, for
+they were champions of contrary theories, but at the end he declared:
+"If any man has a right to be proud of the success of these measures, it
+is the senator from Illinois." The enterprise, indeed, was Clay's; his
+was the idea, the initiative, the general plan. It is rightly called
+Clay's compromise. But the execution of the plan was quite as much
+Douglas's work as his. When Clay died, no one had a better right than
+Douglas to inherit his place as the statesman and orator of compromise
+and conciliation.</p>
+
+<p>In the defense of the settlement he was no less conspicuous. Though in
+the South such extremists as Yancey and Quitman declared that the
+so-called compromise was in fact a surrender of Southern rights and a
+sufficient reason for abandoning the Union, there were Northern men
+quite as violently exercised over what seemed to them a base truckling
+to the slave power. The legislature<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> of Illinois had formally instructed
+her senators to support the Wilmot Proviso, and Douglas had thus been
+compelled, all through the session, to vote for motion after motion to
+prohibit slavery outright in the Territories. At the end of the session,
+when he returned to his home, he found Chicago wrought up to a furor of
+protest. The city council actually voted to release officials from all
+obligation to enforce the fugitive slave law and citizens from all
+obligation to respect it. A mass meeting was about to pass resolutions
+approving this extraordinary action of the council and denouncing as
+traitors the senators and representatives who had voted for the law,
+when Douglas walked upon the stand, announced that the next evening he
+would publicly defend the measures of compromise, and demanded to be
+heard before he was condemned. A great audience, the greatest ever
+assembled in the city, listened to his defense. It was bold, skilful,
+successful. He avowed his authorship of three of the compromise
+measures, his approval of the others. He took them up one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> by one,
+explained them, called for objections, and answered every objection
+effectively. At the end, he proposed and carried resolutions pledging
+the meeting to stand by the Constitution and the laws, and the meeting
+voted further, with but eight or ten nays, to repudiate the resolutions
+of the council. The next night, the council met and repealed them.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed, in fact, that in planting himself on the compromise Douglas
+had rightly forecast the verdict of the country as a whole. An adjourned
+meeting of a Southern convention which had been called before the
+settlement with a view to some united and vigorous action took now a
+tone so mild that it allayed, instead of exciting, the fears of
+patriots. Jefferson Davis, an opponent, and Foote, a supporter of the
+settlement, went before the people of Mississippi as rival candidates
+for the governorship, and Davis was beaten. Yancey in Alabama was
+overthrown in his own party. Only South Carolina would not be
+reconciled. Throughout the North, and particularly in New England,
+attempts to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>resist the fugitive slave law were sometimes violent and
+occasionally successful, and Charles Sumner, from Massachusetts, and
+Wade, from Ohio, were sent to join Seward and Chase and Hale, the
+aggressive anti-slavery men in the Senate. With Sumner, whose first
+important speech was an attack upon the law, Douglas instantly engaged
+in the first of many bitter controversies. An attack on a law so clearly
+demanded by the Constitution was, he declared, an attack on the
+Constitution itself, such as no senator could make without breaking his
+oath of office. But in little more than a year the lower House of
+Congress voted by a good majority that the compromise measures should be
+regarded as a permanent settlement. In 1852, the Democrats, assembled in
+national conventions at Baltimore, indorsed them in their platform. So
+did the Whigs; and Rufus Choate, their convention orator, was excusable
+for his hyperbole when he described "with what instantaneous and mighty
+charm they calmed the madness and anxiety of the hour."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span></p><p>Cass, in his seventieth year, was the leading candidate before the
+Democratic convention; so far as the leadership of parties can be
+determined in America, he was still the leader of the party. But
+Douglas, in his fortieth year, was pressing to the front. In the
+preliminary campaign he was put forward as the candidate of young
+America, and other State conventions than that of Illinois commended
+him. At Baltimore, his supporters were enthusiastic, aggressive,
+boisterous. His name in the long list of candidates always aroused an
+applause which showed that he was classed with Cass and Buchanan in the
+popular estimation, and not with the lesser men. Beginning with twenty
+votes on the first ballot, he rose steadily until on the thirty-first he
+led with ninety-two. But neither he nor Cass had a good following from
+the South. An expediency candidate, acceptable to the South, was found
+in Franklin Pierce, who had fought in the war with Mexico. Against him
+the Whigs pitted the commander-in-chief in the war. But Scott was
+thought to be tainted with free-soil<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> opinions. The Democrats, more
+thoroughly united, swept the country, and the new administration came
+into power with a great majority in both houses of Congress.</p>
+
+<p>In neither branch of that Democratic Congress was there another man so
+fit to take the lead as Douglas. A new senator, coming to Washington in
+1852, found him already risen to the first importance there. "His power
+as a debater," said this observer, "seemed to me unequaled in the
+Senate. He was industrious, energetic, bold, and skillful in the
+management of the affairs of his party. He was the acknowledged leader
+of the Democratic party in the Senate." It should be added that he never
+lost touch with the lower House. Neither was he unmindful of the
+President's part in making laws, but no President could be less disposed
+than Pierce was to set up his will against any measure which might come
+to him stamped with the party stamp. Douglas's wife died early in 1853,
+and in the summer he made his journey to Europe. When he returned, he
+was in a position the most<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> favorable for original and constructive
+statesmanship. By virtue of his leadership of the Senate, he was in
+effect the leader of Congress. He had the power of initiative. He was at
+the age when men are ripest for enterprises of pith and moment.
+Unhesitatingly, he advanced to the front and centre of the stage. When
+the session ended, his name was forever associated with a law that upset
+precedents and traditions, divided old parties and summoned up new ones,
+made&mdash;and unmade&mdash;history.</p>
+
+<p>January 4, 1854, Mr. Douglas, from the Committee on Territories,
+reported a bill to form the Territory of Nebraska out of that part of
+the Louisiana Purchase which lay west and north of Missouri.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h3>LEADERSHIP</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">There</span> was nothing new in the main proposal. A bill to organize this same
+Territory had passed the House the year before. It was generally
+conceded that the region ought to have a territorial government. Vast as
+it was, it had less than a thousand white inhabitants, but the overland
+route to the Pacific ran across it, and there was sure to be a rapid
+immigration into it so soon as it should be thrown open to settlers.
+What was both new and startling was a clause permitting the inhabitants
+of the Territory, whenever it should be admitted to statehood, to decide
+for themselves whether they would have slavery or not. The eighth
+section of the Compromise Act of 1820 provided that slavery should never
+exist anywhere in the Louisiana Purchase north<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> of 36&deg; 30&acute;, North
+latitude, save in the State of Missouri.</p>
+
+<p>In the report which accompanied the bill, Douglas declared that it was
+based on the principles of the compromise measures of 1850. Those
+measures, he maintained, affirmed three propositions: questions relating
+to slavery in the Territories and in States to be formed out of them
+should be left to the people thereof; cases involving title to slaves
+and questions of personal freedom should be left to the local courts,
+with a right of appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States; the
+mandate of the Constitution concerning fugitive slaves applied to
+Territories as well as States. Three days later, these propositions were
+incorporated in the bill.</p>
+
+<p>January 16, Archibald Dixon, a senator from Kentucky, offered an
+amendment expressly repealing the eighth section of the Missouri
+Compromise law. Douglas remonstrated, but in a few days he called on
+Dixon, the two senators went for a drive, and in the course of it
+Douglas promised to accept the amendment. He was satisfied, so Dixon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>
+reported his conversation, that the Missouri Compromise was
+unconstitutional and that it was unfair to the South. "This proceeding,"
+he said, "may end my political career, but, acting under the sense of
+duty which animates me, I am prepared to make the sacrifice. I will do
+it." January 22, with several other congressmen, he called on Jefferson
+Davis, Secretary of War, and was by him conducted to the White House.
+Contrary to his usage, for it was Sunday, the President granted them an
+interview. At the end of it, he promised to support the repeal. The next
+day, Douglas reported a substitute for the Nebraska bill. It provided
+for two Territories, Kansas and Nebraska, instead of one; and it
+declared the eighth section of the Missouri Compromise law to be
+inoperative because it was "superseded by" the principles of the
+compromise of 1850.</p>
+
+<p>At the report and the bill in its first form the anti-slavery men in
+Congress took instant alarm. By the time the substitute was presented,
+the whole country knew that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> something extraordinary was afoot. Without
+a sign of any popular demand, without preliminary agitation or debate,
+Douglas, of Illinois, had set himself to repeal the Missouri Compromise.
+He had undertaken to throw open to slavery a great region long
+consecrated to freedom. He had written the bill of his own motion, by
+himself, in his own house. The South had not asked for the concession,
+the North had not in any wise consented to it. For a little while, in
+fact, the Southern leaders seemed to distrust the bill, for they
+distrusted Douglas; one or two of them, like Sam Houston, of Texas,
+resisted it to the last, declaring it was sure in the end to do the
+South more harm than good. But for the most part they came quickly into
+line behind Douglas, though they never generally accepted his principle
+of popular sovereignty. As to the North, the challenge of the
+Kansas-Nebraska bill met there with such a response as no Southern
+aggression had yet provoked. Through every avenue of expression&mdash;through
+the press and the pulpit, in petitions to Congress,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> in angry protests
+of public meetings and solemn resolves of legislatures&mdash;a hostile and
+outraged public opinion broke upon Douglas and his bill. His own party
+could not be held in line. Scores of Democratic newspapers turned
+against him. Save the legislature of Illinois, no Northern assembly,
+representative or other, that could speak with any show of authority,
+dared to support him. No Southern fire-eater was ever half so reviled.
+He could have traveled from Boston to Chicago, so he afterwards
+declared, by the light of his own burning effigies.</p>
+
+<p>But the firmest and clearest protest of all came from the sturdy little
+band of anti-slavery men in Congress. The day after Douglas proposed his
+substitute, it came up for debate, and Chase, of Ohio, speaking for the
+opposition, asked for more time to examine the new provisions. Douglas
+granted a week, and the next day there appeared in various newspapers an
+address to the country entitled "An Appeal of the Independent Democrats
+in Congress." Chase was the principal author of it; he and Sumner and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>
+four representatives signed it. They denounced the bill as a breach of
+faith, infringing the historical compact of 1820, and as part of a plot
+to extend the area of slavery; and they accused Douglas of hazarding the
+dearest interests of the American people in a presidential game.</p>
+
+<p>That judgment of him and of the bill was probably accepted by a majority
+of his contemporaries. For lack of Southern support, he had missed the
+Democratic nomination in 1852. It seemed clear that whatever Northern
+candidate the South should prefer would be nominated in 1856. His rivals
+were all, in one way or another, commending themselves to the South.
+Pierce was hand in glove with Davis and other Southern leaders. Marcy,
+in the Department of State, and Buchanan, in a foreign mission, were
+both working for the annexation of Cuba, a favorite Southern measure. It
+was suspected that Cass, old as he was, had it in mind to move the
+repeal when Douglas went ahead of him.</p>
+
+<p>The contemporaries of Douglas were under a necessity to judge his
+motives, for they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> had to pass upon his fitness for high office and
+great responsibilities, and no other motive than ambition was so natural
+and obvious an explanation of his course. But it is questionable if any
+such positive judgment as was necessary, and therefore right, in his
+contemporaries, is obligatory upon historians. What he did was in accord
+with a political principle which he had avowed, and it was not in
+conflict with any moral principle he had ever avowed, for he did not
+pretend to believe that slavery was wrong. True, he had once thought the
+Missouri Compromise a sacred compact; but there were signs that he had
+abandoned that opinion. It is enough to decide that he took a wrong
+course, and to point out how ambition may very well have led him into
+it. It is too much to say he knew it was wrong, and took it solely
+because he was ambitious.</p>
+
+<p>But if he had taken a wrong course he did not fail to do that which will
+often force us, in spite of ourselves, into admiration for a man in the
+wrong: he pursued it unwavering to the end. Neither the swelling uproar<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>
+from without nor a resolute and conspicuously able opposition within the
+Senate daunted him for a moment. He pressed the bill to its passage with
+furious energy. He set upon Chase savagely, charging him with bad faith
+in that he had gained time, by a false pretense of ignorance of the
+bill, to flood the country with slanderous attacks upon it and upon its
+author. The audacity of the announcement that the Compromise of 1850
+repealed the Compromise of 1820 was well-nigh justified by the skill of
+his contention. It was a principle, he maintained, and no mere temporary
+expedient, for which Clay and Webster had striven, which both parties
+had indorsed, which the country had acquiesced in,&mdash;the principle of
+"popular sovereignty." That principle lay at the base of our
+institutions; it was illustrated in all the achievements of our past;
+it, and it alone, would enable us in safety to go on and extend our
+institutions into new regions. Cass, though he made difficulties about
+details, supported the bill, and the Southerners played their part well.
+But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> Douglas afterwards said, and truly: "I passed the Kansas-Nebraska
+act myself. I had the authority and power of a dictator throughout the
+whole controversy in both houses. The speeches were nothing. It was the
+marshaling and directing of men and guarding from attacks and with
+ceaseless vigilance preventing surprise."</p>
+
+<p>Chase was the true leader of the opposition, and he was equipped with a
+most thorough mastery of the slavery question in its historical and
+constitutional aspects. By shrewd amendments he sought to bring out the
+division between the Northern and Southern supporters of the bill; for
+the Southerners held that slave-owners had a constitutional right to go
+into any Territory with their property,&mdash;a right with which neither
+Congress nor a territorial legislature could interfere. Douglas,
+however, managed to avoid the danger. He made another change in the
+important clause. To please Cass and others, he made it declare that the
+Compromise of 1820 was "inconsistent with" instead of "superseded by"
+the principles<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> of the later compromise; and then he added the words,
+"it being the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate
+slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to
+leave the inhabitants thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their
+domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution
+of the United States." That, as Benton said, was a little stump speech
+incorporated in the bill; and it proved a very effective stump speech
+indeed.</p>
+
+<p>Neither the logic and the accurate knowledge of Chase, nor the lofty
+invective of Sumner, nor the smooth eloquence of Everett, nor Seward's
+rare combination of political adroitness with an alertness to moral
+forces, matched, in hand to hand debate, the keen-mindedness, the
+marvelous readiness, and the headlong force of Douglas. Their set
+speeches were impressive, but in the quick fire, the
+question-and-answer, the give-and-take of a free discussion, he was the
+master of them all. When, half an hour after midnight of the third of
+March, he rose before<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> a full Senate and crowded galleries to close the
+debate, he was at his best. Often interrupted, he welcomed every
+interruption with courtesy, and never once failed to put his assailant
+on the defensive. Now Sumner and now Chase was denying that he had come
+into office by a sacrifice of principle; now Seward was defending his
+own State of New York against a charge of infidelity to the compact of
+1820; now Everett, friend and biographer and successor of Webster, was
+protesting that he had not meant to misrepresent Webster's views.
+Always, after these encounters, Douglas knew how to come back, with a
+graver tone, to the larger issue, as if they, and not he, were trying to
+obscure it. A spectator might have fancied that these high-minded men
+were culprits, and he their inquisitor. Now and then, as when he dealt
+with the abolitionists, there was no questioning the sincerity of his
+feeling, and it stirred him to a genuine eloquence. He was not surprised
+that Boston burned him in effigy. Had not Boston closed her Faneuil Hall
+upon the aged Webster? Did not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> Sumner live there? And he turned upon
+the senator from Massachusetts: "Sir, you will remember that when you
+came into the Senate, and sought an opportunity to put forth your
+abolition incendiarism, you appealed to our sense of justice by the
+sentiment, 'Strike, but hear me first!' But when Mr. Webster went back
+in 1850 to speak to his constituents in his own self-defense, to tell
+the truth and to expose his slanderers, you would not hear him, but <i>you
+struck him first</i>." Again and again, as at the end of a paragraph of
+unadorned but trenchant sentences the small, firm-knit figure quivered
+with a leonine energy, the great, swart head was thrown backward, and
+the deep voice swelled into a tone of triumph or defiance, the listeners
+could not forbear to applaud. Once, even Seward broke forth: "I have
+never had so much respect for him as I have to-night."</p>
+
+<p>The vote in the Senate was 27 ayes to 14 noes; but in the House the
+opposition was dangerously strong, and but for the precaution of
+securing the support of the administration<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> the bill might have failed.
+There was a fierce parliamentary battle. Richardson, Douglas's friend
+and chief lieutenant, kept the House in continuous session thirty-six
+hours trying to force through a motion to fix a term for the debate.
+Feeling rose on both sides. Personal encounters were imminent. Douglas,
+in constant attendance, watched every move of the opposition and was
+instant with the counter-move. It was a month before the bill could be
+brought to a vote, and then it passed, with a slight change, by a
+majority of thirteen. At the end of May, the President signed it, and
+Douglas, turning from the work of enacting it into law to the harder
+task of defending it before the country, beheld the whole field of
+national politics transformed. The Whig party, crushed to earth in 1852,
+made no move to take a stand on the new issue; it was dead. His own
+historical Democratic party was everywhere throughout the North in a
+turmoil that seemed to forebode dissolution. One new party, sprung
+swiftly and secretly into life on the old issue of enmity<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> to foreigners
+and Roman Catholics, seemed to stand for the idea that the best way to
+meet the slavery issue was to run away from it. Another new party,
+conceived in the spirit of the appeal of the independent Democrats, was
+struggling to be born. State after State was falling under the power of
+the Know-Nothings; and those men, Whigs and Democrats alike, who for
+years had been awaiting an opportunity to fight slavery outside of its
+breastworks of compromise, were forming at last under the name of
+Anti-Nebraska men. Before long, they began to call themselves
+Republicans.</p>
+
+<p>He did not quail. Invited to pronounce the Independence Day oration at
+Philadelphia, he made of it the first thoroughgoing denunciation of the
+Know-Nothings that any eminent public man in the country had the courage
+to make. Democrats everywhere, bewildered by the mystery in which these
+new adversaries shrouded their designs, were heartened to an aggressive
+warfare. Some months later, he took the stump in Virginia, where Henry
+A. Wise had brought the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> Democrats firmly into line against the only
+rivals they had in the South, now that the Whigs were giving up the
+fight. The campaign was a crucial one, and the Know-Nothings never
+recovered from their defeat. Douglas's course had the merit of
+consistency as well as courage, for he had always championed the rights
+of the foreign born.</p>
+
+<p>The Independence Day oration was also his first popular defense of the
+Kansas-Nebraska bill. But so soon as Congress adjourned he hastened home
+to face his own people of Illinois. Chicago was once more, as in 1850, a
+centre of hostility, and he announced that he would speak there the
+evening of September first. When the time came, flags at half mast and
+the dismal tolling of church bells welcomed him. A vast and ominously
+silent crowd was gathered, but not to hear him. Hisses and groans broke
+in upon his opening sentences. Hour after hour, from eight o'clock until
+midnight, he stood before them; time and again, as the uproar lessened,
+his voice combated it; but they would not let him speak.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> Nothing, in
+fact, but his resolute bearing saved him from violence. On the way home,
+his carriage was set upon and he was in danger of his life.</p>
+
+<p>Wherever he went in Northern Illinois, similar scenes were enacted. But
+he got a hearing, and in the central counties and in "Egypt," the
+southern part of the State, where the people were largely of Virginian
+and Kentuckian descent, he was cordially received. He kept his hold upon
+his party in Illinois, and Illinois, alone of all the Northwestern
+States, would not go over completely to the opposition. The Democratic
+candidate for state treasurer was elected. The Know-Nothings and
+Anti-Nebraska men got a majority of the congressmen, and by the
+defection of certain state senators who held over from a previous
+election they were enabled to send Lyman Trumbull, Anti-Nebraska
+Democrat, to be Douglas's colleague at Washington. That, when compared
+with the results elsewhere in the North, was a striking proof of
+Douglas's power with his people. Moreover, the Democrats of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> North
+who remained in the party had accepted his leadership. In the South, the
+party organization was soon free of any effective opposition. The two
+wings, so long as they were united, could still control the Senate and
+elect presidents. All would still be well, if only all went well on
+those Western plains whither Douglas declared that the slavery question
+was now banished forever from the halls of Congress.</p>
+
+<p>But all was not going well there. When the Kansas-Nebraska bill passed,
+Sumner exultantly exclaimed: "It sets freedom and slavery face to face,
+and bids them grapple." Nebraska was conceded to freedom, but the day
+Kansas, the southern Territory, was thrown open to settlement, a long,
+confused, confusing struggle began. The whole country was drawn into it.
+Blue lodges in the South, emigrant aid societies in the North, hurried
+opposing forces into the field. The Southerners, aided by colonized
+voters from Missouri, got control of the territorial legislature and
+passed a slave code. The Free-Soilers, ignoring the government thus
+established,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> gathered in convention at Topeka, formed a free state
+constitution, and demanded to be admitted into the Union as a State.
+When a new Congress assembled in December, 1855, there were two
+governments in Kansas, and the people were separated into hostile camps.
+Brawls were frequent, and it was clear that very soon, unless the
+general government intervened, there would be concerted violence. A
+force of several thousand pro-slavery men, encamped on the Wakarusa
+River, were threatening Lawrence, the principal Free-Soil town. The
+Free-Soil men were in a majority, but their course had been in disregard
+of law. The pro-slavery men were in a minority, they had resorted to
+violence and fraud, but they had followed the forms of law.</p>
+
+<p>President Pierce, swayed by Jefferson Davis, took the side of slavery.
+The House was nearly two months organizing, and then the President sent
+in a message to Congress denouncing the Free-Soilers for resisting the
+laws. He followed it up with a proclamation, and placed United States
+troops at the disposal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> of the regular territorial government. In March,
+Douglas, from his Committee on Territories, made a long report on all
+that had occurred. He, too, laid the blame on the emigrant aid
+societies. He was against the Topeka constitution, and offered, instead,
+a bill providing for the admission of Kansas, so soon as her population
+should reach 93,000, which would entitle her to one representative in
+Congress, with such constitution as her people might lawfully adopt. The
+House, with an anti-slavery majority, was for admitting Kansas at once
+with the Topeka constitution. So was the anti-slavery group in the
+Senate, now swelled into a strong minority. In the fierce debate that
+followed, Douglas had to defend the results, as well as the theory, of
+his law. Sumner was the bitterest of his assailants, and their
+controversy passed all bounds of parliamentary restraint. In Sumner's
+famous speech on the crime against Kansas, Butler, of South Carolina,
+was represented as the Don Quixote of slavery, Douglas as its Sancho
+Panza, "ready to do all its humiliating offices." The day<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> after that
+speech, Lawrence was sacked, and civil war broke out in Kansas. The next
+day, Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, assaulted Sumner and beat him
+down on the floor of the Senate. Ten days later, the Democratic
+convention met at Cincinnati to name a candidate for the presidency.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> once more a free hand with Kansas and the slavery
+question.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The decision was, however, universally and rightly considered a great
+victory for slavery. It condemned the Republican programme as
+unconstitutional, and it strengthened<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Superb fighter that he was, he had a fighter's best opportunity,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> in Washington, he must have had in mind, as he took up his new
+r&ocirc;le, some such thought as that which fortified his favorite hero at
+Marengo: one battle was lost, but there was time enough to win another.</p>
+
+<p>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
+re&euml;lection 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;for the administration, beaten in Congress, attacked him
+at home,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h3>THE RIVALS</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Hamilton</span> and Jefferson, Clay and Jackson, Douglas and Lincoln,&mdash;these
+are the three great rivalries of American politics. The third was not
+the least. If it fell short of the others in variety of confrontments,
+if it was not so long drawn out, or accompanied with so frequent and
+imposing alignments and realignments of vast contending forces on a
+broad and national field, it surpassed them in the clearness of the sole
+and vital issue it involved, in a closer contact and measuring of
+powers, in the complete and subtle correspondence of the characters of
+the rivals to the causes for which they fought.</p>
+
+<p>Douglas was the very type of that instant success which waits on ability
+undistracted by doubt and undeterred by the fear of doing wrong; the
+best exemplar of that American statesmanship which accepted things as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>
+they were and made the most of them. Facile, keen, effective, he had
+found life a series of opportunities easily embraced. Precocious in
+youth, marvelously active in manhood, he had learned without study,
+resolved without meditation, accomplished without toil. Whatever
+obstacles he had found in his path, he had either adroitly avoided them
+or boldly overleaped them, but never laboriously uprooted them. Whatever
+subject he had taken in hand, he had swiftly compassed it, but rarely
+probed to the heart of it. With books he dealt as he dealt with men,
+getting from them quickly what he liked or needed; he was as unlikely to
+pore over a volume, and dog-ear and annotate it, as he was with
+correspondence and slow talk and silences to draw out a friendship. Yet
+he was not cold or mean, but capable of hero-worship, following with
+ardor the careers of great conquerors like C&aelig;sar and Napoleon, and
+capable, too, of loyalty to party and to men. He had great personal
+magnetism: young men, especially, he charmed and held as no other public
+man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> could, now Clay was dead. His habits were convivial, and the
+vicious indulgence of his strong and masculine appetites, the only
+relaxation he craved in the intervals of his fierce activities, had
+caused him frequent illnesses; but he was still a young man, even by
+American standards, for the eminence he had attained. At the full of his
+extraordinary powers, battling for the high place he had and the higher
+he aspired to, there was nowhere to be seen his equal as a debater or a
+politician,&mdash;nowhere but in the ungainly figure, now once more erected
+into a posture of rivalry and defiance, of the man whom he had long ago
+outstripped and left behind him in the home of their common beginnings.</p>
+
+<p>Slower of growth, and devoid altogether of many brilliant qualities
+which his rival possessed, Lincoln nevertheless outreached him by the
+measure of the two gifts the other lacked: the twin gifts of humor and
+of brooding melancholy. Bottomed by the one in homeliness, his character
+was by the other drawn upward to the height of human nobility and
+aspiration. His great capacity of pain,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> which but for his buffoonery
+would no doubt have made him mad, was the source of his rarest
+excellencies. Familiar with squalor, and hospitable to vulgarity, his
+mind was yet tenanted by sorrow, a place of midnight wrestlings. In him,
+as never before in any other man, were high and low things mated, and
+awkwardness and ungainliness and uncouthness justified in their uses. At
+once coarser than his rival and infinitely more refined and gentle, he
+had mastered lessons which the other had never found the need of
+learning, or else had learned too readily and then dismissed. He had
+thoroughness for the other's competence; insight into human nature, and
+a vast sympathy, for the other's facile handling of men; a deep devotion
+to the right for the other's loyalty to party platforms. The very core
+of his nature was truth, and he himself is reported to have said of
+Douglas that he cared less for the truth, as the truth, than any other
+man he knew.</p>
+
+<p>Hanging for some years upon the heels of his rival's rapid ascent,
+Lincoln had entered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> the House as Douglas left it for the Senate, but at
+the end of the term he retired from politics baffled and discouraged.
+Tortured with the keen apprehension of a form and grace into which he
+could never mould his crudeness, tantalized with a sense that there must
+be a way for him to get a hold on his fellows and make a figure in the
+history of his times, he had watched the power of Douglas grow and the
+fame of Douglas spread until it seemed that Douglas's voice was always
+speaking and Douglas's hand was everywhere. Patiently working out the
+right and wrong of the fateful question Douglas dealt with so boldly, he
+came into the impregnable position of such as hated slavery and yet
+forbore to violate its sanctuary. Suddenly, with the repeal of the
+Missouri Compromise, Douglas himself had opened a path for him. He went
+back into politics, and took a leading part in the Anti-Nebraska
+movement. Whenever opportunity offered, he combated Douglas on the
+stump. The year Trumbull won the senatorship, Lincoln had first come
+within a few votes of it. Risen now to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> leadership of the
+Republicans in Illinois, he awaited Douglas at Chicago, listened to his
+opening speech, answered it the next evening, followed him into the
+centre of the State, and finally proposed a series of joint debates
+before the people. Douglas hesitated, but accepted, and named seven
+meeting-places: Ottawa and Freeport, in the northern stronghold of the
+Republicans; Galesburg, Quincy, and Charleston, in a region where both
+parties had a good following; and Jonesboro and Alton, which were in
+"Egypt." The first meeting was at Ottawa, in August; the last, at Alton,
+in the middle of October. Meanwhile, both spoke incessantly at other
+places, Douglas oftener than once a day. First the fame of Douglas, and
+then Lincoln's unexpected survival of the early meetings, drew the eyes
+of the whole country upon these two foremost Americans of their
+generation, face to face there on the Western prairie, fighting out the
+great question of the times.</p>
+
+<p>Elevated side by side on wooden platforms in the open air, thrown into
+relief<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> against the low prairie sky line, the two figures take strong
+hold upon the imagination: the one lean, long-limbed, uncommonly tall;
+the other scarce five feet high, but compact, manful, instinct with
+energy, and topped with its massive head. In voice and gesture and
+manner, Douglas was incomparably the superior, as he was, too, in the
+ready command of a language never, indeed, ornate or imaginative, and
+sometimes of the quality of political commonplace, but always forcible
+and always intelligible to his audience. Lincoln had the sense of words,
+the imagination, the intensity of feeling, which go to the making of
+great literature; but for his masterpieces he always needed time. His
+voice was high and strained, his gestures ungraceful, his manner
+painful, save in the recital of those passages which he had carefully
+prepared or when he was freed of his self-consciousness by anger or
+enthusiasm. Neither of them, in any single speech, could be compared to
+Webster in the other of the two most famous American debates, but the
+series was a remarkable exhibition of forensic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> power. The interest grew
+as the struggle lengthened. People traveled great distances to hear
+them. At every meeting-place, a multitude of farmers and dwellers in
+country towns, with here and there a sprinkling of city-folk, crowded
+about the stand where "Old Abe" and the "Little Giant" turned and
+twisted and fenced for an opening, grappled and drew apart, clinched and
+strained and staggered,&mdash;but neither fell. The wonder grew that Lincoln
+stood up so well under the onslaughts of Douglas, at once skillful and
+reckless, held him off with so firm a hand, gripped him so shrewdly.
+Now, the wonder is that Douglas, wrestling with the man and the cause of
+a century, kept his feet and held his own.</p>
+
+<p>He was fighting, too, with an enemy in the rear. When he turned to
+strike at the administration, Lincoln would call out: "Go it, husband!
+Go it, bear!" Apart from that diversion, however, the debate, long and
+involved as it was, followed but three general lines. The whole is
+resolvable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> into three elements,&mdash;personalities, politics, and
+principles. There were the attacks which each made upon the other's
+record; the efforts which each made to weaken the other's position
+before the people; and the contrary views which were advanced.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> 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,&mdash;once, he
+actually threw his argument<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> into a syllogism,&mdash;did no great harm to
+Douglas.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>anti-slavery
+men. Lincoln would go their lengths in but one particular: he was for
+prohibiting slavery outright in all the Territories.</p>
+
+<p>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?"</p>
+
+<p>Douglas had no great difficulty with the first three questions, and the
+fourth&mdash;the second, as Lincoln read them&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;right and wrong&mdash;throughout the world."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span></p><p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> 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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> it was voted to adjourn
+to Baltimore. In the interval, Davis and Douglas fell once more into
+their bitter controversy in the Senate.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The rivals were again confronted, but on cruelly unequal terms. From the
+first, it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> 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"&mdash;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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+"Woodman, spare that tree!<br />
+Touch not a single bough."<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span></p><p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span></p><p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span></p><p>It was a hard time to die. War was at hand, and his strong nature
+stirred at the call. Plunged in his youth into affairs, and wonted all
+his life to action, he had played a man's part in great events, and
+greater were impending. He had taken many blows of men and circumstance,
+and stormy times might bring redress. He was a leader, and for want of
+him a great party must go leaderless and stumbling to a long series of
+defeats. He was a true American, and his country was in danger. He was
+ambitious, and his career was not rightly finished. He was the second
+man in the Republic, and he might yet be the first.</p>
+
+<p>But first he never could have been while Lincoln lived, nor ever could
+have got a hold like Lincoln's on his kind. His place is secure among
+the venturesome, strong, self-reliant men who in various ages and
+countries have for a time hastened, or stayed, or diverted from its
+natural channel the great stream of affairs. The sin of his ambition is
+forgiven him for the good end he made. But for all his splendid energy
+and his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> brilliant parts, for all the charm of his bold assault on
+fortune and his dauntless bearing in adversity, we cannot turn from him
+to his rival but with changed and softened eyes. For Lincoln, indeed, is
+one of the few men eminent in politics whom we admit into the hidden
+places of our thought; and there, released from that coarse clay which
+prisoned him, we companion him forever with the gentle and heroic of
+older lands. Douglas abides without.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p class="center"><span class="oldeng">The Riverside Press</span><br />
+
+<i><small>Electrotyped and printed by H.O. Houghton &amp; Co.<br />
+
+Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A.</small></i></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Stephen Arnold Douglas, by William Garrott Brown
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+Project Gutenberg's Stephen Arnold Douglas, by William Garrott Brown
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Stephen Arnold Douglas
+
+Author: William Garrott Brown
+
+Release Date: December 20, 2008 [EBook #27579]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Bergquist and The Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ Transcriber's Note
+
+ The punctuation and spelling from the original text have been faithfully
+ preserved. Only obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
+
+
+
+
+The Riverside Biographical Series
+
+   1. ANDREW JACKSON, by W.G. BROWN.
+   2. JAMES B. EADS, by LOUIS HOW.
+   3. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, by PAUL E. MORE.
+   4. PETER COOPER, by R.W. RAYMOND.
+   5. THOMAS JEFFERSON, by H.C. MERWIN.
+   6. WILLIAM PENN, by GEORGE HODGES.
+   7. GENERAL GRANT, by WALTER ALLEN.
+   8. LEWIS AND CLARK, by WILLIAM R. LIGHTON.
+   9. JOHN MARSHALL, by JAMES B. THAYER.
+  10. ALEXANDER HAMILTON, by CHAS. A. CONANT.
+  11. WASHINGTON IRVING, by H.W. BOYNTON.
+  12. PAUL JONES, by HUTCHINS HAPGOOD.
+  13. STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS, by W.G. BROWN.
+  14. SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN, by H.D. SEDGWICK, Jr.
+
+Each about 140 pages, 16mo, with photogravure portrait, 65 cents, _net_;
+_School Edition_, each, 50 cents, _net_.
+
+  HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
+  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+
+
+  The Riverside Biographical Series
+
+  NUMBER 13
+
+  STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS
+
+  BY
+
+  WILLIAM GARROTT BROWN
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+  STEPHEN ARNOLD
+  DOUGLAS
+
+  BY
+
+  WILLIAM GARROTT BROWN
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+  HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
+  The Riverside Press, Cambridge
+  1902
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY WILLIAM GARROTT BROWN
+
+  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+  _Published March, 1902_
+
+
+  TO J.S. JR.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAP.                            PAGE
+
+    I. YOUTH AND THE WEST             1
+
+   II. THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE      31
+
+  III. THE GREAT QUESTION            58
+
+   IV. LEADERSHIP                    82
+
+    V. THE RIVALS                   112
+
+
+  _The portrait is from a photograph by
+  Brady in the Library of the State
+  Department at Washington._
+
+
+
+
+STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+YOUTH AND THE WEST
+
+
+The ten years of American history from 1850 to 1860 have a fascination
+second only to that of the four years which followed. Indeed, unless one
+has a taste for military science, it is a question whether the great war
+itself is more absorbing than the great debate that led up to it;
+whether even Gettysburg and Chickamauga, the March to the Sea, the
+Wilderness, Appomattox, are of more surpassing interest than the
+dramatic political changes,--the downfall of the Whig party, the swift
+rise and the equally swift submergence of the Know-Nothing party, the
+birth of the Republican party, the disruption and overthrow of the
+long-dominant Democratic party,--through which the country came at last
+to see that only the sword could make an end of the long controversy
+between the North and the South.
+
+The first years of the decade were marked by the passing of one group of
+statesmen and the rise of another group. Calhoun's last speech in the
+Senate was read at the beginning of the debate over those measures which
+finally took shape as the Compromise of 1850. The Compromise was the
+last instance of the leadership of Clay. The famous Seventh of March
+speech in defense of it was Webster's last notable oration. These voices
+stilled, many others took up the pregnant theme. Davis and Toombs and
+Stephens and other well-trained Southern statesmen defended slavery
+aggressively; Seward and Sumner and Chase insisted on a hearing for the
+aggressive anti-slavery sentiment; Cass and Buchanan maintained for a
+time their places as leaders in the school of compromise. But from the
+death of Clay to the presidential election of 1860 the most resonant
+voice of them all was the voice of Stephen Arnold Douglas. It is
+scarcely too much to say that during the whole period the centre of the
+stage was his, and his the most stirring part. In 1861, the curtain fell
+upon him still resolute, vigorous, commanding. When it rose again for
+another scene, he was gone so completely that nowadays it is hard for us
+to understand what a place he had. Three biographers writing near the
+time of his death were mainly concerned to explain how he came to be
+first in the minds of his contemporaries. A biographer writing now must
+try to explain why he has been so lightly esteemed by that posterity to
+which they confidently committed his fame. Blind Tom, the negro mimic,
+having once heard him speak, was wont for many years to entertain
+curious audiences by reproducing those swelling tones in which he rolled
+out his defense of popular sovereignty, and it is not improbable that
+Douglas owes to the marvelous imitator of sounds a considerable part of
+such fame as he has among uneducated men in our time. Among historical
+students, however seriously his deserts are questioned, there is no
+question of the importance of his career.
+
+He was born April 23, 1813, at Brandon, Vermont, the son of Stephen
+Arnold Douglas and Sarah Fisk, his wife. His father, a successful
+physician, was doubtless of Scotch descent; but the founder of the
+Douglas family in America was married in Northamptonshire. He landed on
+Cape Ann in 1639-40, but in 1660 he made his home at New London,
+Connecticut. Dr. Douglas's mother was an Arnold of Rhode Island,
+descended from that Governor Arnold who was associated with Roger
+Williams in the founding of the colony. Sarah Fisk's mother was also an
+Arnold, and of the same family. Their son was therefore of good New
+England stock, and amply entitled to his middle name. Dr. Douglas died
+suddenly of apoplexy in July, 1813; it is said that he held the infant
+Stephen in his arms when he was stricken. His widow made her home with a
+bachelor brother on a farm near Brandon, and the boy's early years were
+passed in an environment familiar to readers of American biography--the
+simplicity, the poverty, the industry, and the serious-mindedness of
+rural New England. He was delicate, with a little bit of a body and a
+very large head, but quick-witted and precocious, and until he was
+fifteen years of age his elders permitted him to look forward to a
+collegiate education and a professional career.
+
+But by that time the uncle was married, and an heir was born to him.
+Stephen was therefore made to understand that the expense of his
+education could be met only from his mother's limited means. He promptly
+resolved to learn a trade, walked fourteen miles to the neighboring town
+of Middlebury, and apprenticed himself to a cabinet-maker. He worked at
+cabinet-making two years, and afterwards, even when he had risen so high
+that many of his countrymen were willing he should try his hand at
+making cabinets of men, he protested that those two years were by far
+the happiest of his life, and that he would never willingly have
+exchanged his place in the Middlebury workshop for any other place
+whatsoever. As it was, he left it because he was not strong enough for
+that sort of work.
+
+The following year he pursued his studies at the academy of Brandon.
+Then his mother married again, and he went with her to the home of his
+stepfather, Gehazi Granger, Esquire, near Canandaigua, New York, and
+finished his schooling at the Canandaigua Academy, which appears to have
+been an excellent one. Meanwhile, he also read law, and showed great
+proficiency both in his classical and his legal studies. Not much is on
+record concerning his schoolboy life. It is known, however, that he had
+a way of making his fellows like him, so that they of their own accord
+put him forward, and that he had a lively interest in politics. It is
+said that even so early as the campaign of 1828, when he was but
+fifteen, he organized a band of his playmates to make war on the "coffin
+handbills" wherewith the Adams men sought to besmirch the military fame
+of General Jackson, already become his hero. At Canandaigua, four years
+later, he espoused the same cause in debating clubs, and won an
+ascendency among his fellows by his readiness and the extent of his
+information. In the life of another man, these boyish performances
+might be set down merely as signs of promise; but Douglas was so soon
+immersed in real politics, and rose to distinction with such astounding
+swiftness, that his performances as a schoolboy may well be accounted
+the actual beginning, and not merely a premonition, of his career. He
+was only twenty, when, in June, 1833, he set forth to enter upon it.
+
+Save that he was going West, he does not seem to have had any
+destination clearly in mind. He carried letters to certain persons in
+Cleveland, and stopped there to see them, and so made the acquaintance
+of Sherlock J. Andrews, a leading lawyer of the town, who persuaded him
+to remain and read law in his office until a year should elapse and he
+could be admitted to the Ohio bar. However, in less than a week he fell
+ill of a fever which did not leave him until the expense of it had
+well-nigh emptied his slender purse. His physicians, fearing he was too
+slight and delicate for Western hardships, urged him to go back to
+Canandaigua, but when he left Cleveland he again turned westward,
+resolved in his own mind never to go back without the evidences of
+success in his life. It is doubtful if among all the thousands who in
+those days were constantly faring westward, from New England towns and
+the parishes of Virginia and the Carolinas, there ever was a youth more
+resolutely and boldly addressed to opportunity than he. Poor, broken in
+health, almost diminutive in physical stature, and quite unknown, he
+made his way first to Cincinnati, then to Louisville, then to St. Louis,
+in search of work. Coming almost to the end of his resources, he
+reasoned that it would be best for him to seek some country town, where
+his expenses would be slight; and guided merely by a book of travel he
+had read he fixed on a town which, as it happened, bore the name of his
+political patron saint. In November, 1833, being now twenty years and
+six months old, he arrived at Jacksonville, Illinois, with a sum total
+of thirty-seven cents in his pocket. The glimpses we get of him during
+his wanderings, from the recollections of certain men with whom he made
+acquaintance in stages and on river steamboats, make a curious and
+striking picture of American character. The feverish, high-strung boy
+was never dismayed and never a dreamer, but always confident,
+purposeful, good-humored.
+
+He found no work at Jacksonville, and walked to Winchester, sixteen
+miles to the southwestward, where he hoped to get work as a teacher. The
+next morning, seeing a crowd assembled in the public square of the
+village, he pushed his way to the centre and learned that there was to
+be an auction of the wares of a merchant who had recently died. The
+auctioneer was in need of a clerk to keep the record of the sales, and
+the place was offered to the young stranger. He took it, served three
+days, earned six dollars, made acquaintance with the farmers gathered
+for the sale, and got a chance in the talk about politics to display
+those qualities which he never failed to display when opportunity
+offered--the utmost readiness in debate, good-natured courtesy, and keen
+political instinct. A school was arranged for him, and within a week he
+had forty pupils entered for three months. A lawyer of the place
+befriended him with the loan of some books, and he gave his evenings to
+law and politics. When the three months were ended, he went back to
+Jacksonville and opened an office. March 4, 1834, he was licensed to
+practice, and from that time he rose faster than any man in Illinois, if
+not in the whole country, notwithstanding that he rose on the lines
+along which many and many another young American was struggling toward
+prominence, and notwithstanding that Illinois was exceptionally full, as
+later years were to prove, of young men fitted for such careers as
+Douglas sought--notwithstanding, too, that there had already drifted to
+New Salem, in the very next county, a young Kentuckian destined to such
+eminence that the Illinois of those years is oftenest studied now for
+light on him, and is most amply revealed to us in the books about him.
+
+But for the very reason that Douglas rose so fast it is not necessary,
+in order to understand how or why he rose, to study the conditions and
+men he had to deal with so carefully as they have done who seek to
+explain for us the slower progress of that strange career with which his
+is indissolubly associated. Jacksonville, which was to be his home for a
+few years, was a small country town, but it was the county seat of
+Morgan, one of the two wealthiest and most populous counties in the
+State. A few years earlier, that whole region had been a frontier, but
+the first roughness was now worn away. True, the whole northern half of
+Illinois was practically unsettled, and Chicago was but three years old,
+and not yet important. But it appears that the general character of the
+central counties was already fixed, and what followed was of the nature
+of growth rather than change. Certain small towns, like Springfield,
+were to become cities, and certain others, like New Salem, were to
+disappear. Railroads were not yet, though many were planning, and
+manufactures were chiefly of the domestic sort. But in the matter of the
+opportunities it presented to aspiring youth the country was already
+Western, and no longer wild Western. Hunting shirts and moccasins were
+disappearing. Knives in one's belt had gone out of fashion. The merely
+adventurous were passing beyond the Mississippi, and the field was open
+to the enterprising, the speculative, the ambitious.
+
+Enterprise and speculation were in the air, and ambition, if it took a
+political turn, must perforce take account of them. The whole country
+was prosperous, and Illinois was possessed with the fever of development
+then epidemic throughout the West and the South. If one examines the
+legislation of any of the States west of the Alleghanies during the
+second administration of President Jackson, by far the most numerous
+category of bills will be found to deal with internal improvements,
+particularly railroads and canals. Money, however, was needed for these
+things, and Illinois, like all new countries, had to look backward to
+older communities for capital. President Jackson had but lately made his
+final assault upon the National Bank, the principal dispenser of
+capital, by the removal of the deposits, and public opinion was much
+divided on his course, when Douglas opened his law office and began to
+discuss public questions with his neighbors. While he still lived at
+Winchester, he had helped to get subscribers for a Democratic newspaper
+at Jacksonville, and he soon called upon the editor, who was first
+surprised at his visitor's youthful appearance and then, as he himself
+tells us, at "the strength of his mind, the development of his
+intellect, and his comprehensive knowledge of the political history of
+his country."
+
+Boy as he looked, and boy as he was, for he had not yet passed his
+twenty-first birthday, Douglas actually got the leadership of the
+Jackson party in that neighborhood before he had lived there a month. An
+enthusiastic supporter of the President's policy on the bank question,
+he talked about the matter so well on Saturdays, when, according to the
+Western and Southern custom, the country people flocked into town, that
+he was put forward to move the Jackson resolutions at a mass meeting of
+Democrats which he and his friend, the editor, had contrived to bring
+about. There was a great crowd. Josiah Lamborn, an orator of some
+reputation, opposed the resolutions. Douglas replied in an hour's
+speech, discomfited Lamborn, and so swept his audience that they seized
+upon him and bore him on their shoulders out of the room and around the
+public square. He was the "Little Giant" from that day, and the speech
+became a Democratic tradition. Of course, in after years, the men who
+could say they heard it could not be expected to admit that he ever made
+a better speech in his life.
+
+Within a year, he was so well known that he was chosen to the office of
+public prosecutor, or district attorney, of the first judicial circuit,
+the most important in Illinois, and his successful candidacy for the
+place is all the more remarkable because he was chosen by the
+legislature, and not by his neighbors of the circuit. Moreover, his
+competitor, John J. Hardin, was one of the foremost men of Illinois. It
+is true that Hardin was a Whig, and that by this time there was a
+pretty clear division between Whigs and Jackson men on offices as well
+as measures, so that the contest was a party as well as a personal
+affair; but from auctioneer's clerk to district attorney was a promotion
+hardly to be won in a year by a youth of qualities less than
+extraordinary.
+
+The election was in February, 1835, and Douglas held the office the
+better part of two years. A justice of the supreme court had declared,
+on hearing of the legislature's choice, that the stripling could not
+fill the place because he was no lawyer and had no law books.
+Nevertheless, he was an efficient prosecutor. No record of his service
+is available, but there was a tradition in later years that not one of
+his indictments was quashed. Certainly, his work in the courts of the
+district increased his reputation and strengthened his hold on his own
+party. In the spring of 1836, the Democrats of Morgan held a convention
+to nominate candidates for the six seats in the house of representatives
+to which the county was entitled. This was a novel proceeding, for the
+system of conventions to nominate for office was not yet developed; the
+first of the national party conventions was held in preparation for the
+presidential campaign of 1832. Douglas was a leader in the movement, and
+as a result of it he himself was drawn into the contest. Morgan was a
+Whig county, but the solid front of the Democracy so alarmed the Whigs
+that they also abandoned the old plan of letting any number of
+candidates take the field and united upon a ticket with Hardin at its
+head. No man on the Democratic ticket was a match for Hardin. One of the
+candidates was withdrawn, therefore, and Douglas took his place, and he
+and Hardin canvassed the county together in a series of joint debates.
+Mainly through his championship, the convention plan was approved, and
+the Democrats won the election; but Hardin's vote was greater than the
+weakest Democrat's, and so the rivalry between him and Douglas was
+continued in the legislature, where they took their seats in December,
+1836.
+
+In that same house of representatives were John A. McClernand, James
+Shields, William A. Richardson, and other men who rose to national
+distinction. Abraham Lincoln, a Whig representative from Sangamon
+County, was already well known for his ungainly length of body, for his
+habit of reasoning in parables which were now scriptural and now vulgar
+to the point of obscenity, and for a quaint and rare honesty. He was
+four years older than the new member from Morgan, and nearly two feet
+taller. Douglas, many years later, declared that he was drawn to Lincoln
+by a strong sympathy, for they were both young men making an uphill
+struggle in life. Lincoln, at his first sight of Douglas, during the
+contest with Hardin for the attorneyship, pronounced him "the least man
+he ever saw."
+
+Douglas was the youngest member of an unusual house, but he at once took
+his place among the leaders. When the governor's message, animadverting
+severely on the President's course with the Bank, brought on a
+discussion of national party questions, he and Hardin seem to have won
+the chief honors of the debate. He was appointed chairman of the
+Committee on Petitions, to which numerous applications for divorce were
+referred, and introduced a resolution which passed and which put an end
+to divorces by act of the legislature. On the great question of the
+hour, the question of development and internal improvements, he declared
+that the State ought to attempt no improvement which it could not afford
+to construct and to own. He favored a few specific enterprises and the
+making of careful surveys and estimates before any others should be
+taken up. But it was the very height of "flush times" in Illinois, and
+the legislature added millions to the vast sums in which the State was
+already committed to the support of canals, railroads, river
+improvements, and banks. It was but a few weeks from the adjournment in
+March to the great financial panic of 1837, which crushed every one of
+the state-aided banks, stopped the railroad building and river dredging,
+and finally left Illinois burdened with an enormous debt. There was a
+special session of the legislature in the summer, occasioned by the
+depression and hard times which had followed so hard upon the flush
+times of the winter, but Douglas was not there to tax his associates
+with their unwisdom. He had taken another step in his unexampled career
+of office-holding by accepting from President Van Buren the office of
+register of public lands at Springfield, the growing town in Sangamon
+County which the legislature had just made the capital of the State, and
+where, within a few years, Shields, McClernand, Lincoln, and other
+rising young men were gathered.
+
+From this time, Douglas and Lincoln knew each other well, for they lived
+together several years in an atmosphere of intimate personal scrutiny.
+For searching study of one's fellows, for utter disregard of all
+superficial _criteria_ of character and conventional standards of
+conduct, there is but one sort of life to be compared with the life of a
+Southern or Western town, and that is the life of students in a
+boarding-school or a small college. In such communities there is little
+division into classes, as of rich and poor, educated and illiterate,
+well and obscurely born. On the steps of the court-house, in the
+post-office while the daily mail is sorted, in the corner drug store on
+Sundays, in lawyers' offices, on the curbstone,--wherever a group of men
+is assembled,--there is the freest talk on every possible subject; and
+the lives of men are open to their fellows as they cannot be in cities
+by reason of the mass or in country districts by reason of the solitude
+and the shyness which solitude breeds. Against Douglas there was the
+presumption, which every New England man who goes southward or westward
+has to live down, that he would in some measure hold himself aloof from
+his fellows. But the prejudice was quickly dispelled. No man entered
+more readily into close personal relations with whomsoever he
+encountered. In all our accounts of him he is represented as surrounded
+with intimates. Not without the power of impressing men with his dignity
+and seriousness of purpose, we nevertheless hear of him sitting on the
+knee of an eminent judge during a recess of the court; dancing from end
+to end of a dinner-table with the volatile Shields--the same who won
+laurels in the Mexican War, a seat in the United States Senate, and the
+closest approach anybody ever won to victory in battle over Stonewall
+Jackson; and engaging, despite his height of five feet and his weight of
+a hundred pounds, in personal encounters with Stuart, Lincoln's athletic
+law partner, and a corpulent attorney named Francis.
+
+On equal terms he mingled in good-humored rivalry with a group of
+uncommonly resourceful men, and he passed them all in the race for
+advancement. There is some reason to believe that Lincoln, strange as it
+seems, was his successful rival in a love affair, but otherwise Douglas
+left Lincoln far behind. Buoyant, good-natured, never easily abashed,
+his maturity and _savoir faire_ were accentuated by the smallness of his
+stature. His blue eyes and his dark, abundant hair heightened his
+physical charm of boyishness; his virile movements, his face,
+heavy-browed, round, and strong, and his well-formed, uncommonly large
+head gave him an aspect of intellectual power. He had a truly Napoleonic
+trick of attaching men to his fortunes. He was a born leader, beyond
+question; and he himself does not seem ever to have doubted his fitness
+to lead, or ever to have agonized over the choice of a path and the
+responsibilities of leadership. Principles he had--the principles of
+Jefferson and Jackson as he understood them. These, apparently, he held
+sufficient for every problem and every emergency of political life.
+
+He believed in party organization quite as firmly as he believed in
+party principles, and in the summer of 1837 he had a hand in building up
+the machinery of conventions and committees through which the Illinois
+Democrats have governed themselves ever since. He defended Van Buren's
+plan of a sub-treasury when many even of those who had supported
+Jackson's financial measures wavered in the face of the disfavor into
+which hard times had brought the party in power, and in November,
+although the Springfield congressional district, even before the panic,
+had shown a Whig majority of 3000, he accepted the Democratic nomination
+for the seat in Congress to be filled at the election in August, 1838,
+and threw himself with the utmost ardor into the canvass. The district
+was the largest in the whole country, for it included all the northern
+counties of the State. His opponent was John T. Stuart, Lincoln's law
+partner, and for five months the two spoke six days every week without
+covering the whole of the great region they aspired to represent. The
+northern counties had been filling up with immigrants, and more than
+36,000 votes were cast. Many ballots were thrown out on technicalities;
+most of the election officials were Whigs. After weeks of uncertainty,
+Stuart was declared elected by a majority of five. The moral effect,
+however, was a triumph for Douglas, who at the time of his nomination
+was not of the age required of congressmen.
+
+He announced that he would now devote himself to his profession. But it
+was by this time very difficult, even if he so wished, to withdraw from
+politics. He was constantly in council with the leaders of his party,
+and belonged to a sort of "third house" at Springfield which nowadays
+would probably be called a lobby. During the winter there was an angry
+controversy between the Democratic governor and the Whig senate over the
+question of the governor's right to appoint a secretary of state, the
+senate refusing to confirm his nomination of McClernand on the ground
+that the office was not vacant. The question was brought before the
+supreme court, whose Whig majority, by deciding against the governor,
+strengthened a growing feeling of discontent with the whole judiciary
+among the Democrats, and Douglas took strong ground in favor of
+reorganizing the court. In March, addressing a great meeting at
+Springfield, he defended the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798,
+and when the presidential campaign opened in November he had a debate
+with Lincoln and other Whig orators. He was, in fact, the leading
+Democratic orator throughout the campaign in Illinois, and there is no
+doubt that his enthusiasm and his shrewdness had much to do with the
+result there. Of all the Northern States, only Illinois and New
+Hampshire went for Van Buren.
+
+Meanwhile, however, he had practiced law with such success that no
+account of the Illinois bar of those days omits his name from the list
+of eminent attorneys. It was noted that whereas Lincoln was never very
+successful save in those cases where his client's cause was just, a
+client with but a slender claim upon the court's favor found Douglas a
+far better advocate. He never seems to have given much time to the
+reading of law or to the ordinary drudgery of preparing cases for trial,
+but he mastered the main facts of his cases with the utmost facility,
+and his mind went at once to the points that were sure to affect the
+decision. Early in his experience as a lawyer he had to be content with
+fees that seem absurdly small; once, he rode from Springfield to
+Bloomington to argue a case, and got but five dollars for his services.
+But he was a first-rate man of business, and soon had a good income from
+his profession.
+
+In January, 1841, the legislature, now Democratic in both branches,
+removed the Whig incumbent from the office of secretary of state, and
+the governor at once appointed Douglas to succeed him. That office,
+however, he held less than a month, for the legislature had also
+reconstructed the supreme court in such a way as to increase the number
+of judges, and in February, being then less than twenty-eight years old,
+he was named for one of the new places. One of the reasons why the court
+was reconstructed was its opposition to the Democratic position on the
+franchise question. Douglas, arguing a famous franchise case before it,
+had made himself the champion of unnaturalized inhabitants claiming the
+right to vote, and had thus established himself in the good-will of a
+large and increasing constituency throughout the State. Under the new
+law, each justice was assigned to a particular circuit,--Douglas to the
+westernmost, whose principal town was Quincy, on the Illinois River,
+where he made his home.
+
+The Mormon settlement of Nauvoo was in that circuit, and the most
+interesting of all the cases brought before Judge Douglas grew out of
+the troubles between the followers of Joe Smith and their neighbors. On
+one occasion, Joe Smith was himself on trial, and the Christian populace
+of the neighborhood, long incensed against him and his people, broke
+into the court-room clamoring for his life. The sheriff, a feeble-bodied
+and spiritless official, showed signs of yielding, and the judge,
+promptly assuming a power not vested in his office, appointed a stalwart
+Kentuckian sheriff, and ordered him to summon a _posse_ and clear the
+room. By these means the defendant's life was saved, and Douglas,
+notwithstanding various decisions of his against them, earned the
+gratitude of the religious enthusiasts. There is a story that some years
+later, when he was no longer a judge, but a major in a militia regiment
+sent on an expedition against Nauvoo, he was ordered to take a hundred
+men and arrest the "twelve apostles." The Mormons, outnumbering the
+militia, were fortified for defense. Major Douglas, however, proceeded
+alone into their lines, persuaded the twelve to enter their apostolic
+coach and come with him to the Christian camp, and so brought about an
+agreement which prevented a fight.
+
+Both as a judge and as a member of the council of revision Douglas stood
+out with commendable firmness against the popular feeling, strong
+throughout the country during the hard times, and which in some of the
+States got a complete ascendency over courts and legislatures, in favor
+of the relief of debtors. He enforced the old laws for the collection of
+debts, and he baulked several legislative schemes to defraud creditors
+of their due by declaring the new laws unconstitutional. For the rest,
+his decisions have seemed to competent critics to show that he possessed
+unusual legal ability and grasp of principles and a corresponding power
+of statement, scant as his legal training was.
+
+According to the American usage, he was "Judge Douglas" all the rest of
+his life, but the state bench no more satisfied his ambition than the
+other state offices he had held. In December, 1842, when the legislature
+proceeded to ballot for a United States senator, his name was presented,
+though again his age fell short of the legal requirement, and on the
+last ballot he had fifty-one votes against the fifty-six which elected
+his successful competitor. The next year, being nominated for the lower
+house of Congress, he accepted, and at once resigned his place on the
+bench, though the district had a Whig complexion. At the end of a
+canvass which left both himself and his opponent, Browning, seriously
+ill, he was elected by a majority of several hundred.
+
+On his way to Washington, he visited Cleveland, where his westward
+journey had come so near an abortive ending, and then his home-folk at
+Canandaigua. He was but thirty years old, yet he had held five important
+political offices, he had risen to high rank in his profession, he was
+the leader of the dominant party in a great State; and all this he had
+done alone, unaided. Few aged men have brought back such laurels from
+their Western fortune-seeking. In December, 1843, he took his seat in
+the House of Representatives and began to display before the whole
+country the same brilliant spectacle of daring, energy, and success
+which had captivated the people of Illinois.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE
+
+
+It was the aggressive energy of the man, unrestrained by such formality
+as was still observed by the public men of the older Eastern
+communities, which most impressed those who have left on record their
+judgments of the young Western congressman. The aged Adams, doubtless
+the best representative of the older school in either branch of
+Congress, gave a page of his diary to one of Douglas's early speeches.
+"His face was convulsed,"--so the merciless diary runs,--"his
+gesticulation frantic, and he lashed himself into such a heat that if
+his body had been made of combustible matter it would have burnt out. In
+the midst of his roaring, to save himself from choking, he stripped and
+cast away his cravat, unbuttoned his waistcoat, and had the air and
+aspect of a half-naked pugilist. And this man comes from a judicial
+bench, and passes for an eloquent orator!" On another occasion, the same
+critic tells us, Douglas "raved an hour about democracy and anglophobia
+and universal empire." Adams had been professor of rhetoric and oratory
+at Harvard College, and he was the last man in the country to appreciate
+an oratorical manner that departed from the established rules and
+traditions of the art. Ampere, a French traveler, thought Douglas a
+perfect representative of the energetic builders of the Western
+commonwealths, and predicted that he would come into power when it
+should be the turn of the West to dominate the country. "Small, black,
+stocky," so this observer described him, "his speech is full of nervous
+power, his action simple and strong." Douglas, however, quickly adapted
+himself to his new environment,--no man in the country excelled him in
+that art,--and took on all the polish which the Washington of that day
+demanded, without any loss of fighting spirit or any abandonment of his
+democratic manners and principles.
+
+He soon got a good opportunity to plant himself on a powerful popular
+sentiment by urging, in a really excellent speech, that the country
+should repay to the aged Jackson the fine which had been imposed upon
+him for contempt of court during the defense of New Orleans. An
+experienced opponent found him ready with a taking retort to every
+interruption. It being objected that there was absolutely no precedent
+for refunding the fine, "I presume," he replied, "that no case can be
+found on record, or traced by tradition, where a fine, imposed upon a
+general for saving his country, at the peril of his life and reputation,
+has ever been refunded." When he visited The Hermitage during the
+following summer, Jackson singled him out of a distinguished party and
+thanked him, not without reason, for defending his course at New Orleans
+better than he himself had ever been able to defend it. Douglas won
+further distinction during the session by defending, in a report from
+the committee on elections, the right of the several States to determine
+how their representatives in Congress should be chosen. Later, in a
+debate with John J. Hardin, his rival in Congress as in the Illinois
+legislature, he contrasted the Whig and Democratic positions on the
+questions of the day with so much force and skill that the speech was
+used as the principal Democratic document in the presidential campaign
+of 1844.
+
+In Congress, distinction does not always, or usually, imply power; but
+Douglas was consummately fit for the sort of struggling by which things
+are in fact accomplished at Washington. Whatever the matter in hand, his
+mind always moved with lightning rapidity to positive views. He was
+never without a clear purpose, and he had the skill and the temper to
+manage men. He knew how to conciliate opponents, to impress the
+thoughtful, to threaten the timid, to button-hole and flatter and
+cajole. He breathed freely the heated air of lobbies and committee
+rooms. Fast as his reputation grew, his actual importance in legislation
+grew faster still. At the beginning of his second term he was appointed
+chairman of the House Committee on Territories, and so was charged in
+an especial way with the affairs of the remoter West. In the course of
+that service, he framed many laws which have affected very notably the
+development of our younger commonwealths. He was particularly opposed to
+the policy of massing the Indians in reservations west of the
+Mississippi, fearing that the new Northwest, the Oregon country, over
+which we were still in controversy with Great Britain, would thus be
+isolated. To prevent this, he introduced during his first term a bill to
+organize into a territory that part of the Louisiana Purchase which lay
+north and west of Missouri. As yet, however, there were scarcely any
+white settlers in the region, and no interest could be enlisted in
+support of the bill. But he renewed his motion year after year until
+finally, as we shall see, he made it the most celebrated measure of his
+time.
+
+His advocacy of the internal improvements needed for the development of
+the West brought him in opposition to a powerful element in his own
+party. Adams, writing in his diary under date of April 17, 1844, says:
+"The Western harbor bill was taken up, and the previous question was
+withdrawn for the _homunculus_ Douglas to poke out a speech in favor of
+the constitutionality of appropriations for the improvement of Western
+rivers and harbors. The debate was continued between the conflicting
+absurdities of the Southern Democracy, which is slavery, and the Western
+Democracy, which is knavery." Under the leadership of Jackson and other
+Southerners, the Democrats, notwithstanding their long ascendency, had
+adhered to their position on internal improvements more consistently,
+perhaps, than to any other of the contentions which they had made before
+they came into power. Douglas did not, indeed, commit himself to that
+interpretation of the Constitution which justified appropriations for
+any enterprise which could be considered a contribution to the "general
+welfare," and he protested against various items in river and harbor
+bills. But as a rule he voted for the bills.
+
+He was particularly interested in the scheme for building a railroad
+which should run north and south the entire length of Illinois, and
+favored a grant of public lands to aid the State in the enterprise. For
+years, however, he had to contend with a corporation which had got from
+the State a charter for such a railroad and was now trying to get help
+from Congress. In 1843, and for several sessions thereafter, bills were
+introduced to give aid directly to the Great Western Railway Company,
+and it was mainly the work of Douglas that finally secured a majority in
+Congress for the plan of granting lands to the State, and not to the
+company. That was in 1851. To his chagrin, however, the promoters of the
+company then persuaded the Illinois legislature to pass a bill
+transferring to them whatever lands Congress might grant to the State
+for the railroad. He at once sent for Holbrook, the leading man in the
+company, and informed him that no bill would be permitted to pass until
+he and his associates should first execute a release of all the rights
+they had obtained from the legislature. Such a release they were at last
+forced to sign, the bill passed, and the Illinois Central was built. It
+became an important agency in the development, not of Illinois merely,
+but of the whole Mississippi Valley; and it is the most notable material
+result of Douglas's skill in legislation. But throughout the whole
+course of his service at Washington he never neglected, in his concern
+about the great national questions with which his name is forever
+associated, the material interests of the people whom he especially
+represented. His district and his State never had cause to complain of
+his devotion to his party and his country.
+
+But the questions which had the foremost place while he was a member of
+the lower house were questions of our foreign relations, and as it
+happened they were questions to which he could give himself freely
+without risking his distinctive role as the champion of the newer West.
+The Oregon boundary dispute and the proposed annexation of Texas were
+uppermost in the campaign of 1844, and on both it was competent for him
+to argue that an aggressive policy was demanded by Western interests and
+Western sentiment. It was in discussing the Oregon boundary that he
+first took the attitude of bitter opposition to all European, and
+particularly to all English interference in the affairs of the American
+continents which he steadily maintained thereafter. The long-standing
+agreement with Great Britain for joint occupation of the Oregon country
+he characterized as in practice an agreement for non-occupation. Arguing
+in favor of giving notice of the termination of the convention, he
+shrewdly pointed out that as the British settlers were for the most part
+fur-traders and the American settlements were agricultural, we would
+"squat them out" if no hindrance were put upon the westward movement of
+our pioneers. He would at once organize a territorial government for
+Oregon, and take measures to protect it; if Great Britain threatened
+war, he would put the country in a state of defense. "If war comes," he
+cried, "let it come. We may regret the necessity which produced it, but
+when it does come, I would administer to our citizens Hannibal's oath of
+eternal enmity. I would blot out the lines on the map which now mark our
+territorial boundaries on this continent, and make the area of liberty
+as broad as the continent itself." He even broke with the Polk
+administration when it retreated from the advanced position which the
+party had taken during the campaign, and was one of a hardy ten who, in
+the debate over the resolutions that led to the final settlement, voted
+for a substitute declaration that the question was "no longer a subject
+of negotiation and compromise." There can be little doubt that his
+hostility to England, as well as his robust Americanism, commended him
+at that time to the mass of his countrymen everywhere but in the
+commercial East.
+
+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 role 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.
+
+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 deg. 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 deg. 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.
+
+The material elements of the problem, then, were comparatively simple,
+and the immediately pressing questions were easily phrased; but the
+intangible element of public opinion was uncommonly hard to estimate. So
+far as the great parties were concerned, it was impossible to fix upon
+either of them any general theory about slavery or any definite policy
+with it. Up to this time, both had apparently gone on the understanding
+that it was not a proper issue in political contests. A small group of
+unpractical men had, in fact, tried to build up a party on the issue of
+opposition to it, but they had no prospect of carrying a single
+electoral vote. The adherents of the old parties were agreed on one
+thing: that there was no lawful way for Congress or the people of the
+free States to interfere with slavery in the slave States. They were
+divided among themselves, inside of party lines, on the fugitive slave
+law, on the interstate slave trade, on slavery and the slave trade in
+the District of Columbia, and on slavery in the Territories.
+
+But if party lines did not yet accurately represent the divisions of
+opinion on these questions, there was, nevertheless, a grouping of men
+according to their opinions on the general question which already had
+its effects in politics. Every thoughtful American of that day belonged
+to one or another of several groups according to the view he took of two
+things: slavery itself, and the body of law and usage that had grown up
+about it. There were the abolitionists, who believed slavery to be so
+utterly wrong that they were ready to go all lengths to get rid of it,
+violating the Constitution, breaking the compromises, endangering the
+Union. There were the Southern fire-eaters, who not only believed
+slavery right but were similarly willing to go all lengths to defend and
+extend it. There were the moderate men who made up the bulk of the two
+great parties in the North, who believed slavery wrong but felt
+themselves bound by the compromises of the Constitution which protected
+it where it already existed and debarred from any method of attacking it
+which might bring the Union into danger. There were the moderate men of
+the South, Whigs and Democrats alike, who believed either that slavery
+was right or at least that there was no better state possible for the
+mass of the blacks, but who were yet devoted to the Union and respected
+their constitutional obligations. Finally, there were men so constituted
+that they could decline to take any thought whether slavery were right
+or wrong, and could deal with every question that arose concerning it as
+a question of expediency merely, or of law and precedent.
+
+To which of these groups should Douglas join himself? Up to this time,
+his public record was too meagre to show clearly where he stood. In
+1845, when the bill to annex Texas was before the House, he had offered
+an amendment extending the compromise line of 1820 through the new
+State, so that if Texas were ever divided slavery would be prohibited in
+such State or States as should be formed north of that line. Both in
+the House and in the Senate he had voted against the famous resolution
+of Mr. David Wilmot to exclude slavery from any territory that we might
+get from Mexico, and he continued to oppose that motion, in whatever
+form it appeared, until the legislature of Illinois instructed him to
+favor it. In 1848, he voted for the so-called Clayton Compromise, which
+proposed to organize California, Oregon, and New Mexico into Territories
+and merely extend over them the Constitution and laws of the United
+States so far as these should prove applicable; but he also voted for
+the bill to organize the Territory of Oregon with a clause prohibiting
+slavery. By his speeches, no less than by his votes, he was committed to
+the position that the Missouri Compromise was a final settlement so far
+as the Louisiana Purchase was concerned, and that the compromise line
+ought to be extended through the Mexican Cession to the Pacific. He was
+not clearly committed on any other of the points at issue between the
+friends and the opponents of slavery.
+
+But he had roundly denounced the abolitionists, and he had married the
+daughter of a slaveholder. The day after his wedding his father-in-law
+presented him a deed to a plantation in Mississippi and a number of
+slaves. He gave it back, not, so he declared, because he thought it
+wrong to hold slaves, but because he did not know how to govern them or
+to manage a plantation. His wife soon fell heir to the land and negroes,
+and at her death they passed to her children under a will which
+requested that the blacks be not sold but kept and cared for by the
+testator's descendants. Douglas, as the guardian of his infant children,
+respected their grandfather's wishes. For that reason he was called a
+slaveholder, and a fellow senator once openly accused him of shaping his
+course as a public man to accord with his private interests. He denied
+and disproved the charge, but proudly added: "I implore my enemies, who
+so ruthlessly invade the private sanctuary, to do me the favor to
+believe that I have no wish, no aspiration, to be considered purer or
+better than she who was, or they who are, slaveholders."
+
+He was of those who could be indifferent to the moral quality of
+slavery. He could favor whatever policy the Constitution required, or
+precedents favored, or public expediency demanded; if his enemies were
+to be believed, he could take whatever course ambition and self-interest
+impelled him to. Never once during his long wrestling with the slavery
+question did he concede that any account should be taken of the moral
+character of the institution, or intimate that he believed it wrong for
+one man to hold another man in bondage.
+
+The Democratic National Convention of 1848, though its platform was as
+vague as it could be made, nominated a candidate who was committed to a
+particular plan with slavery in the Territories. The candidate was Lewis
+Cass, of Michigan, and his plan was set forth in a letter to one
+Nicholson, of Nashville, Tennessee, of date December 24, 1847. The plan
+appeared to be a very simple one. It was to leave the people of each
+Territory, so soon as it should be organized, free to regulate their
+domestic institutions as they chose. He favored it for two reasons:
+first, because Congress had no right to interfere; and second, because
+the people themselves were the best judges of what institutions they
+ought to have. That was the barest form of the doctrine which its
+opponents in derision named "squatter sovereignty." It was contrary to
+the doctrine of the Wilmot Proviso, which invoked the authority of
+Congress to exclude slavery from all the Territories, and contrary,
+also, to whatever doctrine or no doctrine was implied in the motion to
+extend the compromise line to the Pacific, exercising the authority of
+Congress to exclude slavery north of the line and forbearing to exercise
+it south of the line. It was equally contrary to a third doctrine which
+was brought before the convention. William L. Yancey, a delegate from
+Alabama, offered a resolution to the effect that neither Congress nor
+any territorial legislature had any right to exclude slave property from
+the Territories. This was a mild statement of the extreme Southern
+doctrine that slaves were property, so recognized by the Constitution,
+and that a slaveholder had the right to take his slaves anywhere but
+into a State where slavery was forbidden.
+
+The doctrine of Cass seemed to accord best with that democratic theory
+of the government which Douglas had always professed. It accorded well
+with his faith in the builders of the West. It alone, of all the
+doctrines advanced, accorded fully with his attitude of indifference to
+the moral quality of slavery. He soon embraced it, therefore, and for
+the rest of his life he was oftenest occupied embodying it in
+legislation, defending it, restating it to suit new conditions,
+modifying it to meet fresh exigencies. Cass, though his authorship of
+the doctrine is disputed, was at first held responsible for it, and he
+advocated it with great ability. But in the end men well-nigh forgot who
+the author of the principle was, so preeminent was Douglas as its
+defender. He made it his, whosesoever it was at first, and his it will
+always be in history.
+
+During the session of 1848-49, he introduced a bill to admit California
+as a State, leaving the people to settle the slavery question as they
+pleased. But his first great opportunity came in the session of 1849-50.
+
+Cass had been beaten in the election. Zachary Taylor, the successful
+candidate of the Whigs, was a Southerner and a slaveholder, but he was
+elected on a non-committal platform, and he had never declared, if
+indeed he had ever formed, any opinions on the questions in dispute. His
+first message merely notified Congress that California, whither people
+were rushing from all parts of the country in search of gold, had of her
+own motion made ready for statehood; he expressed a hope that New Mexico
+would shortly follow her example, and recommended that both be admitted
+into the Union with such constitutions as they might present.
+Immediately, the House, where the free-soilers held a balance of power,
+fell into a long wrangle over the speakership; and the Senate was soon
+in fierce debate over certain anti-slavery resolutions presented from
+the legislature of Vermont. The North seemed to be united on the Wilmot
+Proviso as it had never before been united on any measure of opposition
+to slavery, and the South, fearing to lose the fruits of her many
+victories in statesmanship, in diplomacy, and on Mexican battlefields,
+was threatening disunion if, by the admission of California as a free
+State with no slave State to balance, her equality of representation in
+the Senate should be destroyed. The portents were all of disagreement,
+struggle, disaster.
+
+But at the end of January, Henry Clay, though he had come back to the
+scene of his many stirring conflicts in the past minded to be "a calm
+and quiet looker-on," roused himself to one more essay of that
+statesmanship of compromise in which he was a master. He made a plan of
+settlement that covered all the controversies and put it in the form of
+a series of resolutions. It was to admit California with her free-state
+constitution; to organize the remainder of the Mexican Cession into
+Territories, with no restriction as to slavery; to pay Texas a sum of
+money on condition that she yielded in the dispute over the boundary
+between her and New Mexico; to prohibit the slave trade, but not
+slavery, in the District of Columbia; to leave the interstate slave
+trade alone; and to pass an effective fugitive slave law.
+
+For two days, Clay spoke for his plan. Age, though it had not bereft him
+of his consummate skill in oratory, added pathos to his genuine fervor
+of patriotism as in that profound crisis of our affairs he pleaded with
+his fellow senators and with his divided countrymen. There followed the
+most notable series of set speeches in the history of Congress. One
+after another, the old leaders, Calhoun, Webster, Benton, Cass, and the
+rest,--for all were still there,--rose and solemnly addressed themselves
+to the state of the country and the plan of settlement. All but Calhoun:
+now very near his end, he was too weak to stand or speak, and Mason, of
+Virginia, read for him, while he sat gloomily silent, his last bitter
+arraignment of the North. He was against the plan. Benton, though on
+opposite grounds, also found fault with it. Webster, to the rage and
+sorrow of his own New England, gave it his support. Then the new men
+spoke. Jefferson Davis, on whom, as Calhoun was borne away to his grave,
+the mantle of his leadership seemed visibly to fall, steadfastly
+asserted the Southern claim that slaveholders had a right to go into any
+Territory with their slaves, but offered, as the extreme concession of
+the South, to extend the Missouri line to the Pacific if property in
+slaves were protected below the line. Chase, of Ohio, impressive in
+appearance but stiff in manner, argued weightily for the
+constitutionality and rightfulness of the Wilmot Proviso. Seward, of New
+York, though the shrewdest politician of the anti-slavery forces,
+enraged the Southerners and startled the country with the announcement
+that "a higher law than the Constitution" enjoined upon Congress to
+guard these fresh lands for freedom.
+
+But none of the new men, and none of the old leaders but Clay himself,
+had such a part as Douglas in the actual settlement. He supported the
+resolutions, and as chairman of the Committee on Territories he wrote
+and introduced two bills: one to admit California, and one to organize
+the Territories of New Mexico and Utah with no restrictions as to
+slavery and to adjust the dispute with Texas. When Clay was put at the
+head of a Committee of Thirteen, to which all the subjects of dispute
+were referred, he was often in consultation with the chairman of the
+Committee on Territories. Douglas was of opinion that the various
+measures proposed would have a better chance of passing separately than
+all in one, but Clay decided to deal with California, the Territories,
+and the Texas boundary in a single measure. This, with separate bills on
+the fugitive slave law and the slave trade in the District, he reported
+early in May. The Omnibus, as the first bill was called, was simply
+Douglas's two bills joined together with a wafer: the words, "Mr. Clay,
+from the Committee of Thirteen," were substituted for the words, "Mr.
+Douglas, from the Committee on Territories." But there was one important
+change. Douglas's bill gave the territorial legislatures authority over
+all rightful subjects of legislation, subject to the Constitution, save
+that they could pass no law interfering with the primary disposal of the
+soil. Clay's committee, contrary to his wish, added the clause, "nor in
+respect to African slavery." Douglas moved to strike out the exception.
+He was voted down, but bided his time, persuaded another senator to
+renew the motion at a favorable moment, and it passed.
+
+But the Omnibus could not pass. The death of President Taylor, who would
+probably have vetoed it, brought Fillmore, a friend of the compromise,
+into the White House; but there were only a handful of senators who
+favored every one of the measures so combined. Late in July, after
+months of debate and negotiation had wearied Clay out and driven him
+from the scene, all but the part relating to Utah was stricken out, and
+with that single passenger the Omnibus went through the Senate. Then
+separately, one after another, as Douglas had advised, the other
+measures were passed. The House quickly accepted them, Fillmore signed
+them, and the last of the compromises was complete. Jefferson Davis had
+opposed it, and had often been pitted against Douglas in debate, for
+they were champions of contrary theories, but at the end he declared:
+"If any man has a right to be proud of the success of these measures, it
+is the senator from Illinois." The enterprise, indeed, was Clay's; his
+was the idea, the initiative, the general plan. It is rightly called
+Clay's compromise. But the execution of the plan was quite as much
+Douglas's work as his. When Clay died, no one had a better right than
+Douglas to inherit his place as the statesman and orator of compromise
+and conciliation.
+
+In the defense of the settlement he was no less conspicuous. Though in
+the South such extremists as Yancey and Quitman declared that the
+so-called compromise was in fact a surrender of Southern rights and a
+sufficient reason for abandoning the Union, there were Northern men
+quite as violently exercised over what seemed to them a base truckling
+to the slave power. The legislature of Illinois had formally instructed
+her senators to support the Wilmot Proviso, and Douglas had thus been
+compelled, all through the session, to vote for motion after motion to
+prohibit slavery outright in the Territories. At the end of the session,
+when he returned to his home, he found Chicago wrought up to a furor of
+protest. The city council actually voted to release officials from all
+obligation to enforce the fugitive slave law and citizens from all
+obligation to respect it. A mass meeting was about to pass resolutions
+approving this extraordinary action of the council and denouncing as
+traitors the senators and representatives who had voted for the law,
+when Douglas walked upon the stand, announced that the next evening he
+would publicly defend the measures of compromise, and demanded to be
+heard before he was condemned. A great audience, the greatest ever
+assembled in the city, listened to his defense. It was bold, skilful,
+successful. He avowed his authorship of three of the compromise
+measures, his approval of the others. He took them up one by one,
+explained them, called for objections, and answered every objection
+effectively. At the end, he proposed and carried resolutions pledging
+the meeting to stand by the Constitution and the laws, and the meeting
+voted further, with but eight or ten nays, to repudiate the resolutions
+of the council. The next night, the council met and repealed them.
+
+It seemed, in fact, that in planting himself on the compromise Douglas
+had rightly forecast the verdict of the country as a whole. An adjourned
+meeting of a Southern convention which had been called before the
+settlement with a view to some united and vigorous action took now a
+tone so mild that it allayed, instead of exciting, the fears of
+patriots. Jefferson Davis, an opponent, and Foote, a supporter of the
+settlement, went before the people of Mississippi as rival candidates
+for the governorship, and Davis was beaten. Yancey in Alabama was
+overthrown in his own party. Only South Carolina would not be
+reconciled. Throughout the North, and particularly in New England,
+attempts to resist the fugitive slave law were sometimes violent and
+occasionally successful, and Charles Sumner, from Massachusetts, and
+Wade, from Ohio, were sent to join Seward and Chase and Hale, the
+aggressive anti-slavery men in the Senate. With Sumner, whose first
+important speech was an attack upon the law, Douglas instantly engaged
+in the first of many bitter controversies. An attack on a law so clearly
+demanded by the Constitution was, he declared, an attack on the
+Constitution itself, such as no senator could make without breaking his
+oath of office. But in little more than a year the lower House of
+Congress voted by a good majority that the compromise measures should be
+regarded as a permanent settlement. In 1852, the Democrats, assembled in
+national conventions at Baltimore, indorsed them in their platform. So
+did the Whigs; and Rufus Choate, their convention orator, was excusable
+for his hyperbole when he described "with what instantaneous and mighty
+charm they calmed the madness and anxiety of the hour."
+
+Cass, in his seventieth year, was the leading candidate before the
+Democratic convention; so far as the leadership of parties can be
+determined in America, he was still the leader of the party. But
+Douglas, in his fortieth year, was pressing to the front. In the
+preliminary campaign he was put forward as the candidate of young
+America, and other State conventions than that of Illinois commended
+him. At Baltimore, his supporters were enthusiastic, aggressive,
+boisterous. His name in the long list of candidates always aroused an
+applause which showed that he was classed with Cass and Buchanan in the
+popular estimation, and not with the lesser men. Beginning with twenty
+votes on the first ballot, he rose steadily until on the thirty-first he
+led with ninety-two. But neither he nor Cass had a good following from
+the South. An expediency candidate, acceptable to the South, was found
+in Franklin Pierce, who had fought in the war with Mexico. Against him
+the Whigs pitted the commander-in-chief in the war. But Scott was
+thought to be tainted with free-soil opinions. The Democrats, more
+thoroughly united, swept the country, and the new administration came
+into power with a great majority in both houses of Congress.
+
+In neither branch of that Democratic Congress was there another man so
+fit to take the lead as Douglas. A new senator, coming to Washington in
+1852, found him already risen to the first importance there. "His power
+as a debater," said this observer, "seemed to me unequaled in the
+Senate. He was industrious, energetic, bold, and skillful in the
+management of the affairs of his party. He was the acknowledged leader
+of the Democratic party in the Senate." It should be added that he never
+lost touch with the lower House. Neither was he unmindful of the
+President's part in making laws, but no President could be less disposed
+than Pierce was to set up his will against any measure which might come
+to him stamped with the party stamp. Douglas's wife died early in 1853,
+and in the summer he made his journey to Europe. When he returned, he
+was in a position the most favorable for original and constructive
+statesmanship. By virtue of his leadership of the Senate, he was in
+effect the leader of Congress. He had the power of initiative. He was at
+the age when men are ripest for enterprises of pith and moment.
+Unhesitatingly, he advanced to the front and centre of the stage. When
+the session ended, his name was forever associated with a law that upset
+precedents and traditions, divided old parties and summoned up new ones,
+made--and unmade--history.
+
+January 4, 1854, Mr. Douglas, from the Committee on Territories,
+reported a bill to form the Territory of Nebraska out of that part of
+the Louisiana Purchase which lay west and north of Missouri.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+LEADERSHIP
+
+
+There was nothing new in the main proposal. A bill to organize this same
+Territory had passed the House the year before. It was generally
+conceded that the region ought to have a territorial government. Vast as
+it was, it had less than a thousand white inhabitants, but the overland
+route to the Pacific ran across it, and there was sure to be a rapid
+immigration into it so soon as it should be thrown open to settlers.
+What was both new and startling was a clause permitting the inhabitants
+of the Territory, whenever it should be admitted to statehood, to decide
+for themselves whether they would have slavery or not. The eighth
+section of the Compromise Act of 1820 provided that slavery should never
+exist anywhere in the Louisiana Purchase north of 36 deg. 30', North
+latitude, save in the State of Missouri.
+
+In the report which accompanied the bill, Douglas declared that it was
+based on the principles of the compromise measures of 1850. Those
+measures, he maintained, affirmed three propositions: questions relating
+to slavery in the Territories and in States to be formed out of them
+should be left to the people thereof; cases involving title to slaves
+and questions of personal freedom should be left to the local courts,
+with a right of appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States; the
+mandate of the Constitution concerning fugitive slaves applied to
+Territories as well as States. Three days later, these propositions were
+incorporated in the bill.
+
+January 16, Archibald Dixon, a senator from Kentucky, offered an
+amendment expressly repealing the eighth section of the Missouri
+Compromise law. Douglas remonstrated, but in a few days he called on
+Dixon, the two senators went for a drive, and in the course of it
+Douglas promised to accept the amendment. He was satisfied, so Dixon
+reported his conversation, that the Missouri Compromise was
+unconstitutional and that it was unfair to the South. "This proceeding,"
+he said, "may end my political career, but, acting under the sense of
+duty which animates me, I am prepared to make the sacrifice. I will do
+it." January 22, with several other congressmen, he called on Jefferson
+Davis, Secretary of War, and was by him conducted to the White House.
+Contrary to his usage, for it was Sunday, the President granted them an
+interview. At the end of it, he promised to support the repeal. The next
+day, Douglas reported a substitute for the Nebraska bill. It provided
+for two Territories, Kansas and Nebraska, instead of one; and it
+declared the eighth section of the Missouri Compromise law to be
+inoperative because it was "superseded by" the principles of the
+compromise of 1850.
+
+At the report and the bill in its first form the anti-slavery men in
+Congress took instant alarm. By the time the substitute was presented,
+the whole country knew that something extraordinary was afoot. Without
+a sign of any popular demand, without preliminary agitation or debate,
+Douglas, of Illinois, had set himself to repeal the Missouri Compromise.
+He had undertaken to throw open to slavery a great region long
+consecrated to freedom. He had written the bill of his own motion, by
+himself, in his own house. The South had not asked for the concession,
+the North had not in any wise consented to it. For a little while, in
+fact, the Southern leaders seemed to distrust the bill, for they
+distrusted Douglas; one or two of them, like Sam Houston, of Texas,
+resisted it to the last, declaring it was sure in the end to do the
+South more harm than good. But for the most part they came quickly into
+line behind Douglas, though they never generally accepted his principle
+of popular sovereignty. As to the North, the challenge of the
+Kansas-Nebraska bill met there with such a response as no Southern
+aggression had yet provoked. Through every avenue of expression--through
+the press and the pulpit, in petitions to Congress, in angry protests
+of public meetings and solemn resolves of legislatures--a hostile and
+outraged public opinion broke upon Douglas and his bill. His own party
+could not be held in line. Scores of Democratic newspapers turned
+against him. Save the legislature of Illinois, no Northern assembly,
+representative or other, that could speak with any show of authority,
+dared to support him. No Southern fire-eater was ever half so reviled.
+He could have traveled from Boston to Chicago, so he afterwards
+declared, by the light of his own burning effigies.
+
+But the firmest and clearest protest of all came from the sturdy little
+band of anti-slavery men in Congress. The day after Douglas proposed his
+substitute, it came up for debate, and Chase, of Ohio, speaking for the
+opposition, asked for more time to examine the new provisions. Douglas
+granted a week, and the next day there appeared in various newspapers an
+address to the country entitled "An Appeal of the Independent Democrats
+in Congress." Chase was the principal author of it; he and Sumner and
+four representatives signed it. They denounced the bill as a breach of
+faith, infringing the historical compact of 1820, and as part of a plot
+to extend the area of slavery; and they accused Douglas of hazarding the
+dearest interests of the American people in a presidential game.
+
+That judgment of him and of the bill was probably accepted by a majority
+of his contemporaries. For lack of Southern support, he had missed the
+Democratic nomination in 1852. It seemed clear that whatever Northern
+candidate the South should prefer would be nominated in 1856. His rivals
+were all, in one way or another, commending themselves to the South.
+Pierce was hand in glove with Davis and other Southern leaders. Marcy,
+in the Department of State, and Buchanan, in a foreign mission, were
+both working for the annexation of Cuba, a favorite Southern measure. It
+was suspected that Cass, old as he was, had it in mind to move the
+repeal when Douglas went ahead of him.
+
+The contemporaries of Douglas were under a necessity to judge his
+motives, for they had to pass upon his fitness for high office and
+great responsibilities, and no other motive than ambition was so natural
+and obvious an explanation of his course. But it is questionable if any
+such positive judgment as was necessary, and therefore right, in his
+contemporaries, is obligatory upon historians. What he did was in accord
+with a political principle which he had avowed, and it was not in
+conflict with any moral principle he had ever avowed, for he did not
+pretend to believe that slavery was wrong. True, he had once thought the
+Missouri Compromise a sacred compact; but there were signs that he had
+abandoned that opinion. It is enough to decide that he took a wrong
+course, and to point out how ambition may very well have led him into
+it. It is too much to say he knew it was wrong, and took it solely
+because he was ambitious.
+
+But if he had taken a wrong course he did not fail to do that which will
+often force us, in spite of ourselves, into admiration for a man in the
+wrong: he pursued it unwavering to the end. Neither the swelling uproar
+from without nor a resolute and conspicuously able opposition within the
+Senate daunted him for a moment. He pressed the bill to its passage with
+furious energy. He set upon Chase savagely, charging him with bad faith
+in that he had gained time, by a false pretense of ignorance of the
+bill, to flood the country with slanderous attacks upon it and upon its
+author. The audacity of the announcement that the Compromise of 1850
+repealed the Compromise of 1820 was well-nigh justified by the skill of
+his contention. It was a principle, he maintained, and no mere temporary
+expedient, for which Clay and Webster had striven, which both parties
+had indorsed, which the country had acquiesced in,--the principle of
+"popular sovereignty." That principle lay at the base of our
+institutions; it was illustrated in all the achievements of our past;
+it, and it alone, would enable us in safety to go on and extend our
+institutions into new regions. Cass, though he made difficulties about
+details, supported the bill, and the Southerners played their part well.
+But Douglas afterwards said, and truly: "I passed the Kansas-Nebraska
+act myself. I had the authority and power of a dictator throughout the
+whole controversy in both houses. The speeches were nothing. It was the
+marshaling and directing of men and guarding from attacks and with
+ceaseless vigilance preventing surprise."
+
+Chase was the true leader of the opposition, and he was equipped with a
+most thorough mastery of the slavery question in its historical and
+constitutional aspects. By shrewd amendments he sought to bring out the
+division between the Northern and Southern supporters of the bill; for
+the Southerners held that slave-owners had a constitutional right to go
+into any Territory with their property,--a right with which neither
+Congress nor a territorial legislature could interfere. Douglas,
+however, managed to avoid the danger. He made another change in the
+important clause. To please Cass and others, he made it declare that the
+Compromise of 1820 was "inconsistent with" instead of "superseded by"
+the principles of the later compromise; and then he added the words,
+"it being the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate
+slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to
+leave the inhabitants thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their
+domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution
+of the United States." That, as Benton said, was a little stump speech
+incorporated in the bill; and it proved a very effective stump speech
+indeed.
+
+Neither the logic and the accurate knowledge of Chase, nor the lofty
+invective of Sumner, nor the smooth eloquence of Everett, nor Seward's
+rare combination of political adroitness with an alertness to moral
+forces, matched, in hand to hand debate, the keen-mindedness, the
+marvelous readiness, and the headlong force of Douglas. Their set
+speeches were impressive, but in the quick fire, the
+question-and-answer, the give-and-take of a free discussion, he was the
+master of them all. When, half an hour after midnight of the third of
+March, he rose before a full Senate and crowded galleries to close the
+debate, he was at his best. Often interrupted, he welcomed every
+interruption with courtesy, and never once failed to put his assailant
+on the defensive. Now Sumner and now Chase was denying that he had come
+into office by a sacrifice of principle; now Seward was defending his
+own State of New York against a charge of infidelity to the compact of
+1820; now Everett, friend and biographer and successor of Webster, was
+protesting that he had not meant to misrepresent Webster's views.
+Always, after these encounters, Douglas knew how to come back, with a
+graver tone, to the larger issue, as if they, and not he, were trying to
+obscure it. A spectator might have fancied that these high-minded men
+were culprits, and he their inquisitor. Now and then, as when he dealt
+with the abolitionists, there was no questioning the sincerity of his
+feeling, and it stirred him to a genuine eloquence. He was not surprised
+that Boston burned him in effigy. Had not Boston closed her Faneuil Hall
+upon the aged Webster? Did not Sumner live there? And he turned upon
+the senator from Massachusetts: "Sir, you will remember that when you
+came into the Senate, and sought an opportunity to put forth your
+abolition incendiarism, you appealed to our sense of justice by the
+sentiment, 'Strike, but hear me first!' But when Mr. Webster went back
+in 1850 to speak to his constituents in his own self-defense, to tell
+the truth and to expose his slanderers, you would not hear him, but _you
+struck him first_." Again and again, as at the end of a paragraph of
+unadorned but trenchant sentences the small, firm-knit figure quivered
+with a leonine energy, the great, swart head was thrown backward, and
+the deep voice swelled into a tone of triumph or defiance, the listeners
+could not forbear to applaud. Once, even Seward broke forth: "I have
+never had so much respect for him as I have to-night."
+
+The vote in the Senate was 27 ayes to 14 noes; but in the House the
+opposition was dangerously strong, and but for the precaution of
+securing the support of the administration the bill might have failed.
+There was a fierce parliamentary battle. Richardson, Douglas's friend
+and chief lieutenant, kept the House in continuous session thirty-six
+hours trying to force through a motion to fix a term for the debate.
+Feeling rose on both sides. Personal encounters were imminent. Douglas,
+in constant attendance, watched every move of the opposition and was
+instant with the counter-move. It was a month before the bill could be
+brought to a vote, and then it passed, with a slight change, by a
+majority of thirteen. At the end of May, the President signed it, and
+Douglas, turning from the work of enacting it into law to the harder
+task of defending it before the country, beheld the whole field of
+national politics transformed. The Whig party, crushed to earth in 1852,
+made no move to take a stand on the new issue; it was dead. His own
+historical Democratic party was everywhere throughout the North in a
+turmoil that seemed to forebode dissolution. One new party, sprung
+swiftly and secretly into life on the old issue of enmity to foreigners
+and Roman Catholics, seemed to stand for the idea that the best way to
+meet the slavery issue was to run away from it. Another new party,
+conceived in the spirit of the appeal of the independent Democrats, was
+struggling to be born. State after State was falling under the power of
+the Know-Nothings; and those men, Whigs and Democrats alike, who for
+years had been awaiting an opportunity to fight slavery outside of its
+breastworks of compromise, were forming at last under the name of
+Anti-Nebraska men. Before long, they began to call themselves
+Republicans.
+
+He did not quail. Invited to pronounce the Independence Day oration at
+Philadelphia, he made of it the first thoroughgoing denunciation of the
+Know-Nothings that any eminent public man in the country had the courage
+to make. Democrats everywhere, bewildered by the mystery in which these
+new adversaries shrouded their designs, were heartened to an aggressive
+warfare. Some months later, he took the stump in Virginia, where Henry
+A. Wise had brought the Democrats firmly into line against the only
+rivals they had in the South, now that the Whigs were giving up the
+fight. The campaign was a crucial one, and the Know-Nothings never
+recovered from their defeat. Douglas's course had the merit of
+consistency as well as courage, for he had always championed the rights
+of the foreign born.
+
+The Independence Day oration was also his first popular defense of the
+Kansas-Nebraska bill. But so soon as Congress adjourned he hastened home
+to face his own people of Illinois. Chicago was once more, as in 1850, a
+centre of hostility, and he announced that he would speak there the
+evening of September first. When the time came, flags at half mast and
+the dismal tolling of church bells welcomed him. A vast and ominously
+silent crowd was gathered, but not to hear him. Hisses and groans broke
+in upon his opening sentences. Hour after hour, from eight o'clock until
+midnight, he stood before them; time and again, as the uproar lessened,
+his voice combated it; but they would not let him speak. Nothing, in
+fact, but his resolute bearing saved him from violence. On the way home,
+his carriage was set upon and he was in danger of his life.
+
+Wherever he went in Northern Illinois, similar scenes were enacted. But
+he got a hearing, and in the central counties and in "Egypt," the
+southern part of the State, where the people were largely of Virginian
+and Kentuckian descent, he was cordially received. He kept his hold upon
+his party in Illinois, and Illinois, alone of all the Northwestern
+States, would not go over completely to the opposition. The Democratic
+candidate for state treasurer was elected. The Know-Nothings and
+Anti-Nebraska men got a majority of the congressmen, and by the
+defection of certain state senators who held over from a previous
+election they were enabled to send Lyman Trumbull, Anti-Nebraska
+Democrat, to be Douglas's colleague at Washington. That, when compared
+with the results elsewhere in the North, was a striking proof of
+Douglas's power with his people. Moreover, the Democrats of the North
+who remained in the party had accepted his leadership. In the South, the
+party organization was soon free of any effective opposition. The two
+wings, so long as they were united, could still control the Senate and
+elect presidents. All would still be well, if only all went well on
+those Western plains whither Douglas declared that the slavery question
+was now banished forever from the halls of Congress.
+
+But all was not going well there. When the Kansas-Nebraska bill passed,
+Sumner exultantly exclaimed: "It sets freedom and slavery face to face,
+and bids them grapple." Nebraska was conceded to freedom, but the day
+Kansas, the southern Territory, was thrown open to settlement, a long,
+confused, confusing struggle began. The whole country was drawn into it.
+Blue lodges in the South, emigrant aid societies in the North, hurried
+opposing forces into the field. The Southerners, aided by colonized
+voters from Missouri, got control of the territorial legislature and
+passed a slave code. The Free-Soilers, ignoring the government thus
+established, gathered in convention at Topeka, formed a free state
+constitution, and demanded to be admitted into the Union as a State.
+When a new Congress assembled in December, 1855, there were two
+governments in Kansas, and the people were separated into hostile camps.
+Brawls were frequent, and it was clear that very soon, unless the
+general government intervened, there would be concerted violence. A
+force of several thousand pro-slavery men, encamped on the Wakarusa
+River, were threatening Lawrence, the principal Free-Soil town. The
+Free-Soil men were in a majority, but their course had been in disregard
+of law. The pro-slavery men were in a minority, they had resorted to
+violence and fraud, but they had followed the forms of law.
+
+President Pierce, swayed by Jefferson Davis, took the side of slavery.
+The House was nearly two months organizing, and then the President sent
+in a message to Congress denouncing the Free-Soilers for resisting the
+laws. He followed it up with a proclamation, and placed United States
+troops at the disposal of the regular territorial government. In March,
+Douglas, from his Committee on Territories, made a long report on all
+that had occurred. He, too, laid the blame on the emigrant aid
+societies. He was against the Topeka constitution, and offered, instead,
+a bill providing for the admission of Kansas, so soon as her population
+should reach 93,000, which would entitle her to one representative in
+Congress, with such constitution as her people might lawfully adopt. The
+House, with an anti-slavery majority, was for admitting Kansas at once
+with the Topeka constitution. So was the anti-slavery group in the
+Senate, now swelled into a strong minority. In the fierce debate that
+followed, Douglas had to defend the results, as well as the theory, of
+his law. Sumner was the bitterest of his assailants, and their
+controversy passed all bounds of parliamentary restraint. In Sumner's
+famous speech on the crime against Kansas, Butler, of South Carolina,
+was represented as the Don Quixote of slavery, Douglas as its Sancho
+Panza, "ready to do all its humiliating offices." The day after that
+speech, Lawrence was sacked, and civil war broke out in Kansas. The next
+day, Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, assaulted Sumner and beat him
+down on the floor of the Senate. Ten days later, the Democratic
+convention met at Cincinnati to name a candidate for the presidency.
+
+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
+role, 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
+reelection 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE RIVALS
+
+
+Hamilton and Jefferson, Clay and Jackson, Douglas and Lincoln,--these
+are the three great rivalries of American politics. The third was not
+the least. If it fell short of the others in variety of confrontments,
+if it was not so long drawn out, or accompanied with so frequent and
+imposing alignments and realignments of vast contending forces on a
+broad and national field, it surpassed them in the clearness of the sole
+and vital issue it involved, in a closer contact and measuring of
+powers, in the complete and subtle correspondence of the characters of
+the rivals to the causes for which they fought.
+
+Douglas was the very type of that instant success which waits on ability
+undistracted by doubt and undeterred by the fear of doing wrong; the
+best exemplar of that American statesmanship which accepted things as
+they were and made the most of them. Facile, keen, effective, he had
+found life a series of opportunities easily embraced. Precocious in
+youth, marvelously active in manhood, he had learned without study,
+resolved without meditation, accomplished without toil. Whatever
+obstacles he had found in his path, he had either adroitly avoided them
+or boldly overleaped them, but never laboriously uprooted them. Whatever
+subject he had taken in hand, he had swiftly compassed it, but rarely
+probed to the heart of it. With books he dealt as he dealt with men,
+getting from them quickly what he liked or needed; he was as unlikely to
+pore over a volume, and dog-ear and annotate it, as he was with
+correspondence and slow talk and silences to draw out a friendship. Yet
+he was not cold or mean, but capable of hero-worship, following with
+ardor the careers of great conquerors like Caesar and Napoleon, and
+capable, too, of loyalty to party and to men. He had great personal
+magnetism: young men, especially, he charmed and held as no other public
+man could, now Clay was dead. His habits were convivial, and the
+vicious indulgence of his strong and masculine appetites, the only
+relaxation he craved in the intervals of his fierce activities, had
+caused him frequent illnesses; but he was still a young man, even by
+American standards, for the eminence he had attained. At the full of his
+extraordinary powers, battling for the high place he had and the higher
+he aspired to, there was nowhere to be seen his equal as a debater or a
+politician,--nowhere but in the ungainly figure, now once more erected
+into a posture of rivalry and defiance, of the man whom he had long ago
+outstripped and left behind him in the home of their common beginnings.
+
+Slower of growth, and devoid altogether of many brilliant qualities
+which his rival possessed, Lincoln nevertheless outreached him by the
+measure of the two gifts the other lacked: the twin gifts of humor and
+of brooding melancholy. Bottomed by the one in homeliness, his character
+was by the other drawn upward to the height of human nobility and
+aspiration. His great capacity of pain, which but for his buffoonery
+would no doubt have made him mad, was the source of his rarest
+excellencies. Familiar with squalor, and hospitable to vulgarity, his
+mind was yet tenanted by sorrow, a place of midnight wrestlings. In him,
+as never before in any other man, were high and low things mated, and
+awkwardness and ungainliness and uncouthness justified in their uses. At
+once coarser than his rival and infinitely more refined and gentle, he
+had mastered lessons which the other had never found the need of
+learning, or else had learned too readily and then dismissed. He had
+thoroughness for the other's competence; insight into human nature, and
+a vast sympathy, for the other's facile handling of men; a deep devotion
+to the right for the other's loyalty to party platforms. The very core
+of his nature was truth, and he himself is reported to have said of
+Douglas that he cared less for the truth, as the truth, than any other
+man he knew.
+
+Hanging for some years upon the heels of his rival's rapid ascent,
+Lincoln had entered the House as Douglas left it for the Senate, but at
+the end of the term he retired from politics baffled and discouraged.
+Tortured with the keen apprehension of a form and grace into which he
+could never mould his crudeness, tantalized with a sense that there must
+be a way for him to get a hold on his fellows and make a figure in the
+history of his times, he had watched the power of Douglas grow and the
+fame of Douglas spread until it seemed that Douglas's voice was always
+speaking and Douglas's hand was everywhere. Patiently working out the
+right and wrong of the fateful question Douglas dealt with so boldly, he
+came into the impregnable position of such as hated slavery and yet
+forbore to violate its sanctuary. Suddenly, with the repeal of the
+Missouri Compromise, Douglas himself had opened a path for him. He went
+back into politics, and took a leading part in the Anti-Nebraska
+movement. Whenever opportunity offered, he combated Douglas on the
+stump. The year Trumbull won the senatorship, Lincoln had first come
+within a few votes of it. Risen now to the leadership of the
+Republicans in Illinois, he awaited Douglas at Chicago, listened to his
+opening speech, answered it the next evening, followed him into the
+centre of the State, and finally proposed a series of joint debates
+before the people. Douglas hesitated, but accepted, and named seven
+meeting-places: Ottawa and Freeport, in the northern stronghold of the
+Republicans; Galesburg, Quincy, and Charleston, in a region where both
+parties had a good following; and Jonesboro and Alton, which were in
+"Egypt." The first meeting was at Ottawa, in August; the last, at Alton,
+in the middle of October. Meanwhile, both spoke incessantly at other
+places, Douglas oftener than once a day. First the fame of Douglas, and
+then Lincoln's unexpected survival of the early meetings, drew the eyes
+of the whole country upon these two foremost Americans of their
+generation, face to face there on the Western prairie, fighting out the
+great question of the times.
+
+Elevated side by side on wooden platforms in the open air, thrown into
+relief against the low prairie sky line, the two figures take strong
+hold upon the imagination: the one lean, long-limbed, uncommonly tall;
+the other scarce five feet high, but compact, manful, instinct with
+energy, and topped with its massive head. In voice and gesture and
+manner, Douglas was incomparably the superior, as he was, too, in the
+ready command of a language never, indeed, ornate or imaginative, and
+sometimes of the quality of political commonplace, but always forcible
+and always intelligible to his audience. Lincoln had the sense of words,
+the imagination, the intensity of feeling, which go to the making of
+great literature; but for his masterpieces he always needed time. His
+voice was high and strained, his gestures ungraceful, his manner
+painful, save in the recital of those passages which he had carefully
+prepared or when he was freed of his self-consciousness by anger or
+enthusiasm. Neither of them, in any single speech, could be compared to
+Webster in the other of the two most famous American debates, but the
+series was a remarkable exhibition of forensic power. The interest grew
+as the struggle lengthened. People traveled great distances to hear
+them. At every meeting-place, a multitude of farmers and dwellers in
+country towns, with here and there a sprinkling of city-folk, crowded
+about the stand where "Old Abe" and the "Little Giant" turned and
+twisted and fenced for an opening, grappled and drew apart, clinched and
+strained and staggered,--but neither fell. The wonder grew that Lincoln
+stood up so well under the onslaughts of Douglas, at once skillful and
+reckless, held him off with so firm a hand, gripped him so shrewdly.
+Now, the wonder is that Douglas, wrestling with the man and the cause of
+a century, kept his feet and held his own.
+
+He was fighting, too, with an enemy in the rear. When he turned to
+strike at the administration, Lincoln would call out: "Go it, husband!
+Go it, bear!" Apart from that diversion, however, the debate, long and
+involved as it was, followed but three general lines. The whole is
+resolvable into three elements,--personalities, politics, and
+principles. There were the attacks which each made upon the other's
+record; the efforts which each made to weaken the other's position
+before the people; and the contrary views which were advanced.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+It was a hard time to die. War was at hand, and his strong nature
+stirred at the call. Plunged in his youth into affairs, and wonted all
+his life to action, he had played a man's part in great events, and
+greater were impending. He had taken many blows of men and circumstance,
+and stormy times might bring redress. He was a leader, and for want of
+him a great party must go leaderless and stumbling to a long series of
+defeats. He was a true American, and his country was in danger. He was
+ambitious, and his career was not rightly finished. He was the second
+man in the Republic, and he might yet be the first.
+
+But first he never could have been while Lincoln lived, nor ever could
+have got a hold like Lincoln's on his kind. His place is secure among
+the venturesome, strong, self-reliant men who in various ages and
+countries have for a time hastened, or stayed, or diverted from its
+natural channel the great stream of affairs. The sin of his ambition is
+forgiven him for the good end he made. But for all his splendid energy
+and his brilliant parts, for all the charm of his bold assault on
+fortune and his dauntless bearing in adversity, we cannot turn from him
+to his rival but with changed and softened eyes. For Lincoln, indeed, is
+one of the few men eminent in politics whom we admit into the hidden
+places of our thought; and there, released from that coarse clay which
+prisoned him, we companion him forever with the gentle and heroic of
+older lands. Douglas abides without.
+
+
+
+
+  The Riverside Press
+
+  _Electrotyped and printed by H.O. Houghton & Co._
+
+  _Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A._
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Stephen Arnold Douglas, by William Garrott Brown
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