LEADERSHIP
There was nothing new in the main proposal. A bill to organize this same
Territory had passed the House the year before. It was generally
conceded that the region ought to have a territorial government. Vast as
it was, it had less than a thousand white inhabitants, but the overland
route to the Pacific ran across it, and there was sure to be a rapid
immigration into it so soon as it should be thrown open to settlers.
What was both new and startling was a clause permitting the inhabitants
of the Territory, whenever it should be admitted to statehood, to decide
for themselves whether they would have slavery or not. The eighth
section of the Compromise Act of 1820 provided that slavery should never
exist anywhere in the Louisiana Purchase north of 36 deg. 30', North
latitude, save in the State of Missouri.
In the report which accompanied the bill, Douglas declared that it was
based on the principles of the compromise measures of 1850. Those
measures, he maintained, affirmed three propositions: questions relating
to slavery in the Territories and in States to be formed out of them
should be left to the people thereof; cases involving title to slaves
and questions of personal freedom should be left to the local courts,
with a right of appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States; the
mandate of the Constitution concerning fugitive slaves applied to
Territories as well as States. Three days later, these propositions were
incorporated in the bill.
January 16, Archibald Dixon, a senator from Kentucky, offered an
amendment expressly repealing the eighth section of the Missouri
Compromise law. Douglas remonstrated, but in a few days he called on
Dixon, the two senators went for a drive, and in the course of it
Douglas promised to accept the amendment. He was satisfied, so Dixon
reported his conversation, that the Missouri Compromise was
unconstitutional and that it was unfair to the South. "This proceeding,"
he said, "may end my political career, but, acting under the sense of
duty which animates me, I am prepared to make the sacrifice. I will do
it." January 22, with several other congressmen, he called on Jefferson
Davis, Secretary of War, and was by him conducted to the White House.
Contrary to his usage, for it was Sunday, the President granted them an
interview. At the end of it, he promised to support the repeal. The next
day, Douglas reported a substitute for the Nebraska bill. It provided
for two Territories, Kansas and Nebraska, instead of one; and it
declared the eighth section of the Missouri Compromise law to be
inoperative because it was "superseded by" the principles of the
compromise of 1850.
At the report and the bill in its first form the anti-slavery men in
Congress took instant alarm. By the time the substitute was presented,
the whole country knew that something extraordinary was afoot. Without
a sign of any popular demand, without preliminary agitation or debate,
Douglas, of Illinois, had set himself to repeal the Missouri Compromise.
He had undertaken to throw open to slavery a great region long
consecrated to freedom. He had written the bill of his own motion, by
himself, in his own house. The South had not asked for the concession,
the North had not in any wise consented to it. For a little while, in
fact, the Southern leaders seemed to distrust the bill, for they
distrusted Douglas; one or two of them, like Sam Houston, of Texas,
resisted it to the last, declaring it was sure in the end to do the
South more harm than good. But for the most part they came quickly into
line behind Douglas, though they never generally accepted his principle
of popular sovereignty. As to the North, the challenge of the
Kansas-Nebraska bill met there with such a response as no Southern
aggression had yet provoked. Through every avenue of expression--through
the press and the pulpit, in petitions to Congress, in angry protests
of public meetings and solemn resolves of legislatures--a hostile and
outraged public opinion broke upon Douglas and his bill. His own party
could not be held in line. Scores of Democratic newspapers turned
against him. Save the legislature of Illinois, no Northern assembly,
representative or other, that could speak with any show of authority,
dared to support him. No Southern fire-eater was ever half so reviled.
He could have traveled from Boston to Chicago, so he afterwards
declared, by the light of his own burning effigies.
But the firmest and clearest protest of all came from the sturdy little
band of anti-slavery men in Congress. The day after Douglas proposed his
substitute, it came up for debate, and Chase, of Ohio, speaking for the
opposition, asked for more time to examine the new provisions. Douglas
granted a week, and the next day there appeared in various newspapers an
address to the country entitled "An Appeal of the Independent Democrats
in Congress." Chase was the principal author of it; he and Sumner and
four representatives signed it. They denounced the bill as a breach of
faith, infringing the historical compact of 1820, and as part of a plot
to extend the area of slavery; and they accused Douglas of hazarding the
dearest interests of the American people in a presidential game.
That judgment of him and of the bill was probably accepted by a majority
of his contemporaries. For lack of Southern support, he had missed the
Democratic nomination in 1852. It seemed clear that whatever Northern
candidate the South should prefer would be nominated in 1856. His rivals
were all, in one way or another, commending themselves to the South.
Pierce was hand in glove with Davis and other Southern leaders. Marcy,
in the Department of State, and Buchanan, in a foreign mission, were
both working for the annexation of Cuba, a favorite Southern measure. It
was suspected that Cass, old as he was, had it in mind to move the
repeal when Douglas went ahead of him.
The contemporaries of Douglas were under a necessity to judge his
motives, for they had to pass upon his fitness for high office and
great responsibilities, and no other motive than ambition was so natural
and obvious an explanation of his course. But it is questionable if any
such positive judgment as was necessary, and therefore right, in his
contemporaries, is obligatory upon historians. What he did was in accord
with a political principle which he had avowed, and it was not in
conflict with any moral principle he had ever avowed, for he did not
pretend to believe that slavery was wrong. True, he had once thought the
Missouri Compromise a sacred compact; but there were signs that he had
abandoned that opinion. It is enough to decide that he took a wrong
course, and to point out how ambition may very well have led him into
it. It is too much to say he knew it was wrong, and took it solely
because he was ambitious.
But if he had taken a wrong course he did not fail to do that which will
often force us, in spite of ourselves, into admiration for a man in the
wrong: he pursued it unwavering to the end. Neither the swelling uproar
from without nor a resolute and conspicuously able opposition within the
Senate daunted him for a moment. He pressed the bill to its passage with
furious energy. He set upon Chase savagely, charging him with bad faith
in that he had gained time, by a false pretense of ignorance of the
bill, to flood the country with slanderous attacks upon it and upon its
author. The audacity of the announcement that the Compromise of 1850
repealed the Compromise of 1820 was well-nigh justified by the skill of
his contention. It was a principle, he maintained, and no mere temporary
expedient, for which Clay and Webster had striven, which both parties
had indorsed, which the country had acquiesced in,--the principle of
"popular sovereignty." That principle lay at the base of our
institutions; it was illustrated in all the achievements of our past;
it, and it alone, would enable us in safety to go on and extend our
institutions into new regions. Cass, though he made difficulties about
details, supported the bill, and the Southerners played their part well.
But Douglas afterwards said, and truly: "I passed the Kansas-Nebraska
act myself. I had the authority and power of a dictator throughout the
whole controversy in both houses. The speeches were nothing. It was the
marshaling and directing of men and guarding from attacks and with
ceaseless vigilance preventing surprise."
Chase was the true leader of the opposition, and he was equipped with a
most thorough mastery of the slavery question in its historical and
constitutional aspects. By shrewd amendments he sought to bring out the
division between the Northern and Southern supporters of the bill; for
the Southerners held that slave-owners had a constitutional right to go
into any Territory with their property,--a right with which neither
Congress nor a territorial legislature could interfere. Douglas,
however, managed to avoid the danger. He made another change in the
important clause. To please Cass and others, he made it declare that the
Compromise of 1820 was "inconsistent with" instead of "superseded by"
the principles of the later compromise; and then he added the words,
"it being the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate
slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to
leave the inhabitants thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their
domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution
of the United States." That, as Benton said, was a little stump speech
incorporated in the bill; and it proved a very effective stump speech
indeed.
Neither the logic and the accurate knowledge of Chase, nor the lofty
invective of Sumner, nor the smooth eloquence of Everett, nor Seward's
rare combination of political adroitness with an alertness to moral
forces, matched, in hand to hand debate, the keen-mindedness, the
marvelous readiness, and the headlong force of Douglas. Their set
speeches were impressive, but in the quick fire, the
question-and-answer, the give-and-take of a free discussion, he was the
master of them all. When, half an hour after midnight of the third of
March, he rose before a full Senate and crowded galleries to close the
debate, he was at his best. Often interrupted, he welcomed every
interruption with courtesy, and never once failed to put his assailant
on the defensive. Now Sumner and now Chase was denying that he had come
into office by a sacrifice of principle; now Seward was defending his
own State of New York against a charge of infidelity to the compact of
1820; now Everett, friend and biographer and successor of Webster, was
protesting that he had not meant to misrepresent Webster's views.
Always, after these encounters, Douglas knew how to come back, with a
graver tone, to the larger issue, as if they, and not he, were trying to
obscure it. A spectator might have fancied that these high-minded men
were culprits, and he their inquisitor. Now and then, as when he dealt
with the abolitionists, there was no questioning the sincerity of his
feeling, and it stirred him to a genuine eloquence. He was not surprised
that Boston burned him in effigy. Had not Boston closed her Faneuil Hall
upon the aged Webster? Did not Sumner live there? And he turned upon
the senator from Massachusetts: "Sir, you will remember that when you
came into the Senate, and sought an opportunity to put forth your
abolition incendiarism, you appealed to our sense of justice by the
sentiment, 'Strike, but hear me first!' But when Mr. Webster went back
in 1850 to speak to his constituents in his own self-defense, to tell
the truth and to expose his slanderers, you would not hear him, but _you
struck him first_." Again and again, as at the end of a paragraph of
unadorned but trenchant sentences the small, firm-knit figure quivered
with a leonine energy, the great, swart head was thrown backward, and
the deep voice swelled into a tone of triumph or defiance, the listeners
could not forbear to applaud. Once, even Seward broke forth: "I have
never had so much respect for him as I have to-night."
The vote in the Senate was 27 ayes to 14 noes; but in the House the
opposition was dangerously strong, and but for the precaution of
securing the support of the administration the bill might have failed.
There was a fierce parliamentary battle. Richardson, Douglas's friend
and chief lieutenant, kept the House in continuous session thirty-six
hours trying to force through a motion to fix a term for the debate.
Feeling rose on both sides. Personal encounters were imminent. Douglas,
in constant attendance, watched every move of the opposition and was
instant with the counter-move. It was a month before the bill could be
brought to a vote, and then it passed, with a slight change, by a
majority of thirteen. At the end of May, the President signed it, and
Douglas, turning from the work of enacting it into law to the harder
task of defending it before the country, beheld the whole field of
national politics transformed. The Whig party, crushed to earth in 1852,
made no move to take a stand on the new issue; it was dead. His own
historical Democratic party was everywhere throughout the North in a
turmoil that seemed to forebode dissolution. One new party, sprung
swiftly and secretly into life on the old issue of enmity to foreigners
and Roman Catholics, seemed to stand for the idea that the best way to
meet the slavery issue was to run away from it. Another new party,
conceived in the spirit of the appeal of the independent Democrats, was
struggling to be born. State after State was falling under the power of
the Know-Nothings; and those men, Whigs and Democrats alike, who for
years had been awaiting an opportunity to fight slavery outside of its
breastworks of compromise, were forming at last under the name of
Anti-Nebraska men. Before long, they began to call themselves
Republicans.
He did not quail. Invited to pronounce the Independence Day oration at
Philadelphia, he made of it the first thoroughgoing denunciation of the
Know-Nothings that any eminent public man in the country had the courage
to make. Democrats everywhere, bewildered by the mystery in which these
new adversaries shrouded their designs, were heartened to an aggressive
warfare. Some months later, he took the stump in Virginia, where Henry
A. Wise had brought the Democrats firmly into line against the only
rivals they had in the South, now that the Whigs were giving up the
fight. The campaign was a crucial one, and the Know-Nothings never
recovered from their defeat. Douglas's course had the merit of
consistency as well as courage, for he had always championed the rights
of the foreign born.
The Independence Day oration was also his first popular defense of the
Kansas-Nebraska bill. But so soon as Congress adjourned he hastened home
to face his own people of Illinois. Chicago was once more, as in 1850, a
centre of hostility, and he announced that he would speak there the
evening of September first. When the time came, flags at half mast and
the dismal tolling of church bells welcomed him. A vast and ominously
silent crowd was gathered, but not to hear him. Hisses and groans broke
in upon his opening sentences. Hour after hour, from eight o'clock until
midnight, he stood before them; time and again, as the uproar lessened,
his voice combated it; but they would not let him speak. Nothing, in
fact, but his resolute bearing saved him from violence. On the way home,
his carriage was set upon and he was in danger of his life.
Wherever he went in Northern Illinois, similar scenes were enacted. But
he got a hearing, and in the central counties and in "Egypt," the
southern part of the State, where the people were largely of Virginian
and Kentuckian descent, he was cordially received. He kept his hold upon
his party in Illinois, and Illinois, alone of all the Northwestern
States, would not go over completely to the opposition. The Democratic
candidate for state treasurer was elected. The Know-Nothings and
Anti-Nebraska men got a majority of the congressmen, and by the
defection of certain state senators who held over from a previous
election they were enabled to send Lyman Trumbull, Anti-Nebraska
Democrat, to be Douglas's colleague at Washington. That, when compared
with the results elsewhere in the North, was a striking proof of
Douglas's power with his people. Moreover, the Democrats of the North
who remained in the party had accepted his leadership. In the South, the
party organization was soon free of any effective opposition. The two
wings, so long as they were united, could still control the Senate and
elect presidents. All would still be well, if only all went well on
those Western plains whither Douglas declared that the slavery question
was now banished forever from the halls of Congress.
But all was not going well there. When the Kansas-Nebraska bill passed,
Sumner exultantly exclaimed: "It sets freedom and slavery face to face,
and bids them grapple." Nebraska was conceded to freedom, but the day
Kansas, the southern Territory, was thrown open to settlement, a long,
confused, confusing struggle began. The whole country was drawn into it.
Blue lodges in the South, emigrant aid societies in the North, hurried
opposing forces into the field. The Southerners, aided by colonized
voters from Missouri, got control of the territorial legislature and
passed a slave code. The Free-Soilers, ignoring the government thus
established, gathered in convention at Topeka, formed a free state
constitution, and demanded to be admitted into the Union as a State.
When a new Congress assembled in December, 1855, there were two
governments in Kansas, and the people were separated into hostile camps.
Brawls were frequent, and it was clear that very soon, unless the
general government intervened, there would be concerted violence. A
force of several thousand pro-slavery men, encamped on the Wakarusa
River, were threatening Lawrence, the principal Free-Soil town. The
Free-Soil men were in a majority, but their course had been in disregard
of law. The pro-slavery men were in a minority, they had resorted to
violence and fraud, but they had followed the forms of law.
President Pierce, swayed by Jefferson Davis, took the side of slavery.
The House was nearly two months organizing, and then the President sent
in a message to Congress denouncing the Free-Soilers for resisting the
laws. He followed it up with a proclamation, and placed United States
troops at the disposal of the regular territorial government. In March,
Douglas, from his Committee on Territories, made a long report on all
that had occurred. He, too, laid the blame on the emigrant aid
societies. He was against the Topeka constitution, and offered, instead,
a bill providing for the admission of Kansas, so soon as her population
should reach 93,000, which would entitle her to one representative in
Congress, with such constitution as her people might lawfully adopt. The
House, with an anti-slavery majority, was for admitting Kansas at once
with the Topeka constitution. So was the anti-slavery group in the
Senate, now swelled into a strong minority. In the fierce debate that
followed, Douglas had to defend the results, as well as the theory, of
his law. Sumner was the bitterest of his assailants, and their
controversy passed all bounds of parliamentary restraint. In Sumner's
famous speech on the crime against Kansas, Butler, of South Carolina,
was represented as the Don Quixote of slavery, Douglas as its Sancho
Panza, "ready to do all its humiliating offices." The day after that
speech, Lawrence was sacked, and civil war broke out in Kansas. The next
day, Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, assaulted Sumner and beat him
down on the floor of the Senate. Ten days later, the Democratic
convention met at Cincinnati to name a candidate for the presidency.
Douglas had won a good following from the South, but Pierce was the
first choice of the Southerners. They wanted a servant merely, not a
leader, in the White House. But it was no longer a question of the
South's preference alone: it was a question of holding the two or three
Northern States that were still Democratic. Of these, Pennsylvania was
the most important. Buchanan was the choice of the Northern delegates
because he was a Pennsylvanian and because, abroad on a foreign mission,
he had escaped all responsibility for Kansas. On the first ballot, he
led with 135 votes, Pierce was second with 122, and Douglas had but 33,
but as before he rose as the balloting proceeded. Pierce's vote fell
away; after the fourteenth ballot, his name was withdrawn. On the
fifteenth, Buchanan had 168, Douglas 118. Richardson, Douglas's manager,
thereupon arose and read a dispatch from his chief directing his friends
to obey the will of the majority and give Buchanan the necessary two
thirds. Once more, the prize escaped him, though he had bid for it with
his country's peace.
But the platform proclaimed the principle of his famous law to be "the
only sound and safe solution of the slavery question." He was at the
head of his party as Clay had for so many years headed the Whigs. He had
the substance of power, the reality of leadership, whosesoever the
trappings and the title might be. Every move in Congress was made with a
view to its effect in the campaign, and it was he who arranged the
issues. Toombs, of Georgia, offered an enabling act of admirable
fairness, intended to secure the people of Kansas in their right to have
such a state constitution as they might prefer, and Douglas adopted it
and held the Senate for it against the House bill to admit Kansas with
the Topeka constitution. No agreement could be reached, for the
Republicans in their platform had declared for the prohibition of
slavery in all the Territories. "Bleeding Kansas" was their war-cry, and
Douglas charged, not without reason, that they meant to keep Kansas
bleeding until the election. The House went so far as to attach a rider
to the army appropriation bill forbidding the President to employ United
States troops in aid of the territorial authorities, and would not
permit the appropriations to pass in their ordinary form until Congress
adjourned and the President was forced to call an extra session.
But the Republican party had not yet gathered into its ranks all those
who in their hearts favored its policy. The reality of civil war in
Kansas brought a sobering sense of danger to the Union which worked
contrary to the angry revolt against the slave power, and Buchanan's
appeal to the lovers of the Union in both sections was successful. He
was elected, and the Democrats, with a majority in both houses of
Congress, got once more a free hand with Kansas and the slavery
question.
They had, too, a majority of the Supreme Court, and now for the first
time the court came forward with its view of the question. Two days
after the inauguration, the Dred Scott decision was handed down, and the
territorial controversy passed into a new phase. All parties were forced
to reconsider their positions. Douglas, especially, had need of all his
adroitness to bring his doctrine of popular sovereignty into accord with
the decision; for so far as it went it accorded completely with that
extreme Southern view of Calhoun's and Yancey's and Jefferson Davis's
which he had never yet, in his striving after an approachment with the
South, ventured far enough to accept. The court decided that the
Declaration of Independence did not mean negroes when it declared all
men to be equal; that no negro could become a citizen of the United
States; that the right of property in slaves was affirmed in the
Constitution; and that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in any
Territory. The announcement that the eighth clause of the Missouri
Compromise law was unconstitutional was acceptable enough to the man who
had accomplished its repeal, but what became of popular sovereignty if
the Constitution itself decreed slavery into the Territories? But
Douglas, whether he met the difficulty effectively or not, faced it
promptly. Speaking at Springfield in June, he indorsed the decision, not
merely as authoritative, but as right; and he claimed that it was in
accord with his doctrine. For slavery, he pointed out, was dependent for
its existence anywhere upon positive legislation. This the inhabitants
of a Territory, acting through their territorial legislature, could
grant or deny as they chose. The constitutional right of a slaveholder
to take his property into a Territory would avail him nothing if he
found there no laws and police regulations to protect it.
The decision was, however, universally and rightly considered a great
victory for slavery. It condemned the Republican programme as
unconstitutional, and it strengthened the contention of the
Southerners. But the Southern leaders were in little need of heartening:
no cause ever had bolder and firmer champions. Under cover of the panic
of 1857, which drew men's minds away from politics, a group of them were
already planning a most daring last attempt to bring Kansas into the
Union as a slave State. In the grappling there, freedom had shown itself
stronger than slavery. Robert J. Walker, a slaveholder, whom Buchanan
and Douglas had persuaded to accept the governorship, reported that the
Free-Soilers outnumbered their adversaries three to one. The legislature
had provided for the election of delegates to a constitutional
convention, and when the question of submitting the constitution to the
people arose, the governor, an upright man, promptly announced that it
would be submitted, and the administration sustained him. Many
Free-Soilers, however, made the mistake of staying away from the polls
on election day. The convention, under control of the pro-slavery
leaders, met in October at Lecompton, drew up a constitution which
safeguarded slavery elaborately, and hit upon an extraordinary way to
submit it to the people. The electors were permitted to vote either "for
the constitution with slavery," or "for the constitution without
slavery," but not against the constitution as a whole. Even if "the
constitution without slavery" carried, such slaves as were already held
in Kansas could continue to be held.
So far had the Democratic party progressed toward the extreme Southern
view, and such was the ascendency of the Southerners over Buchanan, that
he would not stand up against the outrageous scheme, and it seemed on
the point of succeeding. But Douglas was come now to a parting of the
ways. Forced to choose between absolute subserviency to the South and
what was left of his principle of popular sovereignty, he remonstrated
angrily with the President for breaking faith with Walker and the
Kansans. At the end of a stormy interview, Buchanan, stirred out of his
wonted placidity, threateningly reminded the senator that no Democrat
ever broke with a Democratic administration without being crushed.
Douglas scornfully retorted: "Mr. President, I wish you to remember that
General Jackson is dead." The new Congress was no sooner assembled than
the Lecompton programme became the central issue, and Douglas, in flat
rebellion against his party's Southern masters, in open defiance of his
party's President, was again the man of the hour.
Superb fighter that he was, he had a fighter's best opportunity,--great
odds to fight against, and at last a good cause to fight for. The
administration proscribed him. The whole South, so lately reciting his
praises, rose up against him and reviled him as a traitor. Of his party
associates in the Senate, but two or three were brave enough to follow
him. Moreover, the panic had swept away his wealth. He was near the end
of his term of office, and the trend in Illinois was toward the
Republicans. The long tide which had so steadily borne him on to fortune
seemed to ebb. Married again but recently, and to the most beautiful
woman in Washington, he must have had in mind, as he took up his new
role, some such thought as that which fortified his favorite hero at
Marengo: one battle was lost, but there was time enough to win another.
The Lecompton plotters had reckoned on the opposition of the
Republicans. It was Douglas and his handful of followers who confounded
them. At once, they accused him of deserting them to make sure of his
reelection to the Senate. But as the debate progressed, and his name
kept appearing on the same side with Sumner's and Seward's in the
divisions, another notion spread. Horace Greeley and other Republicans
began to suggest that he might be the man to lead the new party to
victory on a more moderate platform. Throughout the North, people who
had abhorred him came first to wonder at him and then to praise him.
But he fought the Lecompton conspiracy from his old base. It was
contrary to the principle of the Kansas-Nebraska Act; there had been
gross frauds at the election of delegates; the form of submission was a
mockery of the electors. He would say nothing for slavery or against it.
He cared not "whether slavery was voted up or voted down." Give the
people a fair and free chance to form and adopt a constitution, and he
would accept it. Let them have a fair vote on the Lecompton
constitution, and if they ratified it he would accept that. Ratified it
was at the absurd election the convention had ordered, for the great
majority of the settlers could not vote their opposition, but when the
legislature, now Free-Soil, took the authority to submit it as a whole,
the majority against it by far exceeded the highest total of votes the
pro-slavery men had ever mustered. Nevertheless, the Senate passed it,
Douglas and three other Democrats voting in the negative. His following
in the House was greater, and the bill was there amended so as to
provide for submitting the constitution to the people. There was a
conference, and in its final form the bill offered the people of Kansas
a bribe of lands if they would accept the constitution, and threatened
them with an indefinite delay of statehood if they should reject it.
Douglas, however, after some hesitation, refused to vote for the bill as
amended, and when the time came the Kansans, by more than five to one,
rejected the constitution and the bribe.
So the session brought no settlement, and Kansas was still the burning
issue when Douglas went back to Illinois and took the stump in the
senatorial campaign. Victor in a stirring parliamentary contest, this
time Chicago welcomed him. But there awaited him treason in the ranks of
his own party,--for the administration, beaten in Congress, attacked him
at home,--and an opposition now completely formed and led by a man whom
Douglas himself, in his own heart, dreaded as he had never dreaded the
ablest of his rivals at Washington. The Republicans had taken the
unusual course of holding a convention to nominate their candidate for
the Senate, and the candidate was Abraham Lincoln.