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 originaly 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.