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.