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.