The fathers had rather a hazy view of the future. I was witness to the
decline and fall of the old Whig Party and the rise of the Republican
Party. There was a brief lull in sectional excitement after the
Compromise Measures of 1850, but the overwhelming defeat of the Whigs
in 1852 and the dominancy of Mr. Jefferson Davis in the cabinet of Mr.
Pierce brought the agitation back again. Mr. Davis was a follower of
Mr. Calhoun—though it may be doubted whether Mr. Calhoun would ever
have been willing to go to the length of secession—and Mr. Pierce being
by temperament a Southerner as well as in opinions a pro-slavery
Democrat, his Administration fell under the spell of the ultra Southern
wing of the party. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill was originally harmless
enough, but the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which on Mr. Davis’
insistence was made a part of it, let slip the dogs of war.
In Stephen A. Douglas was found an able and pliant instrument. Like
Clay, Webster and Calhoun before him, Judge Douglas had the
presidential bee in his bonnet. He thought the South would, as it
could, nominate and elect him President.
Personally he was a most lovable man—rather too convivial—and for a
while in 1852 it looked as though he might be the Democratic nominee.
His candidacy was premature, his backers overconfident and indiscreet.
“I like Douglas and am for him,” said Buck Stone, a member of Congress
and delegate to the National Democratic Convention from Kentucky,
“though I consider him a good deal of a damn fool.” Pressed for a
reason he continued; “Why, think of a man wanting to be President at
forty years of age, and obliged to behave himself for the rest of his
life! I wouldn’t take the job on any such terms.”
The proposed repeal of the Missouri Compromise opened up the slavery
debate anew and gave it increased vitality. Hell literally broke loose
among the political elements. The issues which had divided Whigs and
Democrats went to the rear, while this one paramount issue took
possession of the stage. It was welcomed by the extremists of both
sections, a very godsend to the beaten politicians led by Mr. Seward.
Rampant sectionalism was at first kept a little in the background.
There were on either side concealments and reserves. Many patriotic men
put the Union above slavery or antislavery. But the two sets of rival
extremists had their will at last, and in seven short years deepened
and embittered the contention to the degree that disunion and war
seemed, certainly proved, the only way out of it.
The extravagance of the debates of those years amazes the modern
reader. Occasionally when I have occasion to recur to them I am myself
nonplussed, for they did not sound so terrible at the time. My father
was a leader of the Union wing of the Democratic Party—headed in 1860
the Douglas presidential ticket in Tennessee—and remained a Unionist
during the War of Sections. He broke away from Pierce and retired from
the editorship of the Washington Union upon the issue of the repeal of
the Missouri Compromise, to which he was opposed, refusing the
appointment of Governor of Oregon, with which the President sought to
placate him, though it meant his return to the Senate of the United
States in a year or two, when he and Oregon’s delegate in Congress,
Gen. Joseph Lane—the Lane of the Breckenridge and Lane ticket of
1860—had brought the territory of Oregon in as a state.
I have often thought just where I would have come in and what might
have happened to me if he had accepted the appointment and I had grown
to manhood on the Pacific Coast. As it was I attended a school in
Philadelphia—the Protestant Episcopal Academy—came home to Tennessee in
1856, and after a season with private tutors found myself back in the
national capital in 1858.
It was then that I began to nurse some ambitions of my own. I was going
to be a great man of letters. I was going to write histories and dramas
and romances and poetry. But as I had set up for myself I felt in honor
bound meanwhile to earn my own living.