The legislature met in December, 1842, to chose a Senator. Douglas
still lacked six months of the thirty years required, but came
within five votes of the election.
In the following spring he received the Democratic nomination for
Congress and resigned his judgeship to enter the campaign. The
District included eleven large counties in the western part of the
State. O. H. Browning of Quincy, a lawyer of ability, destined to
a distinguished political career and to succeed to Douglas' vacant
seat in the Senate twenty years later, was the Whig candidate.
They held a long series of joint discussions, addressed scores of
audiences and so exhausted themselves that both were prostrated
with serious sickness after the campaign. The questions discussed
are as completely obsolete as the political issues of the
ante-diluvians. Douglas was elected by a small majority.
He was in Washington at the opening of Congress and entered upon
his eventful and brilliant career on that elevated theatre, though
he was as yet only the crude material out of which a statesman
might be evolved. He was a vigorous, pushing Western politician,
with half developed faculties and vague, unlimited ambition, whose
early congressional service gave small promise of the great leader
of after years.
The famous description of him contained in the Adams diary relates
to this period of his life. The venerable ex-President, then
a Member of the House, mentions him as the homunculus Douglas and
with acrid malevolence describes him as raving out his hour in
abusive invectives, his face convulsed, his gesticulation frantic,
and lashing himself into such heat that if his body had been made
of combustible matter it would have burned out.
"In the midst of his roaring," he declares, "to save himself from
choking, he stripped off and cast away his cravat, unbuttoned his
waistcoat and had the air and aspect of a half-naked pugilist."
With all its extravagance and exaggeration, it is impossible to
doubt the substantial truth of this charicature. Adams did not
live to see the young Member become the most powerful debater, the
most accomplished political leader and most influential statesman
of the great and stirring period that ensued.
The time was strange, as difficult of comprehension to the generation
that has grown up since the War as the England of Hengist and Horsa
is to the modern Cockney, or the Rome of Tiberius to the present
inhabitant of the Palentine Hill. Only sixty years have passed, but
with them has passed away civilization, with its modes of thought
and sentiment, its ethics and its politics. The country had
but one fifth of its present population. A third of our area was
still held by Mexico. Wealth was as yet the poet's dream or the
philosopher's night-mare. Commerce was a subordinate factor in
our civilization. Agriculture was the occupation of the people
and the source of wealth. Cotton was king not only in the field
of business, but in that of politics. The world still maintained
its attitude of patronizing condescension or haughty contempt toward
the dubious experiment of "broad and rampant democracy." Dickens
had just written his shallow twaddle about Yankee crudeness and
folly. Macaulay was soon to tell us that our Constitution was "all
sail and no anchor." DeTocqueville had but recently published his
appreciative estimate of the New World civilization. Americans knew
they had less admiration than they claimed and had lurking doubts
that there was some ground for the ill-concealed contempt of the Old
World toward the swaggering giant of the New, and a fixed resolve
to proclaim their supreme greatness with an energy and persistence
that would drown the sneers of all Europe. It was a time of
egotism, bluster and brag in our relation to the foreign world, and
of truckling submission in our home politics to a dominant power,
long since so completely whirled away by the storm of revolution,
that it is hard to realize that half a century ago the strongest
bowed to its will.
Douglas was in no sense a reformer or the preacher of a crusade.
He was ready to cheerfully accept the ethics of the time without
criticism or question. Political morality was at its nadir.
The dominant power of slavery was not alone responsible for this
depravity. The country was isolated from the world and little
influenced by foreign thought. Its energies were devoted to material
aggrandizement, to the conquest of Nature on a gigantic scale, to
the acquisition of wealth. Since the settlement of the Constitution
moral problems had dropped out of political life and the great
passions of the heroic age had died away. Education was superficial.
Religion was emotional and spasmodic. Business ethics was low.
Party politics was in a chaotic condition. The Whig organization
was not in any proper sense a party at all. It was an ill-assorted
aggregation of political elements, without common opinions or united
purposes, whose only proper function was opposition. It was so
utterly incoherent, its convictions so vague and negative, that it
was unable even to draft a platform. Without any formal declaration
of principles or purposes it had nominated and elected Harrison
and Tyler, one a distinguished soldier and respectable Western
politician, the other a renegade Virginia Democrat, whose Whiggism
consisted solely of a temporary quarrel with his own party. The
one unanimous opinion of the party was that it was better for
themselves, if not for the country, that the Whigs should hold
the offices. The Democrats had been in control of the Government
for forty years. Their professed principles were still broadly
Jeffersonian. Their platform consisted mainly of a denial of all
power in the Federal Government to do anything or prevent anything,
the extravagant negations borrowed from the republican philosophers
of England and the French Revolutionists.
But a half century of power had produced a marked diversion
of practice from principles, and, in spite of its open abnegation
of power, the Government had become a personal despotism under
Jackson, which had vainly struggled to perpetuate itself through
the Administration of VanBuren. But notwithstanding the absurd
discrepancy of their practical and theoretical politics, the
Democrats had one great advantage over the Whigs in having a large
and influential body of men united in interest, compelled to defend
themselves against aggression, prepared unflinchingly to take the
initiative, to whom politics was not a philosophic theory but a
serious matter of business.
The slave-holding aristocracy of the South was the only united,
organized, positive political force in the country. With the
personal tastes of aristocrats and the domestic habits of despots,
they were staunchly Democratic in their politics and had full control
of the party. They had positive purposes and aggressive courage.
A crisis had come which they only had the ability and energy to
meet. The control of affairs was in the hands of the timid Whigs.
Decisive measures were needed. By a peaceful revolution they seized
the Government out of the hands of the Whigs in the midst of the
Administration and embarked on a career of Democratic conquest.
President Tyler, having quarreled with his party, eager to
accomplish something striking in the closing hours of his abortive
Administration, with unseemly haste rushed through the annexation
of Texas under a joint resolution of Congress. Mr. Polk, the new
President, did not hesitate in carrying out the manifest will of
the people and the imperious behest of his party. The South was
clamoring for more territory for the extension of slavery. The West
was aggressive and eager for more worlds to conquer. New England,
impelled by hatred of slavery and jealousy of the rising importance
of the West, opposed the entire project and earnestly protested
against annexation.
In the feverish dreams of the slavery propagandists rose chimerical
projects of conquest and expansion at which a Caesar or an Alexander
would have stood aghast. Mexico and Central America were contemplated
as possible additions to the magnificent slave empire which they
saw rising out of the mists of the future. They began to talk of
the Caribbean Sea as an inland lake, of Cuba and the West Indies
as outlying dependencies, of the Pacific as their western coast,
and of the States that should thereafter be carved out of South
America. The enduring foundation of this tropical empire was to
be African slavery, and the governing power was to rest permanently
in the hands of a cultured aristocracy of slave-holders. The people
of the North-Atlantic States and heir descendents in the Northwest,
who churlishly held aloof from these intoxicating dreams, were to
be treated with generous justice and permitted to go in peace or
continue a minor adjunct of the great aristocratic Republic. Already
the irrepressible conflict had begun.
Douglas heartily accepted the plans of his party. He was by
temperament an ardent expansionist, a firm believer in the manifest
destiny of his country to rule the Western Continent, a pronounced
type of exuberant young Americanism. He was an unflinching partisan
seeking to establish himself in the higher councils of his party,
which was committed to this scheme of conquest. On May 13th,
1846, he delivered in the House a speech, in which he defended the
course of the Administration in regard to the Mexican War and, in
a spirited colloquy, instructed the venerable John Quincy Adams in
the principles of international law. He based his defense of the
war upon the treaty with Santa Anna recognizing the independence
of Texas. Adams suggested that at the time of its execution Santa
Anna was a prisoner incapable of making a treaty. Douglas insisted
that, even though a captive, he was a de facto government whose
acts were binding upon the country, and to establish his proposition
cited the case of Cromwell who, during his successful usurpation,
bound England by many important treaties. The niceties of international
law were not very punctiliously observed. His arguments were warmly
received by men already resolved on a career of conquest.
The war was a romantic military excursion through the heart of
Mexico. There were battles between the triumphant invaders and
the demoralized natives, which were believed entitled to rank among
the supreme achievements of genius and courage. Americans had not
yet acquired that deep knowledge of carnage, those stern conceptions
of war, which they were destined soon to gain. Military glory and
imperial conquest have rarely been so cheaply won. The war gave
enduring fame to the commanding generals and shed a real luster
over the lives of thousands of men.
The material results were stupendous. We acquired nearly twelve
hundred thousand square miles of territory--a region one-third larger
than the area of the United States at the close of the Revolution.
The extravagant dream of making the Pacific the western boundary
of the Republic was realized and no one seriously doubted that this
vast domain was surrendered to slavery.