THE RIVALS
Hamilton and Jefferson, Clay and Jackson, Douglas and Lincoln,--these
are the three great rivalries of American politics. The third was not
the least. If it fell short of the others in variety of confrontments,
if it was not so long drawn out, or accompanied with so frequent and
imposing alignments and realignments of vast contending forces on a
broad and national field, it surpassed them in the clearness of the sole
and vital issue it involved, in a closer contact and measuring of
powers, in the complete and subtle correspondence of the characters of
the rivals to the causes for which they fought.
Douglas was the very type of that instant success which waits on ability
undistracted by doubt and undeterred by the fear of doing wrong; the
best exemplar of that American statesmanship which accepted things as
they were and made the most of them. Facile, keen, effective, he had
found life a series of opportunities easily embraced. Precocious in
youth, marvelously active in manhood, he had learned without study,
resolved without meditation, accomplished without toil. Whatever
obstacles he had found in his path, he had either adroitly avoided them
or boldly overleaped them, but never laboriously uprooted them. Whatever
subject he had taken in hand, he had swiftly compassed it, but rarely
probed to the heart of it. With books he dealt as he dealt with men,
getting from them quickly what he liked or needed; he was as unlikely to
pore over a volume, and dog-ear and annotate it, as he was with
correspondence and slow talk and silences to draw out a friendship. Yet
he was not cold or mean, but capable of hero-worship, following with
ardor the careers of great conquerors like Caesar and Napoleon, and
capable, too, of loyalty to party and to men. He had great personal
magnetism: young men, especially, he charmed and held as no other public
man could, now Clay was dead. His habits were convivial, and the
vicious indulgence of his strong and masculine appetites, the only
relaxation he craved in the intervals of his fierce activities, had
caused him frequent illnesses; but he was still a young man, even by
American standards, for the eminence he had attained. At the full of his
extraordinary powers, battling for the high place he had and the higher
he aspired to, there was nowhere to be seen his equal as a debater or a
politician,--nowhere but in the ungainly figure, now once more erected
into a posture of rivalry and defiance, of the man whom he had long ago
outstripped and left behind him in the home of their common beginnings.
Slower of growth, and devoid altogether of many brilliant qualities
which his rival possessed, Lincoln nevertheless outreached him by the
measure of the two gifts the other lacked: the twin gifts of humor and
of brooding melancholy. Bottomed by the one in homeliness, his character
was by the other drawn upward to the height of human nobility and
aspiration. His great capacity of pain, which but for his buffoonery
would no doubt have made him mad, was the source of his rarest
excellencies. Familiar with squalor, and hospitable to vulgarity, his
mind was yet tenanted by sorrow, a place of midnight wrestlings. In him,
as never before in any other man, were high and low things mated, and
awkwardness and ungainliness and uncouthness justified in their uses. At
once coarser than his rival and infinitely more refined and gentle, he
had mastered lessons which the other had never found the need of
learning, or else had learned too readily and then dismissed. He had
thoroughness for the other's competence; insight into human nature, and
a vast sympathy, for the other's facile handling of men; a deep devotion
to the right for the other's loyalty to party platforms. The very core
of his nature was truth, and he himself is reported to have said of
Douglas that he cared less for the truth, as the truth, than any other
man he knew.
Hanging for some years upon the heels of his rival's rapid ascent,
Lincoln had entered the House as Douglas left it for the Senate, but at
the end of the term he retired from politics baffled and discouraged.
Tortured with the keen apprehension of a form and grace into which he
could never mould his crudeness, tantalized with a sense that there must
be a way for him to get a hold on his fellows and make a figure in the
history of his times, he had watched the power of Douglas grow and the
fame of Douglas spread until it seemed that Douglas's voice was always
speaking and Douglas's hand was everywhere. Patiently working out the
right and wrong of the fateful question Douglas dealt with so boldly, he
came into the impregnable position of such as hated slavery and yet
forbore to violate its sanctuary. Suddenly, with the repeal of the
Missouri Compromise, Douglas himself had opened a path for him. He went
back into politics, and took a leading part in the Anti-Nebraska
movement. Whenever opportunity offered, he combated Douglas on the
stump. The year Trumbull won the senatorship, Lincoln had first come
within a few votes of it. Risen now to the leadership of the
Republicans in Illinois, he awaited Douglas at Chicago, listened to his
opening speech, answered it the next evening, followed him into the
centre of the State, and finally proposed a series of joint debates
before the people. Douglas hesitated, but accepted, and named seven
meeting-places: Ottawa and Freeport, in the northern stronghold of the
Republicans; Galesburg, Quincy, and Charleston, in a region where both
parties had a good following; and Jonesboro and Alton, which were in
"Egypt." The first meeting was at Ottawa, in August; the last, at Alton,
in the middle of October. Meanwhile, both spoke incessantly at other
places, Douglas oftener than once a day. First the fame of Douglas, and
then Lincoln's unexpected survival of the early meetings, drew the eyes
of the whole country upon these two foremost Americans of their
generation, face to face there on the Western prairie, fighting out the
great question of the times.
Elevated side by side on wooden platforms in the open air, thrown into
relief against the low prairie sky line, the two figures take strong
hold upon the imagination: the one lean, long-limbed, uncommonly tall;
the other scarce five feet high, but compact, manful, instinct with
energy, and topped with its massive head. In voice and gesture and
manner, Douglas was incomparably the superior, as he was, too, in the
ready command of a language never, indeed, ornate or imaginative, and
sometimes of the quality of political commonplace, but always forcible
and always intelligible to his audience. Lincoln had the sense of words,
the imagination, the intensity of feeling, which go to the making of
great literature; but for his masterpieces he always needed time. His
voice was high and strained, his gestures ungraceful, his manner
painful, save in the recital of those passages which he had carefully
prepared or when he was freed of his self-consciousness by anger or
enthusiasm. Neither of them, in any single speech, could be compared to
Webster in the other of the two most famous American debates, but the
series was a remarkable exhibition of forensic power. The interest grew
as the struggle lengthened. People traveled great distances to hear
them. At every meeting-place, a multitude of farmers and dwellers in
country towns, with here and there a sprinkling of city-folk, crowded
about the stand where "Old Abe" and the "Little Giant" turned and
twisted and fenced for an opening, grappled and drew apart, clinched and
strained and staggered,--but neither fell. The wonder grew that Lincoln
stood up so well under the onslaughts of Douglas, at once skillful and
reckless, held him off with so firm a hand, gripped him so shrewdly.
Now, the wonder is that Douglas, wrestling with the man and the cause of
a century, kept his feet and held his own.
He was fighting, too, with an enemy in the rear. When he turned to
strike at the administration, Lincoln would call out: "Go it, husband!
Go it, bear!" Apart from that diversion, however, the debate, long and
involved as it was, followed but three general lines. The whole is
resolvable into three elements,--personalities, politics, and
principles. There were the attacks which each made upon the other's
record; the efforts which each made to weaken the other's position
before the people; and the contrary views which were advanced.
Douglas began, indeed, with gracious compliments to his opponent,
calling him "an amiable, kindly, and intelligent gentleman." Lincoln,
unused to praise from such a source, protested he was like the Hoosier
with the gingerbread: "He reckoned he liked it better than any other
man, and got less of it." But in a moment Douglas was charging that
Lincoln and Trumbull, Whig and Democrat, had made a coalition in 1854 to
form the Black Republican party and get for themselves the two
senatorships from Illinois, and that Trumbull had broken faith with
Lincoln. Lincoln in turn made a charge that Douglas had conspired with
Presidents Pierce and Buchanan and Chief Justice Taney to spread slavery
and make it universal. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was their first step, the
Dred Scott decision the second; but one more step, and slavery could be
fastened upon States as they had already fastened it upon Territories.
Douglas protesting that to bring such a charge, incapable of proof or
disproof, was indecent, Lincoln pointed out that Douglas had similarly
charged the administration with conspiring to force a slave constitution
upon Kansas; and afterwards took up a charge of Trumbull's that Douglas
himself had at first conspired with Toombs and other senators to prevent
any reference to the people of whatsoever constitution the Kansas
convention might adopt. When they moved southward, Douglas charged
Lincoln with inconsistency in that he changed his stand to suit the
leanings of different communities. Of all these charges and
counter-charges, however, none was absolutely proved, and no one now
believes those which Douglas brought. But he made them serve, and
Lincoln's, though he sustained them with far better evidence, and
pressed them home with a wonderful clearness of reasoning,--once, he
actually threw his argument into a syllogism,--did no great harm to
Douglas.
It was Douglas, too, who began the sparring for a political advantage.
He knew that Lincoln's following was heterogeneous. "Their principles,"
he jeered, "in the north are jet black, in the centre they are in color
a decent mulatto, and in lower Egypt they are almost white." His aim,
therefore, was to fix upon Lincoln such extreme views as would alarm the
more moderate of his followers, since the extremists must take him
perforce, as a choice of two evils, even though he fell far short of
their radical standard. To this end, Douglas produced certain
resolutions which purported to have been adopted by an Anti-Nebraska
convention at Springfield in 1854, and would have held Lincoln
responsible for them. In a series of questions, he asked whether Lincoln
were still opposed to a fugitive slave law, to the admission of any more
slave States, and to acquiring any more territory unless the Wilmot
Proviso were applied to it, and if he were still for prohibiting slavery
outright in all the Territories and in the District of Columbia, and
for prohibiting the interstate slave trade. It soon transpired that
Lincoln was not present at the Springfield convention, and that the
resolutions were not adopted there, but somewhere else, and Douglas had
to defend himself against a charge of misrepresentation. Nevertheless,
when they met the second time, at Freeport, Lincoln answered the
questions. He admitted the right of the South to a fugitive slave law.
He would favor abolition in the District only if it were gradual,
compensated, and accomplished with the consent of the inhabitants. He
was not sure of the right of Congress to prohibit the interstate slave
trade. He would oppose the annexation of fresh territory if there were
reason to believe it would tend to aggravate the slavery controversy. He
could see no way to deny the people of a Territory if slavery were
prohibited among them during their territorial life and they
nevertheless asked to come into the Union as a slave State. These
cautious and hesitating answers displeased the stalwart anti-slavery
men. Lincoln would go their lengths in but one particular: he was for
prohibiting slavery outright in all the Territories.
Then he brought forward some questions for Douglas to answer. Would
Douglas vote to admit Kansas with less than 93,000 inhabitants if she
presented a free state constitution? Would he vote to acquire fresh
territory without regard to its effect on the slavery dispute? If the
Supreme Court should decide against the right of a State to prohibit
slavery, would he acquiesce? "Can the people of a United States
Territory, in any lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the
United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of
a state constitution?"
Douglas had no great difficulty with the first three questions, and the
fourth--the second, as Lincoln read them--he had in fact answered
several times already, and in a way to please the Democrats of Illinois.
But Lincoln, contrary to the advice of his friends, pressed it on him
again with a view to the "all hail hereafter," for it was meant to
bring out the inconsistency of the principle of popular sovereignty with
the Dred Scott decision, and the difference between the Northern and the
Southern Democrats. Douglas answered it as he had before. The people of
a Territory, through their legislature, could by unfriendly laws, or
merely by denying legislative protection, make it impossible for a
slave-owner to hold his slaves among them, no matter what rights he
might have under the Constitution. Lincoln declared that the answer was
historically false, for slaves had been held in Territories in spite of
unfriendly legislation, and pointed out that if the Dred Scott decision
was right the members of a territorial legislature, when they took an
oath to support the Constitution, bound themselves to grant slavery
protection. Later, in a fifth and last question, he asked whether, in
case the slave-owners of a Territory demanded of Congress protection for
their property, Douglas would vote to give it to them. But Douglas fell
back upon his old position that Congress had no right to intervene. He
would not break with his supporters in Illinois, but by his "Freeport
Doctrine" of unfriendly legislation he had broken forever with the men
who were now in control of his party in the Southern States.
It was Lincoln who took the aggressive on principles. A famous paragraph
of his speech before the convention which nominated him began with the
words: "'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this
government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free." That was
a direct challenge to Douglas and his whole plan with slavery, and
throughout the debate, at every meeting, the doctrine of the divided
house was attacked and defended. Douglas declared that Lincoln was
inciting half his countrymen to make war upon the other half; that he
went for uniformity of domestic institutions everywhere, instead of
letting different communities manage their domestic affairs as they
chose. But no, Lincoln protested, he was merely for resisting the spread
of slavery and putting it in such a state that the public mind would
rest in the hope of its ultimate extinction. "But why," cried Douglas,
"cannot this government go on as the fathers left it, as it has gone on
for more than a century?" Lincoln met him on that ground, and had the
better of him in discussing what the fathers meant concerning slavery.
They did not mean, he argued, to leave it alone to grow and spread, for
they prohibited it in the Northwest Territory, they left the word
"slave" out of the Constitution in the hope of a time when there should
be no slaves under the flag. Over the true meaning of the Declaration of
Independence, however, Douglas had a certain advantage, for Lincoln
found the difficulty which candid minds still find in applying the
principle of equality to races of unequal strength. Douglas plainly
declared that ours is a white man's government. Lincoln admitted such an
inferiority in negroes as would forever prevent the two races from
living together on terms of perfect social and political equality, and
if there must be inequality he was in favor of his own race having the
superior place. He could only contend, therefore, for the negro's
equality in those rights which are set forth in the Declaration.
Douglas made the most of this, and of Lincoln's failure, through a
neglect to study the economic character of slavery, to show clearly how
the mere restriction of it would lead to its extinction.
But Douglas did not, and perhaps he could not, follow Lincoln when he
passed from the Declaration and the Constitution to the "higher law,"
from the question of rights to the question of right and wrong; for
there Lincoln rose not merely above Douglas, but above all that sort of
politics which both he and Douglas came out of. There, indeed, was the
true difference between these men and their causes. Douglas seems to
shrink backward into the past, and Lincoln to come nearer and grow
larger as he proclaims it: "That is the real issue. That is the issue
which will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge
Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between
these two principles--right and wrong--throughout the world."
Nevertheless, Douglas won the senatorship and kept his hold on the
Northern Democrats. Immediately, he made a visit to the South. He got a
hearing there, and so made good his boast that he could proclaim his
principles anywhere in the Union; but when he returned to Washington he
found that the party caucus, controlled by Buchanan and the Southerners,
had deposed him from the chairmanship of the Committee on Territories,
which he had held so many years, and from this time he was constantly
engaged with the enemies he had made by his course on Lecompton and by
his Freeport Doctrine. His Northern opponents were no longer in his way.
He had overmatched Sumner and Seward in the Senate, and beaten the
administration, and held his own with Lincoln, but the unbending and
relentless Southerners he could neither beat nor placate. It was men
like Jefferson Davis in the Senate, and Yancey at Southern barbecues and
conventions, who stood now between him and his ambition. That very slave
power which he had served so well was upreared to crush him because he
had come to the limit of his subserviency. His plan of squatter
sovereignty had not got the Southerners Kansas, or any other slave
State, to balance California and Minnesota and Oregon. They demanded of
Congress positive protection for slavery in the Territories. The most
significant debate of the session was between Douglas on the one side
and a group of Southern senators, led by Jefferson Davis, on the other.
He stood up against them manfully, and told them frankly that not a
single Northern State would vote for any candidate on their platform,
and they as flatly informed him that he could not carry a single
Southern State on his.
He was too good a politician to yield, even if there had been no other
reason to stand firm, but continued to defend the only doctrine on which
there was the slightest chance of beating the Republicans in the
approaching election. One method he took to defend it was novel, but he
has had many imitators among public men of a later day. He wrote out his
argument for "Harper's," the most popular magazine of the day. The
article is not nearly so good reading as his speeches, but it was widely
read. Judge Jeremiah Black, the Attorney-General of Buchanan's cabinet,
made a reply to it, and Douglas rejoined; but little of value was added
to the discussions in Congress and on the stump. The Southerners,
however, would not take warning. As they saw their long ascendency in
the government coming to an end, their demands rose higher. Some of them
actually began to agitate for a revival of the African slave trade; and
this also Douglas had to oppose. His following in the Senate was now
reduced to two or three, and one of these, Broderick, of California, a
brave and steadfast man, was first defeated by the Southern interest,
and then slain in a duel. John Brown's invasion of Virginia somewhat
offset the aggressions of the South; but that, too, might have gone for
a warning. The elections in the autumn of 1859 were enough to show that
the North was no longer disposed to forbearance with slavery. Douglas
went as far as any man in reason could go in denouncing John Brown and
those who were thought to have set him on; and he supported a new plan
for getting Cuba. But Davis, on the very eve of the Democratic
convention at Charleston, was pressing upon the Senate a series of
resolutions setting forth the extreme demand of the South concerning the
Territories. He was as bitter toward Douglas as he was toward the
Republicans. At Charleston, Yancey took the same tone with the
convention.
Practically the whole mass of the Northern Democrats were for Douglas
now, and the mass of Southern Democrats were against him. The party was
divided, as the whole country was, by a line that ran from East to West.
Yet it was felt that nothing but the success of that party would avert
the danger of disunion, and the best judges were of opinion that it
could not succeed with any other candidate than Douglas or any other
platform than popular sovereignty. His managers at Charleston offered
the Cincinnati platform of 1856, with the addition of a demand for Cuba
and an indorsement of the Dred Scott decision and of any future
decisions of the Supreme Court on slavery in the Territories. But the
Southerners would not yield a hair's breadth. Yancey, their orator,
upbraided Douglas and his followers with cowardice because they did not
dare to tell the North that slavery was right. In that strange way the
question of right and wrong was forced again upon the man who strove to
ignore it. Senator Pugh, of Ohio, spokesman for Douglas, answered the
fire-eaters. "Gentlemen of the South," he cried, "you mistake us! You
mistake us! We will not do it." The Douglas platform was adopted, and
the men of the cotton States withdrew. On ballot after ballot, a
majority of those who remained, and a majority of the whole convention,
stood firm for Douglas, but it was decided that two thirds of the whole
convention was required to nominate. Men who had followed his fortunes
until his ambition was become their hope in life, wearied out with the
long deferment, broke down and wept. Finally, it was voted to adjourn
to Baltimore. In the interval, Davis and Douglas fell once more into
their bitter controversy in the Senate.
At Baltimore, a new set of delegates from the cotton States appeared in
place of the seceders, but they were no sooner admitted than another
group withdrew, and even Cushing, the chairman, left his seat and
followed them. Douglas telegraphed his friends to sacrifice him if it
were necessary to save his platform, but the rump convention adopted the
platform and nominated him. The two groups of seceders united on the
Yancey platform and on Breckinridge, of Kentucky, for a candidate. A new
party of sincere but unpractical Union-savers took the field with John
Bell, an old Whig, for a candidate, and a platform of patriotic
platitudes. The Republicans, guided in ways they themselves did not
understand, had put aside Seward and taken Lincoln to be their leader.
The rivals were again confronted, but on cruelly unequal terms. From the
first, it was clear that nearly the whole North was going Republican,
and that the cotton States were for Breckinridge or disunion. Whatever
chance Douglas had in the border States and in the Democratic States of
the North was destroyed by the new party. But he knew he was at the head
of the true party of Jefferson, he felt that the old Union would not
stand if he was beaten. He was the leader of a forlorn hope, but he led
it superbly well. He undertook a canvass of the country the like of
which no candidate had ever made before. At the very outset of it he was
called upon to show his colors in the greater strife that was to follow.
At Norfolk, in Virginia, it was demanded of him to say whether the
election of a Black Republican President would justify the Southern
States in seceding. He answered, no. Pennsylvania was again the pivotal
State, and at an election in October the Republicans carried it over all
their opponents combined. Douglas was in Iowa when he heard the news. He
said calmly to his companions: "Lincoln is the next President. I have
no hope and no destiny before me but to do my best to save the Union
from overthrow. Now let us turn our course to the South"--and he
proceeded through the border States straight to the heart of the kingdom
of slavery and cotton. The day before the election, he spoke at
Montgomery, Yancey's home; that night, he slept at Mobile. If in 1858 he
was like Napoleon the afternoon of Marengo, now he was like Napoleon
struggling backward in the darkness toward the lost field of Waterloo.
There was a true dignity and a true patriotism in his appeal to his
maddened countrymen not to lift their hands against the Union their
fathers made:--
"Woodman, spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough."
An old soldier of the Confederacy, scarred with the wounds he took at
Bull Run, looking back over a wasted life to the youth he sacrificed in
that ill-starred cause, remembers now as he remembers nothing else of
the whole year of revolution the last plea of Douglas for the old party,
the old Constitution, the old Union.
He carried but one State outright, and got but twelve votes in the
electoral college. Lincoln swept the North, Breckinridge the South, and
Bell the border States. Nevertheless, in the popular vote, hopeless
candidate that he was, he stood next to Lincoln, and none of his
competitors had a following so evenly distributed throughout the whole
country.
When all was over, he could not rest, for he was still the first man in
Congress, but hurried back to Washington and joined in the anxious
conferences of such as were striving for a peaceable settlement. When
South Carolina seceded, he announced plainly enough that he did not
believe in the right of secession or consider that there was any
grievance sufficient to justify the act. But he was for concessions if
they would save the country from civil war. Crittenden, of Kentucky,
coming forward after the manner of Clay with a series of amendments to
the Constitution, and another Committee of Thirteen being named, Douglas
was ready to play the same part he had played in 1850. But the plan
could not pass the Senate, and one after another the cotton States
followed South Carolina. Then he labored with the men of the border
States, and broke his last lance with Breckinridge, who, when he ceased
to be Vice-President, came down for a little while upon the floor as a
senator to defend the men whom he was about to join in arms against
their country. Douglas engaged him with all the old fire and force, and
worsted him in the debate.
His bearing toward Lincoln was generous and manly. When Lincoln, rising
to pronounce his first inaugural address, looked awkwardly about him for
a place to bestow his hat that he might adjust his glasses to read those
noble paragraphs, Douglas came forward and took it from his hand. The
graceful courtesy won him praise; and that was his attitude toward the
new administration. The day Sumter was fired on, he went to the
President to offer his help and counsel. There is reason to believe that
during those fearful early days of power and trial Lincoln came into a
better opinion of his rival.
The help of Douglas was of moment, for he had the right to speak for
the Democrats of the North. On his way homeward, he was everywhere
besought to speak. Once, he was aroused from sleep to address an Ohio
regiment marching to the front, and his great voice rolled down upon
them, aligned beneath him in the darkness, a word of loyalty and
courage. At Chicago he spoke firmly and finally, for himself and for his
party. While the hope of compromise lingered, he had gone to the extreme
of magnanimity, but the time for conciliation was past. "There can be no
neutrals in this war," he said: "only patriots and traitors." They were
the best words he could have spoken. They were the last he ever spoke to
his countrymen, for at once he was stricken down with a swift and mortal
illness and hurried to his end. A little while before the end, his wife
bent over him for a message to his sons. He roused himself, and said:
"Tell them to obey the laws and support the Constitution of the United
States." He died on June 11, 1861, in the forty-ninth year of his age.
It was a hard time to die. War was at hand, and his strong nature
stirred at the call. Plunged in his youth into affairs, and wonted all
his life to action, he had played a man's part in great events, and
greater were impending. He had taken many blows of men and circumstance,
and stormy times might bring redress. He was a leader, and for want of
him a great party must go leaderless and stumbling to a long series of
defeats. He was a true American, and his country was in danger. He was
ambitious, and his career was not rightly finished. He was the second
man in the Republic, and he might yet be the first.
But first he never could have been while Lincoln lived, nor ever could
have got a hold like Lincoln's on his kind. His place is secure among
the venturesome, strong, self-reliant men who in various ages and
countries have for a time hastened, or stayed, or diverted from its
natural channel the great stream of affairs. The sin of his ambition is
forgiven him for the good end he made. But for all his splendid energy
and his brilliant parts, for all the charm of his bold assault on
fortune and his dauntless bearing in adversity, we cannot turn from him
to his rival but with changed and softened eyes. For Lincoln, indeed, is
one of the few men eminent in politics whom we admit into the hidden
places of our thought; and there, released from that coarse clay which
prisoned him, we companion him forever with the gentle and heroic of
older lands. Douglas abides without.
The Riverside Press
_Electrotyped and printed by H.O. Houghton & Co._
_Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A._
End of Project Gutenberg's Stephen Arnold Douglas, by William Garrott Brown