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Title:  The Life of Stephen A. Douglas

Author:  William Gardner

April, 2001  [Etext #2593]


Project Gutenberg's The Life of Stephen A. Douglas, by Gardner
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The Life of Stephen A. Douglas

by William Gardner



Preface.




De mortuis nil nisi bonum, (of the dead speak nothing but good),
is the rule which governed the friends of Stephen A. Douglas after
his death.  "Of political foes speak nothing but ill," is the rule
which has guided much of our discussion of him for forty years.
The time has now arrived when we can study him dispassionately
and judge him justly, when we can take his measure, if not with
scientific accuracy, at least with fairness and honesty.

Where party spirit is as despotic as it is among us, it is difficult
for any man who spends his life amid the storms of politics to get
justice until the passions of his generation have been forgotten.
Even then he is generally misjudged--canonized as a saint,
with extravagant eulogy, by those who inherit his party name, and
branded as a traitor or a demagogue by those who wear the livery
of opposition.

Douglas has perhaps suffered more from this method of dealing with
our political heroes than any other American statesman of the first
class.  He died at the opening of the Civil War.  It proved to be
a revolution which wrought deep changes in the character of the
people.  It was the beginning of a new era in our national life.
We are in constant danger of missing the real worth of men in these
ante-bellum years because their modes of thought and feeling were
not those of this generation.

The Civil War, with its storm of passion, banished from our minds
the great men and gigantic struggles of the preceding decade.  We
turned with scornful impatience from the pitiful and abortive
compromises of those times, the puerile attempts to cure by futile
plasters the cancer that was eating the vitals of the nation.  We
hastily concluded that men who belonged to the party of Jefferson
Davis and Judah P. Benjamin during those critical years were of
doubtful loyalty and questionable patriotism, that men who battled
with Lincoln, Seward and Chase could hardly be true-hearted
lovers of their country.  Douglas died too soon to make clear to a
passion-stirred world that he was as warmly attached to the Union,
as intensely loyal, as devotedly patriotic, as Lincoln himself.

The grave questions arising from the War, which disturbed our politics
for twenty years, the great economic questions which have agitated
us for the past fifteen years, bear slight relation to those dark
problems with which Douglas and his contemporaries grappled.  He
was on the wrong side of many struggles preliminary to the War.
He was not a profound student of political economy, hence is not
an authority for any party in the perplexing questions of recent
times.  The result is that the greatest political leader of the
most momentous decade of our history is less known to us than any
second-rate hero of the Revolution.

It is not of much importance now to any one whether Douglas is loved
or hated, admired or despised.  It is of some importance that he
be understood.

I have derived this narrative mainly from original sources.  The
biography written during his life-time by his friend Sheahan, and
that published two years after his death by his admirer, Flint,
are chiefly drawn on for the brief account of his early life.
The history of his career in Congress has been gathered from the
Congressional record; the account of Conventions from contemporary
reports, and the Debates with Lincoln from the authorized publication.

I have not consciously taken any liberty with any text quoted,
except to omit superfluous words, which omissions are indicated by
asterisks.  I have not attempted to pronounce judgement on Douglas
or his contemporaries, but to submit the evidence.  Not those who
write, but those who read, pass final judgement on the heroes of
biography.





Chapter I.  Youth.




Stephen Arnold Douglas was born at Brandon, Vermont, on the 23rd
of April, 1813.  His father was a physician, descended from Scotch
ancestors, who had settled in Connecticut before the Revolution.
his mother was the daughter of a prosperous Vermont farmer.  Before
he was three months old his father, whose only fortune was his
practice, suddenly died.  A bachelor brother of the widow took
the family to his home near Brandon, where they lived for fifteen
years.  When not needed at more important work Stephen attended
the common school.  but the serious business of life was tilling
his uncle's fields.

At fifteen he sought help to prepare for college.  His uncle declined
to assume the burden of his education and advised him to shun the
perils of professional life and adopt the safe and honorable career
of a farmer.  The advice was rejected and he obtained permission
to earn his way and shape his future.  He walked to Middlebury, a
distance of fourteen miles, and apprenticed himself to a cabinet
maker.  He worked with energy and enthusiasm, became a good mechanic
and bade fair to win success at his trade, but owning to delicate
health he abandoned the shop after less than two years' service,
and entered the academy at Brandon, where he pursued his studies
for about a year, when his mother married again and moved to
Canandiagua, New York.  He there entered an academy and continued
an industrious student for nearly three years, devoting part of his
time to law study.  This ended his preliminary training.  He quit
the schools and applied himself to the work of practical life.

In June, 1833, he left home to push his fortune in the West.  His
health was delicate, his stock of money scant.  He went to Cleveland,
Ohio, where he became acquainted with a lawyer named Andrews, who,
pleased with the appearance of the youth, invited him to share his
office and use his library, with the promise of a partnership when
admitted to the bar.  The offer was accepted and he began his duties
as law clerk.  A week later he was taken seriously sick, and at
the end of his long illness the doctors advised him to return home.
He rejected the advice and in October took passage on a canal boat
for Portsmouth, on the Ohio river, and went thence to Cincinnati.
For a week he sought employment.  Unable to find it he went to
Louisville, where another week was spent in vain quest of work.
He continued his journey to St. Louis, where he landed in the late
autumn.  An eminent lawyer offered him free use of his library,
but an empty purse compelled him to decline the offer and seek
immediate work.  He went to Jacksonville, Illinois, arriving late
in November, and addressed himself to the pressing problem of
self-support.  The remnant of his cash amount to thirty-seven cents.





Chapter II.  Apprenticeship.




In those days Illinois was a frontier State with about 200,000
population, chiefly settled in its southern half.  A large part of
the people were from the South and, in defiance of the law, owned
many <DW64> slaves.  The Capital was at Vandalia, although Jacksonville
and Springfield were the towns of highest promise and brightest
prospects.  Chicago contained a few score of people to whom the
Indians were still uncomfortably close neighbors.  Railroads and
canals were beginning to be built, with promise of closer relations
between the villages and settlements theretofore lost in the
solitudes.

Finding no employment at Jacksonville, he sold his few books to
keep off hunger and walked to Winchester.  On the morning after
his arrival he found a crowd assembled on the street where a public
sale was about to open.  Delay was occasioned by the want of a
competent clerk and he was hired for two dollars a day to keep the
record of the sale.  He was then employed to teach a private school
in the town at a salary of forty dollars a month.  Besides teaching
he found time to read a few borrowed law books and try an occasional
case before the village justice.

Having been admitted to the bar in March, 1834, he opened a law
office at Jacksonville.  His professional career, though successful,
was so completely eclipsed by the brilliancy of his political
achievements that it need not detain us.  The readiness and agility
of his mind; the adaptability of his convictions to the demands
of the hour; his self-confident energy, were such that he speedily
developed into a good trial lawyer and won high standing at the
bar.  That the profession was not then as lucrative as it has since
become, is evidenced by the fact that he traveled from Springfield
to Bloomington and argued a case for a fee of five dollars.

But his time and energy were devoted to politics rather than law.
The strategy of parties interested him more than Coke or Justinian.
Jacksonville was a conservative, religious town, whose population
consisted chiefly of New England Puritans and Whigs.  But the
prairies were settled by a race of thoroughly Democratic pioneers
to whom the rough victor at New Orleans was a hero in war and a
master in statecraft.

Douglas was an enthusiastic Democrat and an ardent admirer of
President Jackson.  The favorite occupation of the young lawyer,
not yet harassed by clients, was to talk politics to the farmers,
or gather them into his half furnished office and discuss more
gravely the questions of party management.

A few days after his arrival the opportunity came to distinguish
himself in the field of his future achievements.  A mass meeting was
called at the court house for the purpose of endorsing the policy
of the President in removing the deposits of public money from the
United States bank and vetoing the bill for its recharter.  The
opposition was bitter.  In the state of public temper it was a
delicate task to present the resolutions.  The man who had undertaken
it lost courage at the sight of the multitude and handed them to
Douglas, and the crowd looked with amused surprise when the young
stranger, who was only five feet tall, appeared on the platform.  He
read the resolutions of endorsement and supported them in a brief
speech.

When he sat down, Josiah Lamborn, an old and distinguished lawyer
and politician, attacked him and the resolutions in a speech
of caustic severity.  Douglas rose to reply.  The people cheered
the plucky youngster.  The attack had sharpened the faculties
and awakened his fighting courage.  He had unexpectedly found the
field of action in which he was destined to become an incomparable
master.  For an hour he poured out an impassioned harangue, without
embarrassment or hesitation.  Astonishment at what seemed a quaint
freak soon gave way to respect and admiration, and at the close
of this remarkable address the hall and courtyard rang with loud
applause.  The excited crowed seized the little orator, lifted him
on their shoulders and bore him in triumph around the square.

The young adventurer in the fields of law and politics was thenceforth
a man of mark--a man to be reckoned with in Illinois.  There were
scores of better lawyers and more eminent politicians in the State,
but a real leader, a genuine master of men had appeared.

In January, 1835, the legislature met at Vandalia.  Early in the
session it elected Douglas State's Attorney of the First Judicial
District--an extraordinary tribute to the professional or political
ability of the young lawyer of less than a year's standing.  He
held the office a little more than a year and resigned to enter
the legislature.

This was a really memorable body.  Among its members were James
Shields, afterwards United States Senator, John Calhoun of Lecompton
fame, W. A. Richardson, afterwards Democratic leader in the House
of Representatives, John A. McClernand, destined also to distinguish
service in Congress and still more distinguished service as a major
general and rival in arms of Grant and Sherman, Abraham Lincoln,
an awkward young lawyer, from Springfield, and Douglas, whose fate
it was to give Lincoln his first national prominence and then sink
eclipsed by the rising glory of his great rival.  The only memorable
work of the session was the removal of the Capital from Vandalia
to Springfield, and the authorization of twelve millions of debt,
to be contracted for government improvements.

Douglas, who had opposed these extravagant appropriations, having
distinguished himself as a debater, an organizer and a leader, was,
a few days after the adjournment, appointed Register of the United
States Land Office at Springfield, to which place he at once removed.

In the following November he was nominated for Congress.  The
district, which included the entire northern part of the State,
was large enough for an empire, with sparse population and wretched
means of communication.  The campaign lasted nine months, during
which, having resigned the office of the Register, he devoted himself
to the task of riding over the prairies, interviewing the voters
and speaking in school houses and village halls.  The monotony was
relieved by the society of the rival candidate, John T. Stuart,
who as Lincoln's law partner.  Stuart was declared elected by a
doubtful majority of five, and Douglas, after soothing his wounded
feelings by apparently well founded charges of an unfair count and
threats of a contest, abandoned it in disgust and returned to his
law office.  He announced his determination to quit politics forever.

But in December, 1838, the legislature began a session at the old
Capital.  The Governor declared the office of Secretary of State
vacant and appointed John A. McClernand to fill it.  Field, the
incumbent, questioned the power of the Governor to remove him and
declined to surrender the office.  Quo warranto proceedings were
instituted by McClernand, with Douglas and others as counsel.  The
Supreme Court denied the Governor's power of removal.  The Court
became involved in the partisan battle which raged with genuine
Western fervor for two years.

In the early weeks of 1841, a bill was passed, reorganizing the
Judiciary, providing for the election by the legislature of five
additional Supreme Judges, and imposing the duties of trial Judges
upon the members of the Court.  Meanwhile, Field had grown weary of
the struggle with a hostile Governor and legislature, and, being
threatened with a sweeping change of the Court, resigned in January,
1841.  The Governor appointed Douglas his successor.  Five weeks
later the legislature chose him Justice of the Supreme Court and
presiding Judge of the Fifth District.  He resigned the office of
Secretary and began his judicial career, establishing his residence
at Quincy.

This appointment to the bench was one of the most fortunate incidents
in his busy and feverish life.  He was not twenty-eight years old.
Adroit, nimble-witted and irrepressibly energetic as he was, he
had not yet developed much solid strength.  His stock of knowledge
was scanty and superficial.  From force of circumstances he
had devoted little time to calm thought or serious study.  Early
convinced that all truth lay on the surface, patent to him who had
eyes to see, he had plunged into the storm of life and, by his
aggressive and overmastering energy, had conquered a place for
himself in the world.  He was an experienced politician, a famous
campaign orator, and a Justice of the Supreme Court at a period
when most boys are awkwardly finding their way into the activities
of the world.  The younger Pitt was Chancellor of the Exchequer
at twenty-three; but he was the son of Chatham, nurtured in
statesmanship from the cradle.  the younger Adams was Minister to
the Hague at twenty-five; but he was already a ripe scholar and heir
to his father's great fame.  Douglas was a penniless adventurer, a
novus <DW25>, with none of those accidents of fortune which sometimes
give early success to gifted men.

The opportunity afforded the young Judge to extend his knowledge
and mingle on terms of equality with the masters of his profession
was such as rarely falls to the lot of a half-educated man of
twenty-eight.  He did not become an eminent Judge, yet he left the
bench, after three years' service, with marked improvement in the
solidity and dignity of his character.





Chapter III.  Member of Congress.




The legislature met in December, 1842, to chose a Senator.  Douglas
still lacked six months of the thirty years required, but came
within five votes of the election.

In the following spring he received the Democratic nomination for
Congress and resigned his judgeship to enter the campaign.  The
District included eleven large counties in the western part of the
State.  O. H. Browning of Quincy, a lawyer of ability, destined to
a distinguished political career and to succeed to Douglas' vacant
seat in the Senate twenty years later, was the Whig candidate.
They held a long series of joint discussions, addressed scores of
audiences and so exhausted themselves that both were prostrated
with serious sickness after the campaign.  The questions discussed
are as completely obsolete as the political issues of the
ante-diluvians.  Douglas was elected by a small majority.

He was in Washington at the opening of Congress and entered upon
his eventful and brilliant career on that elevated theatre, though
he was as yet only the crude material out of which a statesman
might be evolved.  He was a vigorous, pushing Western politician,
with half developed faculties and vague, unlimited ambition, whose
early congressional service gave small promise of the great leader
of after years.

The famous description of him contained in the Adams diary relates
to this period of his life.  The venerable ex-President, then
a Member of the House, mentions him as the homunculus Douglas and
with acrid malevolence describes him as raving out his hour in
abusive invectives, his face convulsed, his gesticulation frantic,
and lashing himself into such heat that if his body had been made
of combustible matter it would have burned out.

"In the midst of his roaring," he declares, "to save himself from
choking, he stripped off and cast away his cravat, unbuttoned his
waistcoat and had the air and aspect of a half-naked pugilist."
With all its extravagance and exaggeration, it is impossible to
doubt the substantial truth of this charicature.  Adams did not
live to see the young Member become the most powerful debater, the
most accomplished political leader and most influential statesman
of the great and stirring period that ensued.

The time was strange, as difficult of comprehension to the generation
that has grown up since the War as the England of Hengist and Horsa
is to the modern Cockney, or the Rome of Tiberius to the present
inhabitant of the Palentine Hill.  Only sixty years have passed, but
with them has passed away civilization, with its modes of thought
and sentiment, its ethics and its politics.  The country had
but one fifth of its present population.  A third of our area was
still held by Mexico.  Wealth was as yet the poet's dream or the
philosopher's night-mare.  Commerce was a subordinate factor in
our civilization.  Agriculture was the occupation of the people
and the source of wealth.  Cotton was king not only in the field
of business, but in that of politics.  The world still maintained
its attitude of patronizing condescension or haughty contempt toward
the dubious experiment of "broad and rampant democracy."  Dickens
had just written his shallow twaddle about Yankee crudeness and
folly.  Macaulay was soon to tell us that our Constitution was "all
sail and no anchor."  DeTocqueville had but recently published his
appreciative estimate of the New World civilization.  Americans knew
they had less admiration than they claimed and had lurking doubts
that there was some ground for the ill-concealed contempt of the Old
World toward the swaggering giant of the New, and a fixed resolve
to proclaim their supreme greatness with an energy and persistence
that would drown the sneers of all Europe.  It was a time of
egotism, bluster and brag in our relation to the foreign world, and
of truckling submission in our home politics to a dominant power,
long since so completely whirled away by the storm of revolution,
that it is hard to realize that half a century ago the strongest
bowed to its will.

Douglas was in no sense a reformer or the preacher of a crusade.
He was ready to cheerfully accept the ethics of the time without
criticism or question.  Political morality was at its nadir.
The dominant power of slavery was not alone responsible for this
depravity.  The country was isolated from the world and little
influenced by foreign thought.  Its energies were devoted to material
aggrandizement, to the conquest of Nature on a gigantic scale, to
the acquisition of wealth.  Since the settlement of the Constitution
moral problems had dropped out of political life and the great
passions of the heroic age had died away.  Education was superficial.
Religion was emotional and spasmodic.  Business ethics was low.

Party politics was in a chaotic condition.  The Whig organization
was not in any proper sense a party at all.  It was an ill-assorted
aggregation of political elements, without common opinions or united
purposes, whose only proper function was opposition.  It was so
utterly incoherent, its convictions so vague and negative, that it
was unable even to draft a platform.  Without any formal declaration
of principles or purposes it had nominated and elected Harrison
and Tyler, one a distinguished soldier and respectable Western
politician, the other a renegade Virginia Democrat, whose Whiggism
consisted solely of a temporary quarrel with his own party.  The
one unanimous opinion of the party was that it was better for
themselves, if not for the country, that the Whigs should hold
the offices.  The Democrats had been in control of the Government
for forty years.  Their professed principles were still broadly
Jeffersonian.  Their platform consisted mainly of a denial of all
power in the Federal Government to do anything or prevent anything,
the extravagant negations borrowed from the republican philosophers
of England and the French Revolutionists.

But a half century of power had produced a marked diversion
of practice from principles, and, in spite of its open abnegation
of power, the Government had become a personal despotism under
Jackson, which had vainly struggled to perpetuate itself through
the Administration of VanBuren.  But notwithstanding the absurd
discrepancy of their practical and theoretical politics, the
Democrats had one great advantage over the Whigs in having a large
and influential body of men united in interest, compelled to defend
themselves against aggression, prepared unflinchingly to take the
initiative, to whom politics was not a philosophic theory but a
serious matter of business.

The slave-holding aristocracy of the South was the only united,
organized, positive political force in the country.  With the
personal tastes of aristocrats and the domestic habits of despots,
they were staunchly Democratic in their politics and had full control
of the party.  They had positive purposes and aggressive courage.
A crisis had come which they only had the ability and energy to
meet.  The control of affairs was in the hands of the timid Whigs.
Decisive measures were needed.  By a peaceful revolution they seized
the Government out of the hands of the Whigs in the midst of the
Administration and embarked on a career of Democratic conquest.

President Tyler, having quarreled with his party, eager to
accomplish something striking in the closing hours of his abortive
Administration, with unseemly haste rushed through the annexation
of Texas under a joint resolution of Congress.  Mr. Polk, the new
President, did not hesitate in carrying out the manifest will of
the people and the imperious behest of his party.  The South was
clamoring for more territory for the extension of slavery.  The West
was aggressive and eager for more worlds to conquer.  New England,
impelled by hatred of slavery and jealousy of the rising importance
of the West, opposed the entire project and earnestly protested
against annexation.

In the feverish dreams of the slavery propagandists rose chimerical
projects of conquest and expansion at which a Caesar or an Alexander
would have stood aghast.  Mexico and Central America were contemplated
as possible additions to the magnificent slave empire which they
saw rising out of the mists of the future.  They began to talk of
the Caribbean Sea as an inland lake, of Cuba and the West Indies
as outlying dependencies, of the Pacific as their western coast,
and of the States that should thereafter be carved out of South
America.  The enduring foundation of this tropical empire was to
be African slavery, and the governing power was to rest permanently
in the hands of a cultured aristocracy of slave-holders.  The people
of the North-Atlantic States and heir descendents in the Northwest,
who churlishly held aloof from these intoxicating dreams, were to
be treated with generous justice and permitted to go in peace or
continue a minor adjunct of the great aristocratic Republic.  Already
the irrepressible conflict had begun.

Douglas heartily accepted the plans of his party.  He was by
temperament an ardent expansionist, a firm believer in the manifest
destiny of his country to rule the Western Continent, a pronounced
type of exuberant young Americanism.  He was an unflinching partisan
seeking to establish himself in the higher councils of his party,
which was committed to this scheme of conquest.  On May 13th,
1846, he delivered in the House a speech, in which he defended the
course of the Administration in regard to the Mexican War and, in
a spirited colloquy, instructed the venerable John Quincy Adams in
the principles of international law.  He based his defense of the
war upon the treaty with  Santa Anna recognizing the independence
of Texas.  Adams suggested that at the time of its execution Santa
Anna was a prisoner incapable of making a treaty.  Douglas insisted
that, even though a captive, he was a de facto government whose
acts were binding upon the country, and to establish his proposition
cited the case of Cromwell who, during his successful usurpation,
bound England by many important treaties.  The niceties of international
law were not very punctiliously observed.  His arguments were warmly
received by men already resolved on a career of conquest.

The war was a romantic military excursion through the heart of
Mexico.  There were battles between the triumphant invaders and
the demoralized natives, which were believed entitled to rank among
the supreme achievements of genius and courage.  Americans had not
yet acquired that deep knowledge of carnage, those stern conceptions
of war, which they were destined soon to gain.  Military glory and
imperial conquest have rarely been so cheaply won.  The war gave
enduring fame to the commanding generals and shed a real luster
over the lives of thousands of men.

The material results were stupendous.  We acquired nearly twelve
hundred thousand square miles of territory--a region one-third larger
than the area of the United States at the close of the Revolution.
The extravagant dream of making the Pacific the western boundary
of the Republic was realized and no one seriously doubted that this
vast domain was surrendered to slavery.





Chapter IV.  The Compromise of 1850.




Douglas served two terms in the House and was again elected in
1846, but in January following was chosen Senator, taking his seat
on March 4th, 1847.  In April following he married Martha Denny
Martin, daughter of a wealthy North Carolina planter and slave-owner.

The Senate, during the early years of his service, was in its
intellectual gifts altogether the most extraordinary body ever
assembled in the United States.  Rarely, if ever, in the history of
the world, have so many men of remarkable endowment, high training
and masterful energy been gathered in a single assembly.  It was the
period when the generation of Webster, Clay and Calhoun overlapped
that of Seward, Chase and Sumner, when the men who had set at the
feet of the Revolutionary Fathers and had striven to settle the
interpretation of the Constitution met the men who were destined
to guide the Nation through the Civil War and settle the perplexing
questions arising from it.

Webster was now an old man, his face deep lined with care,
disappointment and dissipation.  Though sixty-eight years old and
the greatest orator of the century, his heart was still consumed
with unquenchable thirst of the honor of succeeding John Tyler
and James K. Polk.  Calhoun, now sixty-five years old, a ghastly
physical wreck, still represented South Carolina and dismally
speculated on the prospect of surviving the outgrown Union.  Cass,
equal in years with Calhoun, still held his seat in the Senate and
cherished the delusive hope of yet reaching the Presidency.  Benton
was closing his fifth and last term in the Senate, and Clay, the
knightly leader of the trimming Whigs, though now in temporary
retirement, was soon to return and resume his old leadership.

Within the first four years of Douglas' service, Salmon P. Chase,
William H. Seward and Charles Sumner made their appearance in the
Senate.  A new generation of giants seemed providentially supplied
as the old neared the end of their service.  Douglas, though serving
with both these groups of statesmen, belonged to neither.  Running
his career side by side with the later school of political leaders
and sharing in the great struggles on which their fame, in large
part, rests, his character and ideals were those of the older
generation.

The questions confronting Congress were of transcendent interest
and incalculable importance.  A sudden and astounding expansion had
occurred, calling for the highest, wisest and most disinterested
statesmanship in providing governments for the newly acquired
domain.  A million and a half miles of new territory, extending
through sixteen degrees of latitude, was now to be organized; the
future destiny of this vast territory, and indirectly that of free
institutions generally, was supposed to depend on the decision of
Congress.  Above all, the fate of the American apple of discord,
human slavery, was understood to be involved in the construction
of territorial and State governments for these new possessions.  It
was deemed by the South indispensable to the safety and permanence
of slavery to plant it in them.

For that half-disguised purpose they had been acquired at great
expense of blood and money.  New States, it was hoped, might now be
created south of the line below which slavery flourished, balancing
those to be admitted from the growing Northwest.  Thus far the
adventurous West had powerfully supported the South in its schemes
of conquest, but had no sympathy with slavery.  The old North,
thought ready to submit to its continued existence in the States
where already established, was implacably hostile to its further
spread.

It was not a question of ethics or of sober statesmanship, but one
of practical politics, that divided the North and the South at this
period.  Each hoped to secure for itself the alliance and sympathy
of the new States thereafter admitted.  Each applied itself to the
task of shaping the Territories and moulding the future States to
serve its ulterior views.

When Congress attempted to organize territorial governments,
the people of the North insisted on the exclusion of slavery from
Oregon and the territory acquired from Mexico.  The people of the
South made no resistance to its exclusion from Oregon.  It was
already excluded by "the ordinance of Nature or the will of God."
But that the vast territory torn from Mexico, acquired by the common
blood and treasure, should now be closed to their institution, was
intolerable.  To secure it they had sinned deep.  After the conquest
their position was peculiarly awkward.  The laws of Mexico excluding
slavery continued in force.  Hence in all this territory slavery
was as effectually prohibited as in Massachusetts until Congress
could accomplish the odious work of introducing it by express
enactment.  Calhoun strenuously argued the novel proposition that,
on the overthrow of the authority of the Mexican government by
American arms, the laws and constitution of Mexico were extinguished
and those of the United States, so far as applicable, occupied the
vacant field; that the Federal Constitution carried slavery with
it wherever it went, except where by the laws of a sovereign State
it was excluded.

He announced the proposition afterwards established by the Supreme
Court, that, as the Constitution proprio vigore carried slavery
into all the Territories, neither the territorial legislatures nor
Congress itself had power to interfere with the right of holding
slaves within them.

Webster conclusively answered this refined sophistry, pointing
out that slavery was merely a municipal institution, in derogation
of the common right of mankind, against the native instincts of
humanity, dependent wholly for its right of existence upon local
legislation, and that the real demand of the people of the South
was not to carry their slaves into the new Territories, but to
carry with them the slave codes of their several States.

While the venerable leaders who had ruled Congress and swayed public
opinion for thirty years were uttering philosophic disquisitions
on constitutional law or the ethics of slavery, Douglas had with
practical sagacity offered an amendment to the Oregon bill, extending
the line of the Missouri Compromise to the Pacific.  This would not
decide the great moral question between those who believed slavery
an unmixed good and those who believed it the sum of all villainies.
But he thought that moral ideas had no place in politics.  It would
not decide the great question of constitutional law between those
who, like Calhoun, believed slavery the creature of the Federal
Constitution, and those, who, like Webster, believed it the creature
of local municipal law.  But it promised a temporary respite to
the vexed question.  He had already, in the House, advocated the
extension of this line through the Western Territories.  He believed
that adhesion to this venerable Compromise, now as sacred as the
Constitution itself, was the hope of the future and succeeded in
persuading the Senate to adopt his amendment as the final solution
of the vexed problem.  It was rejected in the House and the question
indefinitely postponed.

In the Territories, meanwhile, events moved fast.  While Congress
had been wrangling over the new possessions, gold was discovered
in California.  A tumultuous rush of people, unparalleled since the
Crusades, at once began by all routes from every region to the new
El Dorado.  More than 80,000 settlers arrived in 1849.  A spontaneous
movement of the people resulted in a Constitutional Convention,
which met at Monterey on September 3d of that year, and adopted a
Constitution which forever prohibited slavery.  It was submitted
to a vote and adopted in November.

Congress met on December 3d and resumed the Sisyphean labors of the
last session.  Douglas was chairman of the Committee on Territories,
to which were referred all measures affecting the recent
acquisitions--altogether the most momentous of the session--which
stirred the deepest passions of Congress and held the keenest attention
of the people.  In the early days of December he submitted to his
Committee two bills.  One provided for the immediate admission
of California; the other for the establishment of governments for
Utah and New Mexico and the adjustment of the Texas boundary.  On
March 25th they were reported to the Senate.  Meanwhile Taylor,
in a special message, had recommended the immediate admission of
California.  Senator Mason had introduced a bill providing more
effective means for the summary return of fugitive slaves, in
effect converting the population of the free States into a posse
comitatus charged with the duty of hunting down the fugitive sand
returning him to bondage.  The clash of arms had begun.  Both sides
were passionately in earnest and resolved to encounter the utmost
extremity rather than yield.  The Democrats had a small majority
in the Senate, while in the House neither party had a majority.

The Free Soilers held the balance of power, but by a refusal
to cooperate with the conservative opponents of slavery extension
left the control of the House in the hands of the Democrats.  The
chief business of the early weeks of the session was the delivery
of defiant speeches and the presentation of resolutions defining
the opinions of various segments of distracted parties and revealing
the chasm that was opening between the friends and opponents of
slavery.

On the 21st of January the rival Whig chiefs of the Senate held
a confidential conference.  Clay submitted a plan of compromise
covering the whole field of controversy.  Webster promised his
cordial support.  A week later Clay presented the first draft of
his famous slavery Compromise.  He was under the sincere illusion
that he had been spared by Providence that he might save his country
in this great exigency and that his bill would secure long years
of peace and harmony.  At least, as many of them were old men, it
would postpone the evil day until they had been safely gathered to
their fathers, and, according to the political morals of the age,
the next generation must take care of itself.  Douglas moved to refer
the resolutions to the Committee on Territories; but, on motion of
Foote of Mississippi, they were referred to a select Committee of
Thirteen, consisting of three Northern Whigs, three Southern Whigs,
three Southern and three Northern Democrats, with Clay as chairman.
Douglas was not on this Committee.  It was composed of old Senators
whose established reputations were expected to give credit to any
proposition of compromise.

On May 8th the Committee reported, recommending the immediate admission
of California, the establishment of territorial governments in New
Mexico and Utah with no mention of the slavery question, the settlement
of the Texas boundary dispute and the enactment of a law providing
for the more effectual return of fugitive slaves.  Substantially
it was Douglas' two bills joined together, with Mason's Fugitive
Slave bill annexed.  It was a mass of unrelated measures, jumbled
together for the illegitimate purpose of compelling support of the
whole from friends of the several parts.

Clay spoke for two days in support of his great masterpiece of
compromising statesmanship.  He insisted that it should be accepted
by all for the reason that "neither party made any concession
of principle, but only of feeling and sentiment," and ingeniously
sought to soothe the anger of the North by the assurance that the
principle of popular sovereignty embodied in the bill was not only
eminently just and in harmony with the spirit of our institutions
but entirely harmless, inasmuch as the North had Nature on its
side, facts on its side and the truth staring it in the face that
there was no slavery in the Territories, proving that the law of
Nature was of paramount force.

On March 4th Calhoun attempted to speak, but found himself unable
and handed his speech to Mason who read it for him.  He rejected
Clay's Compromise as futile and denied utterly the right of the
inhabitants of a Territory to exclude slavery.  He accused the North
of having pursued a course of systematic hostility to Southern
institutions since the close of the Revolution, and cited the
Ordinance of 1787, the Missouri Compromise and the exclusion of
slavery from Oregon as instances of Northern aggression; and now,
he said, the final and fatal act of exclusion was attempted.  He
denounced the action of the people of California in organizing a
State without congressional authority as revolutionary and rebellious.
He grimly announced that the South had no concessions to make, even
to save the poor wreck of a once glorious Union.  He plainly told
them that if the Union was to be saved the North must save it.  It
must open the Territories to slavery.  It must surrender fugitive
slaves.  It must cease agitating the slavery question.  The
Constitution must be amended so as to restore to the South the
power of protecting itself.  If they were not willing to do these
acts of justice, nor that the South should depart in peace, let
them say so, that it might know what to do when the question was
reduced to one of submission or resistance.

Three days later Webster delivered his famous 7th of March speech.
He criticized with severity the Northern Democracy for its eager
and officious subserviency to the South throughout the whole
controversy arising out of the Mexican War, hinting that it had
been even more eager to server than the South had been to accept
its service.  He said that the Mexican War had been prosecuted for
the purpose of the acquisition of territory for the extension of
slavery, but that the nature of the country had defeated, in large
part, the hopes of the South.  He declared that the whole question
of slavery was settled by a higher law than that of Congress and
that there was not then a foot of territory whose status was not
already fixed by the laws of the several States or the decree of
the Almighty; that, by the irrepealable laws of physical geography,
slavery was already excluded from California and New Mexico.  He
"would not take pains uselessly to reaffirm an ordinance of Nature,
nor to reenact the will of God."  He denounced the Abolitionists
and urged upon the Northern States the duty of faithfully and
energetically enforcing the abhorred Fugitive Slave Law.

Seward, speaking a few days later, insisted that it was their
clear duty to admit California under any Constitution adopted by
it, republican in form, and assured then that had its Constitution
permitted slavery he would still have deemed it his duty to vote
for its admission.  He protested against the Fugitive Slave Law as
necessarily nugatory and utterly impossible of execution because
unanimously condemned by the public sentiment of the North.  In
answer to the crushing argument that the Constitution carried
slavery into the Territories and that cheerful obedience must be
yielded to the supreme law, he announced the startling doctrine
that there was a HIGHER LAW than the Constitution, to which their
first duty was due; that slavery was a violation of this HIGHER
LAW and hence the Constitution itself was powerless to establish
it in the Territories.

On the 13th and 14th Douglas spoke.  The speech was able and
adroit.  It was marred by the introduction of party-politics into
a discussion of such gravity.  He was always prone to lapse from
statesmanlike dignity to the level of the politician and viewed
most matters primarily in their relation to he transient questions
of party politics.  He undertook the ambitious task of replying
to the speeches of Webster, Seward, and Calhoun.  He repelled the
charge made by Webster that the Northern Democracy had surrendered
to the slave power in supporting the annexation of Texas and the
Mexican War, declaring that they had supported those measures from
patriotic motives, and that he was "one of those Northern Democrats
who supported annexation with all the zeal of his nature."  "With
a touch of the Northwest--the Northwestern Democracy," sneered
Webster, who contemptuously looked upon him as a crude blustering
youth from the far West.  But Webster, whose contempt for his coarse
taste was justified, had misjudged his resources and power.

"Yes, sir," replied Douglas, "I am glad to hear the Senator say
'With a touch of the Northwest'; I thank him for the distinction.  We
have heard so much talk about the North and South, as if those two
sections were the only ones necessary to be taken into consideration
* * * that I am gratified to find that there are those who appreciate
the important truth that there is a power in this Nation, greater
than either the North or the South--a growing, increasing,
swelling power, that will be able to speak the law to this Nation
and to execute the law as spoken.  That power is the country known
as the great West, the Valley of the Mississippi, one and indivisible
from the Gulf to the Great Lakes, stretching on the ones side and
the other to the extreme sources of the Ohio and the Missouri--from
the Alleghenies to the Rocky Mountains.

"There, sir, is the hope of this Nation, the resting-place of the
power that is not only to control but to save the Union.  We furnish
the water that makes the Mississippi and we intend to follow,
navigate and use it until it loses itself in the briny ocean.  So
with the St. Lawrence.  We intend to keep open and enjoy both of
these great outlets to the ocean, and all between them we intend
to take under our especial protection and keep and preserve as one
free, happy, and united people.  This is the mission of the great
Mississippi Valley, the heart and soul of the Nation and the
continent.  We know the responsibilities that devolve upon us, and
our people will show themselves equal to them.  We indulge in no
ultraism, no sectional strifes, no crusades against the North and
the South.  * * * We are prepared to fulfill all our obligations under
the Constitution as it is, and determined to maintain and preserve
it inviolate in its letter and spirit.  Such is the position, the
destiny and purpose of the great Northwest."

He told Webster that, according to the doctrine of his 7th of March
speech, to permit Texas to be divided into several States would be
harmless, because slavery was excluded from a large part of it by
the ordinance of Nature, the will of God.  He taunted him for not
having discovered his now celebrated principle of the ordinance of
Nature and will of God until after Taylor's election, and reminded
him that prior to the election Cass and Buchanan, the recognized
heads of the Democratic party, had advocated leaving the question
to the decision of the settlers in the Territories or, in other
words, leaving the ordinance of Nature and will of God to manifest
themselves.  But Webster had then opposed Cass' election and
denounced his doctrines and proposed policies.  The Whigs, having
run counter to the overwhelming popular sentiment in their unpatriotic
opposition to the Mexican War, found themselves ruined.  They chose
a distinguished soldier of that war President, and hoped to rally
by adopting this Democratic doctrine.

He accused Seward of carrying New York for the Whigs in the late
election by assuring them that Taylor, though a slave-holder, would
approve the legislative monstrosity known as the Wilmot proviso,
excluding slavery forever from the new Territories.  But Taylor
had ignored Seward's promise.  New York's vote had elected Taylor
and a few weeks later Seward was chosen Senator.  Taylor was made
President and Seward Senator by the latter's successful fraud.

Calhoun's charge of Northern aggression and encroachment he met
with a sweeping denial.  Neither the North nor the South as such
had any right in the Territories, but all the people of the States
had equal rights there.  The Ordinance of 1787, denounced by Calhoun
as a Northern aggression on Southern rights, was voted for by every
Southern State.  That Ordinance did not, in fact, exclude the South,
or even slavery, from the Northwest Territory.  A majority of the
settlers in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois were from the South.  Slavery
had actually existed in Indiana and Illinois and had but recently
disappeared.  The Missouri Compromise was not an act of Northern
aggression, but was passed by a united South which had made repeated
efforts to extend it to the Pacific.  The exclusion of slavery from
Oregon was not an act of Northern aggression, but the work of the
settlers during the period of joint occupancy under the treaty with
Great Britain, and should be accepted by the anti-slavery agitators
as proof of the wisdom of popular sovereignty.  the objection that
the people of the South were forbidden to emigrate with their property
to the new Territories was simply a complaint that they could not
carry the laws of their States with them, but must be governed by
the laws of their new domicile.  Calhoun's project of maintaining
an equilibrium between free and slave States or of compelling States
to accept or retain slavery against their will was impossible.

At the organization of the Government twelve of the thirteen States
had slavery.  but six of them voluntarily abolished it.  Delaware,
Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee would
yet adopt the system of gradual emancipation.  Seventeen free States
would soon be formed out of the territory between the Mississippi
and the Pacific.  Where would they find slave territory with which
to balance these States?  If Texas were divided into five States,
three of them would be free.  If Mexico were annexed, twenty of
her twenty-two States would be free by the ordinance of Nature or
the will of God.  He urged the duty of promptly providing governments
for the unorganized domain and closed with a graceful tribute to
Clay and the prediction that the Territories would soon be organized,
California admitted and the controversy ended forever.

There were three generically distinct groups of statesmen participating
in this great debate--the aggressive, unyielding men of the South
to whom slavery was dearer than the Union; the temporizing politicians
of the North and the border, with their compromises and concessions,
hoping to save the Union by salving its wounds; and the stern
Puritans of the North, bent on rooting out the sins of the Nation,
through the heavens fell.

The climax of the debate was now past, but it continued to agitate
Congress until the middle of September.  President Taylor, who had
exerted his influence against the Compromise, died on July 9th, and
was succeeded by Fillmore, who at once called Webster to the head
of his Cabinet and turned the Executive influence to the support
of the bill.  It proved impossible, even with his help, to pass
it as a whole; but after it had gone to wreck its fragments were
gathered up and each of the several bills which were jumbled together
in the "Omnibus" was passed.  The great Compromise was accomplished
and the slavery question declared settled forever.





Chapter V.  Results of the Fugitive Slave Law.




In 1850 Douglas moved to Chicago, which had become the chief city
of the State.

The people were greatly exasperated by the passage of the Fugitive
Slave Law.  The City Council, on October 21st, passed resolutions
harshly condemning the Senators and Representatives from the free
States who had supported it and "those who basely sneaked away from
their seats and thereby evaded the question," classing them with
Benedict Arnold and Judas Iscariot.  This was a personal challenge
to Douglas.  It happened that he was absent from the Senate on private
business when the bill was passed.  But the charge of evading the
question was grossly unjust.

On the evening of the 22nd a mass meeting was held at the city
hall, attended by a great concourse of angry citizens, who, amid
tumultuous applause, resolved to defy "death, the dungeon and the
grave" in resisting the hated law.  Douglas appeared on the platform
and announced that on the following evening he would address the
people in defense of the Fugitive Slave Law and the entire Compromise.
The announcement was received with a storm of hisses and groans.

The next night an enormous multitude gathered to hear him.  The
audience was not only sullen but bitterly hostile.  After a
contemptuous reference to the resolutions and a brief vindication
of himself against their insinuations, he plunged into the defense
of the law.  He insisted that the provision for the return of
fugitive slaves contained in the recent act was analogous to the
general provision of law for the return of fugitives from justice,
and, while abuses of the process might occur and wrong occasionally
inflicted, that was one of the inherent infirmities of human law,
and the same objection could be urged with equal force to all
extradition statutes.  While free blacks might be seized in the
North and carried South on the false charge of being fugitives
from service, innocent white men might also be seized in Chicago
and carried to California on the false charge of being fugitives
from justice.

He reminded them that the law of 1850 was substantially a reenactment
of that of 1793, passed by the Revolutionary Fathers, the founders
of the Constitution, and approved by President Washington.  He
did not argue, but assumed the justice of the old law; nor did he
allude to the increased ardor of pursuit of fleeing slaves since
their increase in value.  He rested his case on the close resemblance
of the letter of the new law to that of the old.  He told them that
the duty of returning fugitive slaves was created not by THIS law,
but by the Constitution, and that the real question was not as to
the existence of the duty, but which law performed it most justly
and efficiently.

A listener asked him whether the Constitution was not in violation
of the will of God.  He warned them of the danger of that objection,
arising from the difficulty of authentically ascertaining the will
of God.  It was not practicable to allow each citizen to determine
it for himself.  Hence, certain fundamental principles had been
established as a Constitution, which must be assumed to be in harmony
with it and from which no appeal lay.  The Constitution provided
for the return of fugitive slaves.  The sacred duty of citizenship
bound them to support it.  Appeals to a higher law were impracticable
and a mere evasion of duty.

Read in a the calmer light of after years the effectiveness of this
speech is hard to understand.  The literal difference between the
recent act and the law of 1793, was not great.  But the difference
between the ethical views of slavery held by the people in 1850
and those held in 1793 was not to be measured.  The changes in the
law were vicious and in the opposite direction from the radical
changes in popular sentiment.  The specially odious provision of
the new law, distinguishing it from general extradition statutes,
was that forbidding resort to the writ of habeas corpus by the
alleged fugitive at the place where seized.  The fugitive from
justice in California seized in Chicago could, on writ of habeas
corpus issued by an Illinois court, have it judicially determined
before his deportation whether the facts charged against him
constituted a crime and whether thee was probable cause to believe
that he had committed it.

Under the new law the Federal Commissioner of the State where the
arrest was made had no power to inquire into the truth or sufficiency
of the charge.  He could only determine whether the person arrested
was probably the one who had committed the escape, and must decline
to hear the testimony of the fugitive himself.  The fact of escape
was judicially determined in advance, ex parte, in the State from
which it had been made, and the alleged fugitive was remanded to
that State for such further proceedings as its laws might provide
and "no process issued by any Court, Judge, Magistrate or other
person whomsoever" could molest the captor in bearing away his
prize.

The speech was adroit, clever and marvelously effective.  It
strikingly illustrates the mental habits of the times.  It sought
to stem an irresistible moral current with ingenious plausibilities
and appeals to precedent.  It treated the question as one of
political expediency.  It sounded no moral depths, discussed no
ethical problem, though the country was aflame with moral indignation
and rising passionately against the ethics of the past.  It mastered
the audience by its fidelity to literal truth and sent them home
dazed, troubled, doubtful and ashamed.  At the close of the speech
resolutions affirming the duty of Congress to pass the Fugitive
Slave Law and that of citizens to obey and support it, and repudiating
those of the Common Council, were presented and unanimously
adopted by the subdued and humbled crowd.  On the following night
the Council repealed their offensive resolutions.

Meanwhile the country was enjoying the fruits of the Compromise
and striving to persuade itself that it would endure.  The people
earnestly desired to believe that the slavery question was settled
forever.  So strong was the wish to be done with it that, but for
the restless ambition of the politicians, the truce might have been
protracted for many years.  Permanent peace on the preposterous
condition of maintaining on equipoise between active, aggressive and
hostile forces was, of course, impossible.  but it was confidently
expected.  Clay, Stephens and fifty-two other Members of the Senate
and House issued a manifesto in January, 1851, in which they
announced that the Compromise was final and, to give their manifesto
the highest solemnity, gravely declared that they would not support
anyone for office who was not in favor of faithfully upholding it.
In the North approval for the Compromise was general and enthusiastic.
It was hoped that money-making would no longer be disturbed by
fanatical agitation of moral questions.

And yet there were murmurs of anger against the detested law.  It
was hard to compel the descendents of the Puritans to hunt down the
fleeing slaves when they believed that the curse of God rested on
the institution and that the rights of the fugitive were as sacred as
those of his pursuers.  There were outbreaks of defiance, violent
rescues, occasional riots.  But resistance was sporadic.  The people
were disposed to wash their hands of all responsibility for the
law, to deprecate its existence, but, since it had been pronounced
a final Compromise, to pray that it might prove so.  In the South
the general opinion was that the danger was past and that years of
peace were in prospect.  Enthusiastic meetings approving the compromise
were held everywhere outside of South Carolina and Mississippi.

While the entire moral victory of the Compromise rested with
the people of the South, they had won nothing substantial but the
Fugitive Slave Law, which was of questionable value.  The great
object for which they had conspired, sinned and fought had slipped
from their grasp.  California was a free State.  New Mexico with
indecent haste had called a Convention, adopted a Constitution
prohibiting slavery, and now demanded admission.

The Compromise, however, bade fair to endure.  Fillmore in his
annual message in December said, with perfect truth, that a great
majority of the people sympathized in its spirit and purpose and were
prepared in all respects to sustain it.  In Congress an optimistic
feeling prevailed.  Clay complacently congratulated the country on
the general acquiescence in the law and said that it had encountered
but little resistance outside of Boston.  Douglas assured the
Senate that Illinois in good faith discharged its duty under the
late Act.  It was flanked on the east and west by the slave States
of Kentucky and Missouri.  It did not intend to become a free <DW64>
colony by offering refuge to the fleeing slaves of neighboring
States and, not relying on the action of the Federal Government
alone for protection, had enacted severe laws of its own to prevent
it.  When a Judge in that State he had imposed heavy penalties
on citizens convicted of the offense of harboring fugitives from
service.  It was the duty of all citizens to sustain and execute the
law, a duty imposed by patriotism and loyalty to the  Constitution.
But there was an organization in the North to evade and resist
the law, with men of talent, genius, energy, daring and desperate
purpose at its head.  It was a conspiracy against the Government,
and men occupying seats in the Senate were responsible for the
outrages the Boston mob perpetrated in resistance of the law.  The
Abolitionists were arming <DW64>s in the free States and inciting
them to murder anyone who attempted to seize them under the provisions
of the law.

Already he aspired to the Presidency and began to jealously guard
his reputation against the sinister suspicions which in those days
haunted the ambitious statesman.  The great problem which then taxed
the ingenuity of the aspiring politician was, how to win the South
without alienating the North, or how to hold the North without losing
the South.  Irreconcilable differences of opinion on fundamental
questions, deepening ominously into passionate hostility of sentiment,
were already manifesting themselves.  The task of the politician
was to steer his dangerous course between this Scylla and Charybdis.
If he gave color to the suspicion that he even tolerated the growing
anti-slavery sentiment of the North, the South would reject him
with horror.  If he espoused too warmly the cause that had become
so dear to the heart of the South, the North, goaded by its
over-sensitive conscience, would spurn him with disgust.  In the
existing state of party organization the highest success was not
possible without at least partial reconciliation of these irreconcilable
forces.  Northern statesmen could not hope to succeed by brave
appeals to the passions and prejudices of the South, for they would
lose their home constituencies, the worst fatality that can befall
an American politician.  They could not hope to succeed by brave
appeals to the earnest convictions of the North, for they had not
yet authority as affirmative rules of political conduct.

The charge of dodging a vote on the Fugitive Slave bill had annoyed
Douglas deeply.  Any doubt cast upon his fidelity to the South
in its contest with the rising anti-slavery sentiment would be
disastrous.  It was extremely distrustful of Northern politicians
and ready to take alarm on the slightest occasion.  When the
session was but three weeks old he spoke, defending himself against
a series of political charges and boasting his partisan virtues in
a way that plainly proclaimed the candidate and savored strongly
of the stump.  He explained that he had been called to New York
on urgent private business on the day of the passage of the law
and that on his return he was taken seriously ill and confined to
his bed during the latter part of the session and for weeks after
adjournment.  He claimed credit for having written the original
Compromise bills which Clay's Committee joined together with a wafer
and reported as its own.  He denied vehemently having favored the
Wilmot Proviso, excluding slavery from all territory acquired from
Mexico, and declared that he had sought to extend the Missouri
Compromise line to the Pacific.  He said that the legislature of
Illinois had instructed him to vote for the exclusion of slavery
from the Territories, and that, while he had cast the vote of his
State according to instructions, he had protested against it, and
the vote cast was that of the legislature.  He regarded the slavery
question as settled forever and had resolved to make no more
speeches on it.  He assured them that the Democratic party was as
good a Union party as he wanted, and protested against new tests
of party fidelity and all interpolations of new matter into the
old creed.  He conjured them to avoid the slavery question, with
the intimation that, if they did so, it would disappear from Federal
politics forever.

Already the approaching presidential nominations were casting their
shadows over the political arena.  Though not yet thirty-nine,
Douglas was as eager for the Democratic nomination as Webster at
seventy was for that of the Whigs.

His picturesque youthfulness, energy and aggressiveness, so
strikingly in contrast with the old age, conservatism and timidity
of the generation of statesmen with whom he now came in competition,
aroused to the highest pitch the enthusiasm of the younger Democrats.
It is not impossible that he could have been nominated but for his
own imprudence and that of his counselors, who seem to have been
more richly endowed with enthusiasm than wisdom.  To make sure
of getting him before the people in the most dramatic way, and
at an early stage, they brought out in the January number of the
"Democratic Review" a sensational article which immediately gave
him great prominence as a presidential candidate and solidified
against him an opposition which assured his defeat.

This famous article said that a new time was at hand, calling for
new men, sturdy, clear-headed and honest men.  The Republic must
have them even if it must seek them in the forests of Virginia or
in the illimitable West.  It was necessary to have a more progressive
Democratic Administration than theretofore.  The statesmen of a
previous generation, with their antipathies, claims, greatness or
inefficiency, must get out of the way.  Age was to be honored, but
senility was pitiable.  Statesmen of the old generation were out
of harmony with either the Northern or Southern wing of the party.
Those who were not so were men incapable of grasping the difficulties
of the times, of fathoming its ideas or controlling its policy.
It had been in the power of these superannuated leaders to do
much good; but their unfortunate lack of discreet and progressive
statesmanship had ruined the party.  The next nominee for the
Presidency must not be trammeled with ideas belonging to an anterior
age, but a statesman who could bring young blood, young ideas and
young hearts to the councils of the Republic.

"Your mere general," it continued, "whether he can write on
his card the battle-fields of Mexico, or more heroically boast of
his prowess in a militia review; your mere lawyer, trained in the
quiddities of the court, without a political idea beyond a local
election; your mere wire-puller and judicious bottle-holder,
who claims preeminence now on the sole ground that he once played
second fiddle to better men; * * * and above all, your beaten horse,
whether he ran for a previous presidential cup as first or second
or nowhere at all on the ticket, none of these will do.  The
Democratic party expects a new man * * * * of sound Democratic
pluck and world-wide ideas to use it on.  * * * Let the Baltimore
Convention give to this young generation of America a candidate
and we are content."

The candidate thus presumptuously demanded by "Young America" was,
of course, Douglas.  the superannuated statesmen, incapable of
grasping difficulties, trammeled by the ideas of an anterior age
and sinking into pitiable senility, were clearly, Cass, Buchanan
and Marcy.  The description of them as the hero of a militia-review,
the mere lawyer with his quiddities, the political wire-puller
playing second fiddle to better men, was so clear that greater
offense could not have resulted from the use of their names.

On June first, 1852, while Congress was still sweltering in the
tropical heat of the Capital, the Democratic Convention met at
Baltimore, and began its five days of debating and balloting.  There
was a general belief that the nominee was certain to be elected.
The Whigs in their Compromise measures had given the Democrats
substantially what they wanted.  The chief desire of the latter
was to hold fast what they had and secure the administration of
the offices.  They proposed no reforms, made no complaint against
the Administration.  Their platform endorsed its chief measure.  It
pledged the party to the Compromise, including the Fugitive Slave
Act, and to "resist all attempts to renew the agitation of the
slavery question in congress or out of it, under whatever shape or
color the attempt might be made."  Like most political platforms,
it was made to win votes, not to announce moral truths; and the
four statesmen who were competing for the nomination believed that
platform best which would offend the fewest prejudices.

The speeches were delivered.  the first ballot gave Cass 116, Buchanan
93, Marcy 37 and Douglas 20 votes.  Day after day the managers of
the three veteran politicians plotted and counter-plotted and "Young
America" shouted for Douglas.  On the fourth day he had risen to
second rank among the candidates, having 91 votes, while Cass had
93.  On the fifth day the four distinguished statesmen were dropped
and Franklin Pierce, an inoffensive New Hampshire politician, was
nominated.

The Whig convention met at Baltimore on June 16th.  Already the
Whigs, though in power, were demoralized.  Their mission, never
very glorious, was ended.  In the North, tinctured with the old
Puritanism and sincere reverence for the primary rights of man,
there was a widely diffused feeling that a party responsible for the
Fugitive Slave Law could be spared without great loss to civilization.

In the South slavery had definitely placed itself under the
protection of the Democratic party as the more reliable, if not the
more subservient, of the two.  There was an appropriate funereal
air about the Convention as it struggled with the question of who
should stand on its platform of pitiful negations.  The platform
solemnly declared that the Compromise Acts, including the Fugitive
Slave Law, were acquiesced in by the Whig party as a settlement
of the dangerous and exciting questions which they embraced.  It
insisted upon the strict enforcement of the Compromise and deprecated
all further agitation of the question thus settled.  If further
evidence of the collapse of the party were required, it was furnished
by the attitude and character of the candidates.  Fillmore was a
passive candidate.  Webster, his Secretary of State, was an eager
competitor.  General Scott, though without experience in civil
affairs, was the third candidate and received the nomination.

This was the last serious appearance of the Whig party on the stage
of national politics.  The election resulted in the overwhelming
defeat of Scott and the gradual dissolution of the party.





Chapter VI.  The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise.




In January, 1853, Mrs. Douglas died.  In 1856 he married Miss Adele
Cutts of Washington, a Southern lady of good family.

He was reelected Senator in 1853 without serious opposition.  He had
hitherto been one of the most earnest defenders of the sacredness
of the Missouri Compromise.  He had strenuously sought to extend
it to the Pacific.  In 1848 he had declared it as inviolable as
the Constitution, "canonized in the hearts of the American people
as a sacred thing which no ruthless hand would ever be reckless
enough to disturb."  But events had moved fast and he moved with
them, adjusting his opinions to the advancing demands of the dominant
wing of his party.

During half a century the people of the South had been in control
of the Government, but Nature and advancing civilization had been
steadily against them.  They had won a brilliant victory in the
Southwest, but found it barren.  The only remaining territory in
which they could hope to plant slavery was that stretching westward
from Missouri, Iowa and Minnesota to the borders of Utah and Oregon.
It was wholly unorganized, devoted mainly to Indian reservations.
The plan was to organize this region, embracing the present States
of Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and parts
of Colorado and Wyoming, into a Territory to be called Nebraska.
The final contest between freedom and slavery for the possession
of the public domain was now to be waged.

The South was at this time in peculiarly favorable situation.  The
right to recover runaway slaves was secured.  Both the political
parties had declared in favor of maintaining and faithfully executing
the Compromise.  The people of both sections were in favor of
maintaining and faithfully executing the Compromise.  The people
of both sections were in favor of standing by their bargain in good
faith, the South enjoying its slavery and the North its freedom in
peace.  There is no apparent reason why this could not have lasted
for many years.  But the South could not rest easy under the sense
of increasing hostility to slavery and wanted to entrench it more
strongly against assault.  It would like more Senators and was ready
to stake everything on the capture of this last territory out of
which new States could be carved.

Congress met for a memorable session on December 5th, 1853.  Douglas
was chairman of the Committee on Territories, and his trusted
lieutenant, Richardson, was chairman of the Territorial Committee
of the House.  He was thus in position to control the legislation
of deepest importance and greatest political interest.  During the
closing days of the last session Richardson had pushed through the
House a bill to organize the Territory of Nebraska.  It was reported
to the Senate, referred to the Committee on Territories and Douglas
attempted in vain to hurry it through.

Dodge of Iowa, now introduced in the Senate a bill for the organization
of the Territory which was a copy of the House bill of the last
session.  It was referred to the Committee on Territories.  Douglas
as chairman on January 4th reported it to the Senate in an altered
form, accompanied by an elaborate report.  It provided that when
the Territory or any part of it should be admitted as a State it
should be with or without slavery as its Constitution should provide.
The report justified this non-committal attitude by citing the
similar provisions in the Utah and New Mexico bills.  It declared
it a disputed point whether slavery was prohibited in Nebraska by
valid enactment.  The constitutional power of Congress to regulate
the domestic affairs of the Territories was doubted.  The Committee
declined to discuss the question which was so fiercely contested
in 1850.  Congress then refrained from deciding it.  The Committee
followed that precedent by neither affirming nor repealing
the Missouri Compromise, nor expressing any opinion as to its
validity.  It intimated that in 1850 Congress already doubted its
constitutionality.  The Compromise was now doomed.  The inventive
genius of the Senate now applied itself to the task of shifting
the odium of its repeal upon the previous Congress.

While this bill was pending in the Senate Douglas was anxiously
scanning the field to ascertain what effect it was producing among
the people.  The South was not likely to be duped.  If the Missouri
Compromise was in force that alone excluded slavery, and no advantage
could accrue from organizing the new Territory without mention of
the subject.  It did not care to take the risk of proving the law
of 1820 invalid.  Let it be repealed.  But the thought of explicitly
repealing the Missouri Compromise, which he had been wont to declare
inviolably sacred, appalled him.  He dreaded its effect in Illinois
and throughout the Puritanical North, where moral ideas were
annoyingly obtrusive.  The South, though not demanding the repeal
of the Compromise, would surely welcome it with joy and gratitude.
The question of expediency was a hard one.

The bill, consisting of twenty sections, was printed on January
2d in the Washington Sentinel.  Again, on the 10th of January, it
appeared in the same paper with another section added.  The new
section provided that the question of slavery during the territorial
period should be left to the inhabitants, that appeals to the Supreme
Court should be allowed in all cases involving title to slaves or
questions of personal freedom, and that the Fugitive Slave Law should
be executed in the Territories as in the States.  This remarkable
change in the form and spirit of the bill was explained as resulting
from an error of the copyist, who had omitted this vital section
from it as originally printed.

On the 16th of January Senator Dixon of Kentucky offered an
amendment repealing the Missouri Compromise.  The next day Sumner
gave notice of an amendment affirming it.  The question could no
longer be dodged.  When Dixon's amendment was offered, Douglas,
who was greatly annoyed by it, went to his seat and implored him
to withdraw it.  But he refused.  He called upon Dixon and took him
for a drive.  They talked of the Nebraska bill and the amendment.
The result of the conference was that Douglas said to him:  "I
have become perfectly satisfied that it is my duty as a fair minded
national statesman, to cooperate with you as proposed in securing
the repeal of the Missouri Compromise restriction.  It is due
to the South; it is due to the Constitution, heretofore palpably
infracted; it is due to that character for consistency which I have
heretofore labored to maintain.  The repeal will produce much stir
and commotion in the free States * * * * for a season.  I shall be
assailed by demagogues and fanatics there without stint.  * * * *
Every opprobrious epithet will be applied to me.  I shall probably
be hung in effigy.  * * * * I may become permanently odious among
those whose friendship and esteem I have heretofore possessed.
This proceeding 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."

The bluff Kentuckian was much affected, and with deep emotion
exclaimed:  "Sir, I once recognized you as a demagogue, a mere party
manager, selfish and intriguing.  I now find you a warm hearted
and sterling patriot.  Go forward in the pathway of duty as you
propose, and, though the whole world desert you, I never will."

He had now decided on his course.  Cass, who had been forestalled by
his alert rival, was understood to be ready to step into the breach
if Douglas faltered.  He was on perilous heights where a false step
would be fatal.  Already a storm of opposition was brewing in the
North, which would surely break upon him with fury if he proposed
the repeal.  It might fail in the House and thus leave him with
both the North and South angrily condemning him,--the South for
his rashness and the North for his treachery.  Pierce was known
to be opposed to the express repeal of the Compromise.  On Sunday,
January 22d, Douglas called on the Secretary of War, Jefferson
Davis, explained the proposed change and sought the help of
the Administration in passing the bill.  Davis was overjoyed and
at once accompanied him to the White House.  Pierce received his
distinguished visitors, discussed the plan with them and promised
his help.

The next morning Douglas offered in the Senate a substitute for
the original Nebraska bill, in which two radical changes appeared.
The new bill divided the proposed Territory, calling the southern
part Kansas and the northern part Nebraska, and declared the Missouri
Compromise superseded by the legislation of 1850 and now inoperative.

On the next day appeared the "Appeal of the Independent Democrats
in Congress to the People of the United States."  The paper was
written by Chase and corrected by Sumner.  It denounced the original
Kansas-Nebraska bill as a gross violation of a sacred pledge, a
criminal betrayal of precious rights, part of an atrocious plot to
exclude free labor and convert the Territory into a dreary region
of despotism inhabited by masters and slaves, a bold scheme against
American liberty, worthy of an accomplished architect of ruin.
It declared in a postscript, written after the substitute bill
was offered by Douglas on January 23d, that not a man in Congress
or out of it, not even Douglas himself, pretended at the time of
their passage that the measures of 1850 would repeal the Missouri
Compromise.  "Will the people," it asked, "permit their dearest
interests to be thus made the mere hazards of a presidential game
and destroyed by false facts and false inferences?"

The Appeal, which (except the postscript) was written before the
substitute was offered, was published in many papers in the North
and produced a deep sensation.  On the 30th Douglas entered the
Senate Chamber angry and excited.  He had already begun to hear
the distant mutterings of the storm.  He opened the debate on his
substituted bill, but he was smarting under the cruel lash and,
before beginning his argument, poured out his rage on the authors
of the Appeal.  He accused Chase of treacherously procuring a
postponement of the consideration of the bill for a week in order
to circulate their libel upon him.  Chase interrupted him with angry
emphasis.  Douglas waxed furious and poured out his "senatorial
billingsgate" upon the offenders.  Yet, amidst his wrath, he kept
his head and made a keen and ingenious defense of his course.

The basis of his argument was the proposition, assumed though no
where stated, that while the laws of Congress were specific and
enacted to meet particular demands, the PRINCIPLE embodied in each
law was general, and if the philosophic principle of any law was
repugnant to that of any prior law, however foreign to each other
the subjects might be, the latter must be held to repeal the former
by implication; that the principle of the legislation of 1850 was
repugnant to that of the Missouri Compromise and hence repealed
it.

Chase at once replied briefly to the fiery attack, and on February
3d delivered an elaborate speech against the bill, which Douglas
recognized as the strongest of the session.  As a legal argument
it was a complete and crushing answer to the quibbling sophistry
of the advocates of implied repeal.  But it was not merely the
argument of a great lawyer.  It was the earnest remonstrance of a
moralist who believed in the eternal and immeasurable difference
between right and wrong.

He reminded them that the Missouri Compromise was a Southern measure,
approved by a Southern President, on the advice of a Southern
Cabinet.  While in form a law, it had all the moral obligation of
a solemn contract.  The considerations for the perpetual exclusion
of slavery in the Territories north of 36 degrees and 30 minutes
were the admission of Missouri with slavery, the permission of
slavery in the Territories south of 36 degrees and 30 minutes, and
the admission of new States south of that line with slavery if their
constitution should so provide.  The North had honorably performed
its contract by the admission of Missouri and prompt consent to
the admission of all other slave States that had sought it.  The
South had yielded nothing to the North under the contract, except
the admission of Iowa and the organization of Minnesota.  The
slave States, having received all the contemplated benefits under
the contract and yielded none, proposed to declare it ended without
the consent of the free States.  He closed with an appeal to the
honor of the South, earnestly imploring the Senators to reject the
bill as a violation of the plighted faith and solemn compact which
their fathers had made and which they were bound by every sacred
obligation faithfully to maintain.

Seward, speaking on the 17th cautioned them that the repeal of the
Compromise would be the destruction of the equilibrium between the
North and the South so long maintained, the loss of which would be
the wreck of the Union.  He warned the North that if this territory
was surrendered to slavery the South would be vested with permanent
control of the Government; for every branch of it would be securely
within its power.  Already it had absolute sway.  One slave-holder
in a new Territory, with access to the Executive ear at Washington,
exercised more political influence than five hundred free men.
The recital of an old repeal was made for the demagogic purpose
of confusing the people, but was false in fact and false in law.
The Missouri Compromise was a purely local act.  That of 1850 was
likewise local.  They affected entirely different localities.  Hence
the later law could not by implication repeal the former.  It was
an ingenious device to attain the desired end by declaring that
done by a former Congress which no one then thought of doing, and
which the present Congress dared not boldly do.  The doctrine of
popular sovereignty meant that the Federal Government should abandon
its constitutional duty and abdicate its power over he Territory
in favor of the first band of squatters who settled within it.  It
meant that the interested cupidity of the first chance settlers
was more fit to guide the destinies of the infant Territory than
the collective wisdom of the American people.

Sumner, speaking a week later, declared that they were about to
determine forever the character of a new empire.  An effort was
made on false assumptions of fact, in violation of solemn covenants
and the principles of the fathers, to open this immense region to
slavery.  The measures of 1850 could not by any effort of interpretation,
by any wand of power, by an perverse alchemy, be transmuted into
a repeal of that prohibition of slavery.  The pending proposition
was to abolish freedom.  When the conscience of mankind was at last
aroused, they were about to open a new market to the traffickers
in flesh who haunted the shambles of the South.  They had as much
right to repudiate the purchase of Louisiana as this compact.
Despite the temporary success of their political maneuvers, let
them not forget that the permanent and irresistible forces were all
arrayed against them.  The plough, the steam engine, the railroad,
the telegraph, the book, were all waging war on slavery.  Its
opponents could bide the storm of vituperation and calmly await
the judgment of the future.

There was at no time the slightest doubt that the bill would pass,
and the arguments against it were in the nature of protests against
a wrong that could not be averted and appeals to the future to
redress it.

From the beginning it had a well organized majority.  But, assailed
by the invectives of Chase, Seward and Sumner, it could not stand
before the world undefended.  There was but one man enlisted in
its support at all fit to measure swords with any of these great
leaders; but he was undoubtedly more than a match for them all.

At midnight on March 3rd Douglas rose to close the debate.  The
great arguments were delivered; a safe majority was assured.  While
numerous Senators still wanted to be heard in support of the bill,
all conceded his right to close and yielded him the floor.  The
scenes of that wild night, while he charged upon his foes and stood
for hours at bay like a gladiator, repelling their savage assaults,
are among the most memorable in our congressional history.

He laughed at the charge that his bill had reopened the slavery
question against the will of both political parties, as expressed
in their platforms, and had disturbed the country at a time of
profound tranquility.  These men, he declared, who where singing
paeans of praise over the legislation of 1850, were the same men
who had most bitterly opposed it and predicted dire results from
it, just as they were prophesying evil from the pending measure
which simply carried to its legitimate conclusion the beneficent
principle of the former law.  The substance of all the opposition
speeches was contained in their manifesto published in January.
Chase in his speech had exhausted the entire argument.  The others
merely followed in his tracks.

"You have seen them," he said, "on their winding way, meandering
the narrow and crooked path in Indian file, each treading close
upon the heels of the other, and neither venturing to take a step
to the right or left or to occupy one inch of ground which did not
bear the footprint of the Abolition champion."

The repeal of the Compromise was a mere incident of the bill.  He
quoted his speeches in 1850 to show that he then defended the
popular sovereignty principle, also resolutions of the Illinois
legislature approving it.  The Committee assumed in reporting
the original bill that the law of 1850 had repealed the Missouri
Compromise and hence did not mention it.  Finding a diversity
of opinion and desiring to clear the ground for the unobstructed
operation of the principles of 1850 in all the Territories, they
had expressly recited the repeal.  Did not the bill as originally
reported repeal the Missouri Compromise as effectually as the
amended bill did?  If so, why this clamor about the amendment?  They
denounced the original bill in their manifesto as a repeal of the
Missouri Compromise.  If they told the truth in their manifesto their
speeches denouncing the amendment were false.  If their speeches
were true their manifesto was false.  The Missouri Compromise was
not a compact at all.  It was simply a piece of ordinary legislation,
passed like other bills, by means of compromise and concession.
The statement that the North had faithfully performed all the terms
of he alleged contract and, hence, the South was estopped from
repudiating it, was not supported by the evidence.  The North had
broken it immediately by resisting the admission of Missouri with
slavery.  A resolution of the New York legislature had been passed
a few months after the Compromise instructing their Senators and
Representatives to oppose the admission of Missouri or any other
State unless its Constitution prohibited slavery.  Objection being
made to the slavery clause of the Constitution, Missouri had not
been admitted until 1821.  The North having broken its alleged
contract, had relieved the South from all obligation under it, if
such obligation ever existed.  All this moral indignation had been
stirred up over the repeal of an ordinary law.  By their manifesto
and speeches the anti-slavery Senators had roused the people to rage
in their States.  The citizens of Ohio had burned him in effigy.
He could be found hanging by the neck in all the towns in which
they had influence.

Chase protested his sorrow that the people of Ohio had offered this
insult.  Douglas angrily reminded him of the vituperative epithets
contained in the manifesto, which evidently wounded him more
deeply than the coarser indignities.  He drew Seward and Chase into
debate on the literal correctness of details of their arguments, as
to which he had the better of them, having fortified himself with
voluminous documents, and elaborately proved the inaccuracy of
their statements, and elaborately proved the inaccuracy of their
statements, which gave him a brilliant opportunity to indulge
in a burst of indignation and in his wrath at the errors of his
adversaries' neglect, the awkward moral question which, was the
core of the controversy.  He intimated that Chase and Sumner had
obtained their seats in the Senate by questionable compromises.
Chase hotly branded the statement as false.  Sumner contemptuously
denied that he had even sought the position, much less bargained for
it.  The speech was closed with an earnest appeal to the Senators
to banish the subject of slavery forever and refer it to the
people to decide for themselves as they did other questions, with
assurance that this would result in a satisfactory settlement of
the vexed problem and bring abiding peace to all.  As the day was
dawning he closed.

With difficulty the presiding officer had repressed the bursts of
applause in the crowded galleries.  Even Seward, moved to admiration
by the overwhelming power and marvelous skill of his adversary,
impulsively cried out, "I never had so much respect for him as I
have to-night."

Amid the solemn hush of anxious expectancy the crowd awaited the
calling of the roll.  While no one doubted the result, all listened
in breathless silence to the voting of the Senators as though it
were the voice of doom.  Fourteen voted no, and were thirty-seven
voted yes.  The Senate adjourned amid the loud booming of cannon
at the Navy Yard, which celebrated the great victory.  In the chill
gray dawn, as they stood on the steps of the Capitol and listened
to the exultant booming of cannon, Chase said to Sumner:

"They celebrate a present victory, but the echoes they awake will
never rest until slavery itself shall die."

The bill now went to the House, where its management was entrusted
to Douglas' lieutenant, Richardson, chairman of the Territorial
Committee.  But the country was aroused.  The loud storm appalled
the Northern Members, whose votes were needed.  Pierce hesitated
until goaded on by his Southern counselors.  The attempt to refer
the bill to the Territorial Committee failed.  It was referred to
the Committee of the Whole and went to the foot of a long calendar.
This alarmed Douglas, who now spent most of his time in the House
assisting Richardson.  The Administration brought all of its
power to bear on the refractory Members, and on the 8th of May the
forces were ready for the attack.  The House resolved itself into
a Committee of the Whole, laid aside all previous business and
proceeded to the consideration of the bill.  The struggle at once
began between the domineering majority and the rebellious minority
and continued with increasing bitterness all day, all night and
until midnight of the 9th, when the session broke up in angry riot,
the enraged members leaping on their desks and shrieking in frenzy
or striving to assault each other with deadly weapons.

All were exhausted by the long, sleepless strain, and many were
drunk.  Douglas was on the floor during most of the session, passing
about swiftly among his followers and directing their movements,
the master-spirit who guided the storm of his own raising.  At
midnight the House, now a mere bedlam, adjourned.

The struggle dragged along from day to day, the minority stubbornly
contesting every inch, and the majority, under the personal direction
of Douglas, hesitating to use their power.  At last, on May 22nd,
at nearly midnight, the final vote was forced and the bill passed
by a majority of thirteen.  Among those voting against it was Thomas
H. Benton of Missouri, now a Member of the House, after his thirty
years' service in the Senate.  His terse characterization is more
generally remembered than anything else said against it.  Speaking
with a statesman's contempt of the explanatory clause, he said it
was "a little stump speech injected in the belly of the bill."






Chapter VII.  The Brewing Storm.




The powerful will and effective energy of the young Senator had achieved
a legislative revolution.  Perhaps, like Geethe's apprentice, he
had called into action powers of mischief which he would not be
able to control.  With the instincts of the politician he had sought
to devise a fundamental principle to meet a passing exigency.  He
had cooked his breakfast over the volcano.

The whole doctrine of popular sovereignty which became thenceforth
the central article in his creed did such violence both to law and
philosophy as to discredit the acumen of any statesman who seriously
believed it.  It was a short lived doctrine, speedily repudiated
with disgust by the South, in whose interest it had been invented,
and rejected as a legal heresy by a Supreme Court of learned
advocates of slavery.  It is hardly possible that Douglas believed
that Congress could delegate its highest duties and responsibilities
to a handful of chance squatters on the frontier.  This doctrine,
to the establishment of which he devoted a great part of the remaining
energies of his life, "meant that Congress, which represented
the political wisdom of an educated people, should abdicate its
constitutional right of deciding a question which demanded the
most sagacious statesmanship in favor of a thousand, or perhaps
ten thousand, pioneers, adventurers and fortune seekers, who should
happen to locate in the Territory."

The proposition to give the squatters actual sovereignty in all things
was an evident reducto ad absurdium.  And yet it was the inevitable
result of Douglas' reasoning.  The only excuse for the existence
of territorial governments was that the inhabitants were not yet
ready for the duties of self-government.  Squatter sovereignty rested
on the assumption that there was no such period of immaturity, and
hence no period in which territorial governments were justified.
The clear logic of the doctrine would entitle the first band of
squatters on the public domain to organize a State.  But it was
a superficially plausible proposition that appealed with peculiar
power to the uncritical popular prejudice.  The equality of men
and the right of self government were the central truths of the
American polity.  The sentimental devotion to these two principles
was passionate and universal.  A dogma that seemed to embody them
was a rare invention, the supreme feat of the highest order of
practical political genius.

But the omens were not good.  People seemed absurdly in earnest
about this harmless political maneuver.  Throughout the North rose
a storm of vehement protest, not merely from Abolitionists and Whigs
but from insurgent Democrats, which resulted in the consolidation
of the incoherent anti-slavery factions into the Republican party
and its early conquest of the Democratic States of the Northwest.
It developed later that the Northern Democracy was hopelessly ruined
by this political masterpiece of the greatest Northern Democrat.

Lincoln, who had been quietly maturing in modest retirement, was
roused by this shock and began that memorable battle with Douglas,
which finally lifted the obscure lawyer to heights above the great
Senator.  A resolution endorsing the Nebraska bill was pushed through
the Illinois legislature with difficulty, several of the ablest
Democrats denouncing it bitterly.  Other Northern legislatures either
protested against it or remained ominously silent.  Throughout the
North pulpit and press thundered against the repeal with startling
disregard of party affiliations.  Three thousand New England
clergymen sent a petition protesting against it "in the name of
Almighty God."  The clergy of New York denounced it.  The ministers
of Chicago and the Northwest sent to Douglas a remonstrance with
a request that he present it, which he did.  He was deeply hurt
by the angry protests from the moral guides of the people.  He
denounced the preachers for their ignorant meddling in political
affairs, and declared with great warmth that they had desecrated
the pulpit and prostituted the sacred desk to the miserable and
corrupting influence of party politics.  He afterwards said in
bitter jest, "on my return home I traveled from Boston to Chicago
in the light of fires in which my own effigies were burning."

Congress adjourned early in August, but he lingered in the East and
not until late in the month did he return to meet his constituents.
The intensity of popular indignation at the North was a disagreeable
surprise to him.  In Chicago the sentiment was openly and overwhelmingly
against him.  It was dangerous, now that he had fought his way up
to the head of his party and seemed assured of the coveted nomination,
to permit himself to be discredited at home.

Four years before he had conquered the hostile city by a speech,
and he resolved again to subdue its insurgent spirit.  Meetings of
disgusted Democrats and indignant Whigs had been held to denounce
him.  He had been burned in effigy on the streets.  He had been
charged with loitering in the East afraid to meet the people whom
he had betrayed.  The changes were rung on the fact that his middle
name was that of the traitor, Benedict Arnold.  When he entered the
city the flags on building and vessels were hanging mournfully at
half-mast.  At sunset the bells were tolled solemnly.  It was truly
a funereal reception.  Arrangements were made for him to address
the people on the night of September 1st in vindication of himself.
The meeting was held in the large open space in front of North
Market Hall.  The crowd was enormous and ominously sullen.  The
roofs, windows and balconies of all adjacent buildings were occupied.
There was not a cheer, except from a little band of friends in
front of him, as at nearly eight o'clock he rose to speak.

The memorable scene which followed illustrates how small is the
interval that separates the most advanced civilization from the
grossest barbarism.  He began his speech, but was soon interrupted
by a storm of hisses and groans, growing louder and louder until it
seemed that the whole enormous throng was pouring out its execration
in a mingled hiss and groan.  He waited with defiant calmness for the
storm to subside and again attempted to speak.  He told them with
manifest vexation that he had returned home to address his constituents
and defend his course and that he intended to be heard.  Again he
was interrupted by the overwhelming hiss, mingled with groans and
coarse insults.  His friends fiercely threatened to resent the
outrage, but he prudently restrained them.  He then began to shout
defiance and rebukes at the mob.  His combative temper was stirred.
He shook his head and brandished his fists at the jeering crowd.
His friends importuned him to desist, but he pushed them aside and
again and again returned to the attack with stentorian tones and
vehement gestures, striving to outvoice the wild tumult and compel
an audience.

But they were as resolute as he and persistently drowned his
shouting.  This continued nearly three hours.  At half-past ten,
baffled, mortified and angry, he withdrew.  One admiring biographer
declares that he yelled to the mob as a parting valediction,
"Abolitionists of Chicago, it is now Sunday morning.  I will go to
church while you go to the devil in your own way."  The irrepressible
conflict was approaching the muscular stage of its development,
when the aroused passions of the people must find some other vent
than words, when the game of politics could no longer be safely
played with the strongest emotions of a deeply moral race.

It was not possible to treat the matter lightly.  Evidently a tide
of fanatical passion had set against him, not only in the old North,
but in the new Northwest, the field of his undisputed mastery.
It was necessary to bestir himself in earnest and turn back this
rising flood which threatened to engulf him just as he came in sight
of his goal.  The symptoms were decidedly bad.  The elections thus
far held indicated a surprising revolt against his new Democratic
gospel of popular sovereignty.  As the autumn advanced the omens
grew worse.  New Hampshire and Connecticut had already manifested
their disapproval.  Iowa, hitherto staunchly Democratic, was
carried by the Whigs.  The later New England elections showed the
most amazing Democratic defection.  Pennsylvania elected to Congress
twenty-one pronounced opponents of popular sovereignty and slavery
extension.  Ohio and Indiana had both cast their votes for Pierce.
But at this election Ohio rejected the revised Democratic platform
by 75,00 and Indiana by 13,000.

After his rebuff in Chicago he plunged into the Illinois campaign,
which was fought on the Kansas-Nebraska issue.  In the northern
part of the State his receptions were chilly and his audiences
unfriendly, sometime indulging in boisterous demonstrations
of hostility.  "Burning effigies, effigies suspended by robes,
banners with all the vulgar mottoes and inscriptions that passion
and prejudice could suggest, were displayed at various points.
Whenever he attempted to speak, the noisy demonstrations which had
proved so successful in Chicago were repeated."

But as he moved southward the people became more cordial.  The great
center of political activity was Springfield, where the State Fair,
lasting through the first week of October, attracted thousands of
people, and the politicians assembled to make speeches and plan
campaigns.  He spoke on October 3rd at the State House.  The most
important matter pending was the choice of the legislature which
should elect a Senator to succeed his colleague Shields, who was
a candidate for reelection.  The opposition was a heterogeneous
compound of Whigs, anti-Nebraska Democrats and all other political
elements opposed to the revised Democratic creed.  The leading
candidates of this fusion party for Senator were Lyman Trumbull,
a Democrat opposed to the new program of slavery extension, and
Abraham Lincoln, the recognized leader of the Whig party of the
State.  It was expected that Lincoln would answer Douglas on the
following day.

This political tourney held in the little Western Capital was
in many ways a rather notable event.  The great question of human
slavery had now definitely passed from the region of mere moral
disquisition into that of active statesmanship.  It had become the
decisive practical problem of the time, the attempt to solve which
was revolutionizing party politics and sweeping away the political
philosophy of the past.  The opinions of men on this question
were determining their associations and directing their conduct,
regardless of minor matters, which are now forgotten.  The South
was united for the support and extension of slavery.  The North
was tending to unity in the resolve to prevent its further spread.
Already the new generation of Southern statesmen were plotting to
divide the Union and were bent on extending the slave holding States
across the continent, believing that when the separation occurred,
California would join the Southern Confederation and thus give
them a Republic extending from ocean to ocean and controlling the
mouth of the Mississippi.

The first step in this plan had already been taken by opening to
slavery the Territory of Kansas, which then contained a large part
of Colorado.  The remaining task of pushing their western border
on to the Pacific seemed comparatively easy.  Already treason was
festering in the heart of the South, but Douglas, now the most
powerful ally of these plotting traitors, was entirely devoted to
the Union.  He neither felt nor thought deeply on any question.  The
symptoms of coming revolution were merely disclosures of political
strategy to him.  The South held out the bait of the Presidency,
and he led its battle.  In his attachment to the Union and his
subordination of both morals and statecraft to its preservation as
the supreme end, he was a faithful echo of the great statesmen of
the preceding age.  But a generation of statesmen had appeared in
the North with a large and growing following who were reluctantly
reaching the conclusion that the primary rights of man were even
more sacred than the Union.  Political expediency was not their
ultimate test of right.

Lincoln, though yet comparatively obscure, was destined soon to become
the leader of this new school of ethical statesmen, as distinguished
from the old school of political temporizers and opportunists
to which Douglas belonged.  Lincoln, as Douglas well knew, was a
man of finer intellectual gifts than any of the great senatorial
triumvirate whom he had successfully met.  His moral feelings were
tuned to as high a key as Sumner's.  He had a firmer grasp of the
central truths of the new politico-moral creed than Chase.  He
had more tact and sagacity than Seward.  He had more patience with
temporary error, more serene faith in the health and sanity of human
nature than any of the three.  He was a greater master of the art
of popular oratory than any of them.  Above all he had the power,
dangerous to Douglas, of seizing the most ingenious and artfully
concealed sophism and good naturedly dragging it to the light.
Endowed with the most exuberant flow of genial humor, he was yet
sternly earnest in his belief in the inviolable sanctity of moral
right.  During his recent years he had read much and thought deeply.
He had mastered a style rarely equaled in clearness, simplicity
and power.  Without the prejudices and entanglements of a past
political career, he entered the arena in the ripeness of his
slow-maturing powers.  Not only his temperament and intellect but
his experience and training admirably fitted him for the high task
which he was destined to perform.

When Douglas opened his speech at the State House, he unconsciously
lent new importance to Lincoln by announcing that he understood
that he was to answer him, and requesting him to come forward and
arrange terms for the debate.  But Lincoln was not present and he
plunged into his argument, defending the Kansas-Nebraska bill, his
own course and that of his party.  Lincoln spoke the next day and
among his most eager listeners was Douglas, who occupied a seat in
front and was generously invited to reply.  The speech, four hours
long, was an agreeable surprise to Lincoln's friends, a startling
revelation to Douglas and an astonishing event to the crowd, who
recognized in the awkward country lawyer a dangerous antagonist for
the great Senator, the incomparable master of the art of political
debate.  He realized that this obscure adversary had clutched him
with a power never felt in his great struggles with the giants
of the Senate.  He indicated his sense of the importance of the
contest by devoting two hours to a reply.  The chief interest of
this meeting now is in the new prominence which it gave to Lincoln.
The long duel lasted intermittently through four years, and finally
gave Lincoln such fame that he was chose over Seward and Chase to
lead the anti-slavery forces which they had roused from lethargy
and organized into unity.

The Illinois campaign continued with great spirit and Douglas had
the mortification of seeing what he regarded as a wave of fanaticism
engulf the State.  The anti-Nebraska fusion carried the legislature,
defeated Shields and, after a brief contest between Trumball, the
anti-Nebraska Democrat, and Lincoln, the anti-slavery Whig, elected
the former Senator.





Chapter VIII.  Decline of Popular Sovereignty.




Congress had confessed its incompetency to deal with the Kansas
problem and referred it to the decision of rude squatters on
the frontier.  They dealt with this grave congressional question
in characteristic fashion.  An Emigrant Aid Society, organized in
Massachusetts, was among the means adopted by the North to colonize
the Territory and mold its institutions.  The adventurous frontiersmen
of western Missouri were chiefly relied on by the South to shape
the new State.  The Emigrant Society founded the town of Lawrence
and established there a formidable anti-slavery colony.  The Missouri
squatters organized a "Self-Defensive Association" and attempted
to drive out the Northern settlers.  Elections were held by the
colonists from the North and their Missouri neighbors in which the
Missourians outnumbered their rivals and captured the territorial
government.  The Northern colonists organized a State and attempted
to run it.  Irregular warfare was maintained between the Lawrence
squatters and the invading Missourians to determine which faction
was entitled to exercise the sovereignty delegated by Congress.

The House passed a bill to admit Kansas with the Constitution
adopted at Topeka by the Northern settlers in their abortive effort
to organize a State.  It failed in the Senate and a few days later
the Federal troops dispersed the usurping State legislature.  The
Governor seeing that all civil authority was ended, negotiate a
truce between the warring factions, resigned and hastened away from
the scene of the disastrous experiment of Squatter Sovereignty.

The meeting of Congress on December 3rd, 1855, marked another stage
in the great struggle.  So completely were the parties disorganized
that it was found impossible to classify this Congress.  From
December 3rd to February 2nd the House was unable even to organize
itself.  On December 31st the President sent in his message.  He
disposed of the overshadowing problem in a few brief words and
devoted the message to ephemeral matters long since as completely
forgotten as himself.  Although civil war had been raging in Kansas
for many months and the carnival of crime was still in progress
on that frontier, he gravely assured Congress that it was a matter
of congratulation that the Republic was tranquilly advancing in a
career of prosperity and peace.  He told them that the people of
the Territory were clothed with the power of self-government and
that he had not felt justified in interfering with their exercise
of that right.  But on January 24th he sent another message announcing
in general terms the disappointment of his hopes and recommending
an enabling act for the admission of Kansas as a State.

The Senate consisted of thirty-four Democrats, twelve Whigs and
thirteen Republicans.  Douglas was the recognized leader of the
majority, without whose presence they were unwilling to take any
decisive action.  But he was detained by sickness and did not take
his seat until February 11th.

On the 12th of March he presented to the Senate a most elaborate
report from his Committee, together with a bill to authorize the
people of Kansas to organize a State whenever they should number
93,420.

It is impossible to read this report, which was prepared by himself,
without admiring his subtle art and consummate skill.  He argued
away the power of Congress to impose restrictions on new States
applying for their admission, other than that the Constitution be
republican in form, and insisted that the people of the Territories
must be left perfectly free to form their own institutions and were
entitled to admission as matter of right.  He traced the trouble
to the pernicious activity of the Emigrant Aid Company, which had
attempted to force New England institutions and customs upon the
Territory.  He accused this Company of systematic colonization
and drew a moving picture of the march of these political colonists
across Missouri, pouring out their denunciations of slavery,
exhibiting their hostility to the institutions of that State, until
at last the people in alarm resolved on defense.  He admitted that
there might be some cause for regret over the occasional errors
and excesses of the Missourians; but it must not be forgotten that
they were defending their internal prosperity and domestic security
against the invasion of New England fanatics, who were bringing
in their grain "the horrors of servile insurrection and intestine
war."

The attempt to organize a State government at Topeka he condemned
as a seditious movement, designed to overthrow the territorial
government and the authority of the United States.  He justified
the law referring the question of slavery to the inhabitants, and
traced its failure to the intemperate passions of those who had
precipitated this mad contest for mastery.

Collamer of Vermont presented the minority report, condemning the
violence of the friends of slavery, deploring the fearful results
of the experiment of Squatter Sovereignty and urging speedy admission
of the State.  It condemned the provision of the law referring
the question of slavery to the inhabitants and traced the entire
trouble to that blunder.

Sumner at once denounced the report of the majority, intimated
his purpose of properly setting the brand of falsehood upon it in
a subsequent speech, and told them to "begin their game with loaded
dice."

Douglas angrily challenged him to deny a single fact in the report
and said he was ready to overwhelm him with proof.  "We are ready
to meet the issue," he said, "and there will be no dodging.  We
intend to meet it boldly; to require submission to the laws and
to the constituted authorities; to reduce to subjection those who
resist them, and to punish rebellion and treason.  I am glad that
a defiant spirit is exhibited here; we accept the issue."

Two days later Trumbull spoke in unsparing criticism of the report of
the Committee.  It happened that Douglas was absent when he began.
Word was carried to him and he hurried to the Senate.  When Trumbull
closed and the usual motion to adjourn was made, he protested
against it and denounced the discourtesy of discussing the report
during his absence.  He was vexed especially by his colleague's
exasperating statement that was a "life-long Democrat and was
representing the Democracy of Illinois in the Senate."  He assured
them that Trumbull was without party standing in that state, and
proposed that they sign a joint resignation, thus submitting their
quarrel to the people.  But there was a deeper wound than this which
still rankled, and he turned from his colleague to pour out his
wrath on Sumner for the publication of the "Appeal of the Independent
Democrats," and the old quarrel between them was rehearsed anew
with increasing bitterness on both sides.

On the 20th he spoke for two hours and a half in defense of his
report.  Charges of fraud, violence or illegal voting, he said,
were made in but seven of the eighteen election districts into
which Kansas was divided, although ample provisions had been made
for the presentation of protests to the Governor.  A large majority
of both branches of the legislature were elected by these eleven
districts where no complaints were made.  At least a quorum must
have been legally elected.  The minority report charged that on
the day of the territorial election, "large bodies of armed men
from the State of Missouri appeared at the polls in most of the
districts, and by most violent and tumultuous carriage and demeanor,
over-awed the defenseless inhabitants and by their own votes, elected
a large majority of the members of both houses of said Assembly."

But the report contained not a word about the eleven uncontested
districts affected by this invasion.  In the eleven uncontested
districts the judges made their returns in due form and, no
protests nor charges of fraud or illegal voting being presented,
the Governor granted certificates of election as a matter of course.
The minority stated that in many districts protest had not been
made because the inhabitants, discouraged and intimidated by the
Missouri invaders, had let the matter pass.  Yet at Lawrence and
Leavenworth, the chief centers of the alleged Missouri violence
the people were not intimidated from contesting the election, what
reason was there to suppose that elsewhere, remote from the scene
of trouble, they were so completely conquered that they dared not
protest against their wrongs and petition for redress of their
grievances?

The thirty-three judges appointed by the Government to conduct
the election in the eleven districts, all swore that the returns
contained a true statement of the votes polled by the lawful voters.
The Governor, two weeks after giving certificates of election,
issued his proclamation commanding the members to assemble on the
2d of July.  He recognized the legitimacy of the legislature in
his message, invoking the Divine blessing on it and recommending
the passage of important laws.  But he afterward quarreled with
the legislature.  He then sought to repudiate it and impeach its
validity by charging that it had been elected by Missouri invaders.
The only evidence before the Committee tending to show irregularities
in the election was the hearsay statement of the Governor, which
flatly contradicted his solemn official declarations.  The legislature
itself had investigated the elections of all members against whom
contests were filed and its legitimacy was finally and conclusively
established.  The malcontents having failed to capture the
legislature, encouraged by Governor Reeder (who had meanwhile been
relieved from office), instituted their rebellious Topeka movement
and, in defiance of the law, attempted to organize a State.

The movement was revolutionary and intended to subvert the existing
Government.  Only two laws enacted by the territorial legislature
were complained of as unjust,--that relating to elections and that
relating to slaves.  The social, domestic and pecuniary relations
of the people had adjusted themselves to this body of laws which
Congress was asked to annul; and these friends of the <DW64> who had
organized a rebellious State government in his behalf, had adopted
a Constitution which forever excluded him from the State.  The
entire trouble in Kansas, he continued, rose not from any vice
inherent in the law, but from abuses of the rights given by it to
the people.  The law simply permitted them to form their domestic
institutions in their own way.  If that great principle had been
permitted free operation, there would have been no violence or
trouble in Kansas.  The good order reigning in Nebraska, where the
law was fairly tried, was sufficient proof of its wisdom.

The opponents of this great principle had insisted on moulding the
State of Kansas from without.  Having failed to induce Congress
to interfere in the internal affairs of the Territory, they then
sought to accomplish their purpose by means of a society organized
in Washington and charted in Massachusetts, with several millions
of capital.  They had deliberately attempted to discredit the
Kansas-Nebraska bill and its supporters, in order to influence the
approaching presidential election.  The whole responsibility for
the disturbance in Kansas rested upon the Massachusetts Emigrant
Aid Company and its affiliated societies.  The people of Missouri
never contemplated the invasion of conquest of the Territory.  If
they had imitated the example set by New England, they had done
it on the principle of self-defense, and had always been ready
to abandon their counter-movement as soon as the managers of the
New England invasion ceased their efforts to shape the domestic
institutions of the Territory by an unwarranted scheme of foreign
interference.  When the cardinal principle of self-government
should be recognized as binding on all, there would be an end of
the slavery controversy, and the occupation of political agitators,
whose hopes of position and promotion depended upon their capacity
to disturb the country, would be gone.

The debate lingered along indecisively through the Spring weeks and
the Senators poured out their mutual recriminations with increasing
bitterness.  Personal relations among them were seriously strained.
Both parties were conscious that their constituents shared their
passions and applauded their acrimony.

On the 19th and 20th of May, Sumner delivered his philippic on "The
Crime Against Kansas."  The title of the speech was a gratuitous
insult to the power which had held sway in American politics for
fifty years and learned to enjoy that sense of superiority and
sacredness which characterized the hierarchy in the middle ages.
The assaults on brother Senators were brutal.  Senator Butler of
South Carolina, a polite, formal gentleman of the old school, was
recognized as the social and intellectual head of the Southern
aristocracy.  Douglas, though forever excluded from its inner
circles, was an efficient and useful ally.

These senatorial leaders of the slavery crusade in Kansas were the
victims of Sumner's bitter invective.  He referred to them as the
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza of slavery and, as if to prove that
this comparison was not a mere momentary inspiration of playful
humor but the elaboration of malignant hate, he developed the
parallel to its minute details.  He described Douglas in his speech
defending his report as "piling one mass of elaborate error on
another mass and constraining himself to unfamiliar decencies of
speech."  But he drew hope from the reflection that the Illinois
Senator "is but mortal man; against him is immortal principle.
With finite power he wrestles with the Infinite and he must fall.
Against him are stronger battalions than any marshaled by mortal
arm, the inborn, ineradicable, invincible sentiments of the human
heart; against him is Nature with all her subtle forces; against
him is God.  Let him try to subdue these."  He compared the Kansas
troubles to the barbarous warfare of the Scottish Highlands when
blackmail was levied and robberies committed by marauders "acting
under the inspiration of the Douglas of other days," and compared
Douglas' recent speech to "the efforts of a distinguished logician
to prove that Napoleon Bonaparte never existed."

Douglas answered with extreme bitterness.  He declared that Sumner's
speech had been got up like a Yankee bedquilt by sewing all the old
scraps and patches together.  He pronounced his classic quotations
obscene and indecent.

"Is it his object," he asked, "to provoke some of us to kick
him as we would a dog in the street?  * * * * * The Senator from
Massachusetts," he declared, "had his speech written, printed,
committed to memory, and practiced every night before the glass,
with a <DW64> boy to hold the candle and watch the gestures."  He
charged Sumner with perjury in taking the senatorial oath to his
personal grievance and complained that he had been burned and hung
in effigy under the advice of Sumner and his brother agitators
because of his unswerving devotion to the Constitution.

"I wish," he said, "the Senate to bear in mind that in the many
controversies in which I have been engaged since I have been a member
of this body, I never had one in which I was not first assailed.  I
have always stood on the defensive.  You arrange it on the opposite
side of the house to set your hounds after me and then complain
when I cuff them over the head and send them back yelping.  I never
made an attack on any Senator; I have only repelled attacks."  He
warned Sumner that Butler, who was absent during the speech, would
return to speak and act for himself.

Sumner briefly replied, defending himself against the charge
of disloyalty to the Constitution in his unwillingness to support
its fugitive slave clause, by quoting Jackson's famous dictum that
each man swears to support the Constitution as he understands it.
He then turned on Douglas with bitter scorn.  He rebuked him for
his coarse personalities unbecoming a Senator and a gentleman.

"Let him remember," he said, "that the bowie-knife and bludgeon
are not the proper emblems of senatorial debate.  Let him remember
that the swagger of Bob Acres and the ferocity of the Malay cannot
add dignity to this body.  * * * * I will not go into the details
which have flowed out so naturally from his tongue.  I only brand
them to his face as false.  I say also to that Senator, and I wish
him to bear it in mind, that no person with the upright form of
man can be allowed--"  He hesitated in doubt whether to proceed.

"Say it," exclaimed Douglas.

"I will say it," replied Sumner.  "No person with the upright form
of man can be allowed, without violation of all decency, to switch
out from his tongue the perpetual stench of offensive personality.
Sir, that is not a proper weapon of debate, at least on this floor.
The noisome, squat and nameless animal to which I now refer is
not a proper model for an American Senator.  Will the Senator from
Illinois take notice?"

"I will," answered Douglas, "and therefore will not imitate you in
that capacity, recognizing the force of the illustration."

"Again," replied Sumner, "the Senator has switched his tongue and
again he fills the Senate with its offensive odor."

Two days after the speech, Preston H. Brooks, a relative of
Butler, who represented a district of South Carolina in the House,
entered the Senate Chamber after adjournment and, finding Sumner in
his seat writing, approached him and struck him down with a heavy
cane.  There was a brief struggle in which Sumner was stunned and
severely injured.

When the assault occurred Douglas was in the reception room adjoining
the Senate Chamber conversing with friends.  A messenger ran in
shouting that someone was beating Mr. Sumner.  He rose intending to
interfere in the fray, but, recalling their unpleasant relations,
returned to his seat.  When the violence was ended he went to the
Chamber to see the result.  Sumner, dazed, bruised and bleeding, had
been helped to his feet and was leaning against a chair.  Douglas
cast a momentary glance at the victim of this brutal and cowardly
outrage, then passed on without comment.

On the day before the assault, the Missouri ruffians had sacked the
town of Lawrence.  On the day following, John Brown's Pottawotamie
adventure occurred.  A crisis was at hand imperiously demanding
more effective action on the part of Congress.  The country was
aroused, alarmed and horrified.  The Conventions were to be held
in June and it was necessary that the Democrats bestir themselves
and make some disposition of the harassing problem of Kansas.
The existing condition in the hag-ridden Territory was directly
chargeable to a measure whose authorship Douglas had boasted.  There
was danger that the tragic failure of his masterpiece of state-craft
would wreck his party and load his own name with odium which even
his rugged vitality could not throw off.  Such uncontrollable
passion had been stirred by his pending bill that it seemed prudent
to quietly drop it.

On the 24th of June, Toombs introduced a bill providing for the
taking of a census, the holding of an election of delegates to a
Constitutional Convention, and the orderly organization of a State.
It was referred to Douglas' Committee, which promptly reported
back an amended bill so infinitely better than the measures thus
far attempted that it seemed comparatively just.  It provided for
the appointment of commissioners to prepare lists of all citizens
over twenty-one years old resident in the Territory since the 4th
of July, who were to vote at the election; also for the holding of
a Convention, the drafting of a Constitution and the admission of
the State.

There were three objections to the bill.  The commissioners were
to be appointed by President Pierce.  The 4th of July, from which
residence must date, was a time at which great numbers of Northern
settlers would be absent from the Territory on account of the
turbulence and disorder which had rendered life there not only
uncomfortable but unsafe.  Moreover, no express provision was made
for submitting the Constitution to a vote.  However, it was regarded
as a concession to the demands of an aroused public, clothed with
the power of promptly and authoritatively expressing its disapproval.

But there were those in the Senate who feared the gift-bearing
Greeks and thought it well, now that the majority had shown some
regard for public opinion, to insist upon an explicit declaration
of their purpose to submit the slavery question to the people of
the Territory fairly and without juggling tricks.  On the 2d of
July, Trumbull offered an amendment declaring it to be the true
intent and meaning of the bill organizing the Territory of Kansas
to confer upon the inhabitants "full power at any time, through its
territorial legislature, to exclude slavery from said Territory or
to recognize and regulate it therein."

This amendment seemed with utmost fairness to declare the meaning
of that law precisely as Douglas expounded it.  But the South had
already taken the advanced ground that, as the Constitution of the
United States expressly established slavery, it was not within the
power of Congress or its creature, the territorial legislature,
to abolish it.  This was not the creed of the Northern Democracy,
which had embraced the popular sovereignty doctrine of Douglas
and Cass.  To abandon that doctrine was to alienate the Northern
Democrats and lose the presidential election.  To carry it out in
good faith was to surrender Kansas and the remaining Territories to
anti-slavery institutions; for it was already evident that popular
sovereignty meant free States.  It was at no time a part of
the serious political philosophy of the South, but the ingenious
invention of the Northern leaders to hold their following.  The
South had permitted is Northern allies to give currency to the
doctrine, but the more sagacious saw that it was a failure and
were preparing, when the election was over, to cast it aside and
announce the true Southern dogma, that no sovereignty except that
of a State could forbid slavery anywhere in the Union.

Already the Dred Scott case was pending in the Supreme Court
and had been once argued; but the decision was reserved until the
elections were over and the new President inaugurated.  Well informed
Southern statesmen did not doubt that this ultra doctrine of their
party would receive the authoritative sanction of that tribunal
and the temporary scaffolding of popular sovereignty would then be
summarily kicked aside.  They could not afford to adopt Trumbull's
declaration of power in the Territory to abolish slavery, for they
secretly expected to establish that it had no such power.  They
could not afford to frankly declare against it while still courting
the Northern Democrats.  Benjamin, who was an accomplished lawyer,
and with the lawyer's instincts depended more on constitutional
defenses than on wavering popular majorities, moved to add the
words "subject only to the Constitution of the United States."  Now
that the Constitution had become the bulwark of slavery, there was
nervous dread that Congress and the people might forget that it
was the supreme law to which all legislation was subject.  Douglas
earnestly objected to Trumbull's amendment.  He protested against
it as wholly unnecessary.  He also voted against it as did the
great majority of the Senators.

The bill passed the Senate by a vote of 33 to 12; but the House
declined to consider it, and on the 3d passed an act to admit Kansas
under the Topeka Constitution.  No compromise of differences so
radical was possible.  Douglas remarked truly to his biographer
that "it was evident during all the proceedings that the Republicans
were as anxious to keep the Kansas question open as the Democrats
were to close it, in view of the approaching presidential election."





Chapter IX.  The Conventions of 1856.




Douglas was now at the zenith of his success, master of all his
resources, the most admired, dreaded and powerful man in American
public life.  History must inexorably condemn much of his most brilliant
and successful work, but the very emphasis of its condemnation is
an involuntary tribute to the matchless efficiency of the man.  At
this period he was the most masterful and commanding personage of
purely civil character that has "strutted his hour upon the stage"
of American politics.  The cabinet maker's apprentice, the village
schoolmaster, the Western lawyer, had, by sheer force, established
his right to this position of real master of his country.  A weak
President was cringing at his feet.  He had overcome the brilliant
and powerful opposition in the Senate.  The aristocratic South,
which instinctively dreaded and despised a plebeian, was paying
him temporary homage.

He was barely 43 years old.  So strenuous and effective had
been his youth that people hesitated to set bounds to his future
possibilities.  So strongly had his overmastering force impressed
the popular imagination that the sobriquet, "Little Giant," suggested
by his small stature and enormous energy, had become household
words.  He had come to Washington fifteen years before, a crude,
coarse, blustering youth, as described by the accomplished Adams
whose social ideals were borrowed from the courts of Europe.  But
he had readily adjusted himself to his new environment and taken on
the polish of the Capital.  Though never rich, he made money with
ease and spent it with princely munificence.  He was not only the
political dictator but the social lion of Washington.  He lived in
splendid style, in harmony with his exalted station, entertained
generously and responded freely to the numerous invitations of
friends and admirers.  "His ready wit, his fine memory, made him
a favorite.  * * * * He delighted in pleasant company.  Unused to
what is called etiquette, he soon adapted himself to its rules and
took rank in the dazzling society of the Capital.  * * * To see
him threading the glittering crowds with a pleasant smile or kind
word for everybody one would have taken him for a trained courtier."

Tradition, backed by General McClellan, says he was a heavy drinker,
though not a drunkard, and some of his finest speeches at this
period of his life appear to have been delivered after unrestrained
carousals that would have prostrated ordinary men.

Ever since 1852, when his youth and indiscretion had defeated
his presidential aspirations, he had been waiting impatiently for
the Convention of 1856.  During the past four years he had been
conspicuously "riding in the whirlwind and directing the storm"
of politics.  He had perhaps intensified the hostile prejudices of
the New England Puritans; but they were austere moralists, rather
than progressive politicians. He had certainly alienated many
friends in the Northwest, which was slowly withdrawing from its old
alliance with the South, and falling into sympathy with the stern
and uncompromising East.  But, while he regretted the necessity
of giving offense to any section of the country or any body of the
people, he had deliberately chosen what he deemed the less of two
political evils,--the alienation of the Puritans of New England and
the Northwest rather than a breach with the salve holding baronage
of the South, which had established a prescriptive right to control
the Presidency.  And yet the fact could not be blinked that all
his services and sacrifices to the South had failed to give him
its confidence and the enthusiastic loyalty that springs from it.
It viewed him with mingled emotions of admiration and fear.  It
desired to retain his service but was unwilling to trust him with
power.  It could not forget that in his zeal for its service that
he had trifled with the North and suspected that, if self-interest
prompted, he might break faith with the section which he now served
with such ardor.

The South, a decided minority in population, had long held its sway
by artful appeals to the selfish ambition of Northern politicians.
Although the undisputed command of the Democracy was in its hands and
the burning question of the time was that of slavery, no Southern
man had in late years been permitted to enter the field as a candidate
for the Presidency.  The Southern leaders inexorably insisted on
giving the nomination to Northern men.  There were at this time
three candidates from the North; Pierce, how would have joyfully
submitted to any terms and pledged himself to any service for another
four years of office; Buchanan, the great lawyer and distinguished
statesman, who had just returned from the English mission; and
Douglas, the giant of the Senate, the recognized head and practical
dictator of his party.

In point of ability and energy there was no comparison between
Douglas and either of his competitors.  Pierce had laboriously
earned for himself the lasting contempt of the world.  Buchanan
was an eminently respectable, dignified old gentleman of great
professional attainments and diplomatic experience, an admirable
Ambassador, a good Secretary of State, who might even have adorned
the Supreme Bench, but whose vacillating will and temporizing
character hopelessly unfitted him for the arduous duties of the
Presidency in the great crises that ensued.  Had the positive,
combative and masterful Douglas been nominated at this time it may
be safely said that the most momentous chapter of American history
would have been widely different from what it is.

The Convention met at Cincinnati on the 2d of June and continued in
session for five days.  The platform was adopted without dissent,
declaring the firm purpose of the party to "resist all attempts at
renewing, in Congress or out of it, the agitation of the slavery
question," and "recognizing and adopting the principle contained
in the organic law establishing the Territories of Nebraska and
Kansas as embodying the only sound and safe solution of the slavery
question."

Buchanan's candidacy was engineered with rare skill.  He was
fortunate in having been absent from the country, representing his
Government at the Court of St. James, during the three preceding
years crowded with great and stirring events, while Pierce and
Douglas had been skirmishing for the advantage, each seeking to
outbid the other in eager competition for Southern favor.  The South
was deeply indebted to Douglas; but fear is strong than gratitude.
It was well satisfied with Pierce, but hesitated to nominate him lest
he might be overwhelmed with a storm of just contempt.  Without an
element of positive strength, Buchanan was a formidable candidate.
On the first ballot he had 135 votes, Pierce 122, Douglas 33, and
Cass 5.  Pierce lost steadily for 14 ballots while Buchanan and
Douglas gained.  Pierce's name was then withdrawn.  On the next
ballot Buchanan had 168 and Douglas 118 votes.  Douglas then sent
a dispatch to Richardson, his manager, to withdraw his name and
make the nomination of Buchanan unanimous.

On June 17th the first Republican National Convention was held at
Philadelphia.  It was not yet a united and well organized party.
It made little pretense of agreeing in anything but unyielding
opposition to slavery-propagandism and the fixed resolve to curb
the intolerable arrogance of the slave power.  It was made up of
those who were opposed to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise,
to the further extension of slavery, and to the refusal to admit
Kansas as a free State.  It consisted of Whigs, Free-spoilers,
Know-nothings and Democrats, who were inclined to apologize for
their temporary association under the name of this mushroom upstart
and were not willing to have it forgotten that their essential
political creeds were unchanged.  They were Republicans for a time
until their own parties reformed or gathered strength for more
effective work.

Yet, imperfect as was the organic unity of the party, it contained
a large part of the best political ability of the country.  The real
leaders, who had evolved it from the incoherent chaos of earlier
years, impressed their energetic characters upon the organization,
and prescribed for it such formula of faith as it yet had, were
Seward and Chase.  To one of them the nomination was clearly due.
Seward preferred to wait four years.  It was not deemed prudent to
nominate Chase.  On the first formal ballot John C. Fremont was
nominated.  For the office of Vice-President Abraham Lincoln received
110 votes, but was fortunately defeated.  The platform declared it
to be "the right and duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories
those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery," condemned
in scathing terms the conduct of affairs in Kansas and demanded
its immediate admission under the Topeka Constitution.

An exciting campaign followed.  Rallies, parades, fireworks
and theatrical displays were lavishly provided by the sanguine
Republicans.  Their orators filled the land with eloquent denunciation
of the Pierce Administration and the Buchanan platform.  Much as
it outwardly resembled the log cabin and hard cider campaign of
1840, it was wholly different in character.  The Republicans were
in serious earnest.  They had well defined, though discordant
opinions and convictions.  But before the end of the contest it
was clear that they had blundered in nominating the picturesque
"pathfinder."

Douglas was not inactive during the campaign, being deeply interested,
not only in the election of Buchanan, but in restoring Democratic
supremacy in Illinois.  He sold a hundred acres of land on the western
limit of Chicago for a hundred thousand dollars and contributed with
great liberality to the campaign fund, not only of his own State,
but also of Pennsylvania.  The Democrats won both States, which,
with the entire vote of the South, elected Buchanan.

Millard Fillmore, a rather ghostly reminiscence of other days,
had been nominated by the American and Whig parties and carried
Maryland.  The combined vote of Fremont and Fillmore exceeded that
of Buchanan by nearly half a million.  The Democrats were evidently
approaching a crisis, and harmony, never so imperatively needed as
now, was never so hopelessly unattainable.





Chapter X.  Popular Sovereignty in the Supreme Court.




The anger of the world was rising against American slavery.  It was
confessedly a shocking anomaly in our system of universal freedom
and democratic equality.  The people of the slave States were
inflexibly resolved to maintain and extend it in defiance of the
rising sentiment of the age.  For many years they had succeeded
in holding their ground and stifling the anti-slavery agitation.
They had vigilantly kept control of the Government.  During sixty
of the first sixty-eight years the presidential chair had been occupied
by Southern men or their dependents.  The Senate had uniformly,
and the House usually, been under their sway.  The Supreme Court
had also been composed of Southern men.  Now that slavery was forced
to fight for its life, the South with increased energy sought the
active support of all the departments of Government.  Pierce was its
humble servant.  The efficient and imperious Douglas was serving it
in the Senate, and Cass was an eager rival.  The Northern Democracy
followed their lead.  A majority of the Supreme Court were zealous
advocates of slavery.  It was unfortunate for the South, and for
Douglas, that the champions of Southern rights on the bench and
their advocates in Congress could not have understood each other in
advance.  They were seeking to plant slavery on a safe foundation
and gird it round with impregnable defenses.  Douglas had promulgated
the doctrine of squatter sovereignty with which the South was not
satisfied.  It was possible for the Court to devise a safer remedy
for the threatened dangers.

In 1834, there was an army surgeon named Dr. Emmerson living in
Missouri who owned a slave named Dred Scott.  He was transferred
to Fort Snelling in the Territory of Wisconsin and took his slave
with him, but in 1838 he returned with him to his former home.  He
then sold Scott to a man named Sanford, who resided in New York, but
kept his slaves in Missouri.  In 1854 the slave brought an action
in the United States Circuit Court of Missouri to recover his
freedom, on the ground that he had been voluntarily taken into the
Territory of Wisconsin, where, by the act of Congress known as the
Missouri Compromise, slavery was prohibited.  His case rested upon
the rule that slavery, being the creature of positive municipal
law, had no legal existence beyond the limits of the sovereignty
creating or recognizing it.  The law of Missouri establishing slavery
was of no efficacy in Wisconsin.  Hence, it was urged, when Dred
was taken to that Territory, the relation of master and slave ended
and he became a free man.

Upon its merit the case presented but one question:  Was slavery
forbidden in Wisconsin?  There rose, however, a preliminary question
of great importance.  To give the Federal Court jurisdiction it was
necessary to show that the plaintiff and defendant were citizens of
different States.  Scott alleged that he was a citizen of Missouri
and Sanford a citizen of New York.  The answer denied the jurisdiction
of the Court for the reason that Scott was not a citizen of any
State, being a <DW64> slave, and hence not entitled to maintain his
action.  The Circuit Court overruled this plea, but held Scott to
be still a slave, notwithstanding his sojourn in Wisconsin, and
awarded him to Sandford.  The case was taken to the Supreme Court
and there argued by lawyers of great ability and learning.  The
Court found unusual difficulties in it, held it under advisement
during the exciting summer of 1856, and directed a re-argument at
the December term.  On March 6th, 1857, two days after the inauguration
of Buchanan, the Judges delivered their memorable opinions.

At this time the Court consisted of five Southern Democrats, two
Northern Democrats, one Whig and one Republican.  Chief Justice
Taney wrote the opinion of the Court, and did it in a manner likely
to preserve his name from early oblivion.  Judges McLean and Curtis
filed dissenting opinions.

The Court, after holding that Scott could not maintain his action
for want of citizenship, decided among other things that:  "Whatever
the General Government acquires it acquires for the benefit of the
people of the several States who created it.  It is their trustee,
acting for them and charged with the duty of promoting the interests
of the whole people of the Union.  * * * * The right of property in
a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.
The right to traffic in it, like an ordinary article of merchandise
and property, is guaranteed to the citizens of the United States.
* * * * The Government * * * is pledged to protect it in all future
time. * * * * The act of Congress which prohibits a citizen from
holding and owning property of this kind in the territory of the
United States north of the line mentioned (36 degrees 30 minutes)
is not warranted by the Constitution and is therefore void. * * *
* * If Congress cannot do this it will be admitted that it could
not authorize a territorial legislature to do it."

Thousands of copies of the opinion of Judge Taney were printed and
distributed among the people by the Democrats who, at first, were
so elated over the blow dealt to the Republican fanatics that they
overlooked the fact that the decision was even more fatal to the
favorite doctrine of the Northern wing of their own party.

The dissenting opinions were printed in enormous numbers by Republican
committees and distributed among the anti-slavery people of the
Northern and Middle States.  Far from settling the controversy,
the powerful conflicting opinions confirmed the already inveterate
prejudices and disclosed with scientific clearness the fact, long
dimly felt, that there existed two fundamentally different and
irreconcilably hostile theories of government among the people
which must sooner or later grapple for the mastery.  Naturally among
Northern Democrats the first emotion on hearing of the decision was
exultation over the disastrous reverse suffered by the Republicans,
whose whole political creed seemed annihilated.  They had declared
in sounding phrase that it was the duty of Congress to wipe from the
Territories those twin relics of barbarism, slavery and polygamy;
and promptly the Supreme Court had decided that Congress had
no such power.  But it soon grew uncomfortably clear to them that
while the decision upset the favorite dogma of the Republicans, it
was utterly inconsistent with the doctrine of popular sovereignty,
the fundamental tenet of Northern Democratic faith.  The decision
was not only a victory of the Democrats over the Republicans, but
a complete victory of the Southern slave-holding Democracy over
that of the free North.

To Douglas the situation in which this left his party was disastrous.
Restlessly active and efficient as he had been in the practical
management of political affairs, his distinctive achievement had
been the powerful advocacy of the doctrine of popular sovereignty,
of which, if not the original author, he was at least the chief
sponsor.  With this doctrine his fame as a statesman was indissolubly
linked.  On its success the unity of the Northern wing of his party
depended; on which hung his hopes of victory.

Two days before the opinion was announced President Buchanan in
his inaugural address reminded the people that the great question
which had agitated them so long would soon be settled by the
Supreme court and bespoke general acquiescence in its decision.
This unhappy allusion gave rise to the unpleasant suspicion that
the relation between the new President and the Supreme Court in
their common service of the South was unduly intimate.

Had Douglas been great enough to sink the politician in the
statesman, he would now have broken with the Southern wing of his
party, which had contemptuously repudiated his entire system of
political doctrines; he would have rejected the new dogma imposed
upon his party by the Southern dictators and led the assault upon
this new creed, which was not only fatal to himself as a National
statesman, but could not fail ultimately to prove fatal to his party
and involve his country in the horrors of civil war.  His squatter
sovereignty was pitiful enough.  But this new doctrine, announced
by the Supreme Court, and approved by the President and his
party, stripped the settlers in the Territories of all semblance
of sovereignty and planted slavery among them by the self-acting
energy of the Constitution, in utter disregard of their wishes.
On the most important question then pending his party had reached
a conclusion which he believed to be utterly wrong.  But it was
his opinion that moral ideas had no place in politics.  He could
not break with the powerful party which he had led so long.  He
could not unqualifiedly endorse the new doctrine without stultifying
himself.  He attempted the impossible task of reconciling the new
creed with that which he had preached in the past.

The United States Grand Jury at Springfield invited him to address
the people of that city on the questions of the time.  He spoke on
the 12th of June, 1857, to a large and enthusiastic audience.  He
assured the people that he cordially accepted the decision and that
it was in perfect harmony with his favorite doctrine of squatter
sovereignty.  The master's right to his slave in the Territories
he admitted was guaranteed by the Constitution and neither Congress
nor the legislature could interfere with it; yet practically this
right was worthless unless sustained, protected and enforced by
appropriate police regulations and local legislation prescribing
adequate remedies for its violation.  These regulations and remedies
must depend entirely upon the will and wishes of the people
of the Territory, as they could only be prescribed by the local
legislature.  Hence, the great principle of popular sovereignty
and self-government was sustained and firmly established by the
authority of the decision.

Perhaps, as pointed out by a recent historian, it would have
been wiser for Douglas to have planted himself on the sound legal
proposition that the only question decided by the Court was that
it had no jurisdiction of the cause and that everything in the
opinion beyond this was mere obiter dicta determining nothing.
But it was no easy matter for a politician in 1857 to explain to a
popular audience that a small fraction of the opinion of the highest
Court was binding, while the remainder was merely the private
opinion of the Judges on a matter not before them.  Had Douglas been
defending his opinions before a bench of trained jurists he might
have safely rested his case on this sound but technical rule.  He
afterwards did so justify his opinions in the Senate.  An experience
politician determined to carry a popular election in a dangerous
crisis might well hesitate to attempt so doubtful an experiment.
History would have less temptation to call him a demagogue had he
pursued that course.  But we may well doubt whether, considered as
a problem of practical politics, he was not wise in depending on
his ingenious sophistry, rather than on this sound legal proposition.

Two weeks after his speech Lincoln addressed the people of Springfield
in reply, pointing out the fallacy of Douglas' chief argument.  But
Lincoln was still an obscure lawyer; Douglas was the omnipotent
Senator whose ipse dixit was final and carried conviction to the
uncritical multitude.





Chapter XI.  Popular Sovereignty in Congress.




While the Supreme Court was dedicating the Territories to slavery
and Douglas was preaching local nullification, anarchy continued
its delirious dance in Kansas.  Guerilla warfare continued to vex
the Territory as with unconscious humor the settlers illustrated
the doctrine of popular sovereignty in practical operation.

On January 12th, 1857, the legislature met at Lecompton.  On the
same day the pro-slavery party held a convention in which it was
decided that it was useless to continue the struggle.  But the
more active and determined leaders were not so easily discouraged
and decided with the aid of the Administration to force a pro-slavery
Constitution upon the people and drag the young Commonwealth into
the Union as a slave State.  By the middle of February a bill
passed the legislature providing for the holding of a Constitutional
Convention.  It made no provision for submitting the Constitution
to a vote.  Governor Geary vetoed it.  The bill was at once passed
over the veto.  The election of delegates to the Convention was
set for the 15th of June.

Among the earliest acts of the new President was the appointment
of Ex-Senator Robert J. Walker of Mississippi as Governor of the
Territory.  Before going to his post of duty, Walker visited Douglas
at Chicago for counsel and showed him his inaugural address, in
which he declared that any Constitution adopted must be submitted
to a vote of the resident citizens of the Territory.  Douglas
heartily approved this and with all sincerity wished the new Governor
God-speed in his perilous enterprise.  Walker arrived late in May.
In the name of the President he promised that the election of
delegates to the Convention should be free from fraud and violence
and that the Constitution should be fairly submitted to a vote.
Buchanan assured him that on the question of submitting the
Constitution to the bona fide resident settlers he was willing to
stand or fall.

When the election was held the Republicans, who numbered at least
two-thirds of the voters of the Territory, committed the blunder
of refusing to vote.  It was within their power to control the
Convention and dictate the Constitution.  But their bitter experience
had produced utter distrust of the Federal Government and silent
rebellion against it.  They had organized themselves into a band of
rebels bent on maintaining their free State.  The election resulted
in the choice of a majority of rabid pro-slavery delegates.

The Convention which met on October 19th produced a unique
Constitution, declaring that the right of property was before and
higher than any constitutional sanction, that the right of the
owner of a slave to such slave and his increase was the same and
as inviolable as the right of the owner of any property whatever,
and provided that it could not be amended before 1865, and then
could not interfere with slavery.  With exquisite ingenuity it was
decided to call an election on December 21st and let the people
vote on the question whether they were "for the Constitution with
slavery," or "for the Constitution with no slavery."  No vote
against the Constitution was permitted.  To make assurance doubly
sure, it was provided that, if "the Constitution with no slavery"
carried, slavery should not exist in the State except that the right
of property in slaves then in the Territory should in no measure
be interfered with.

Walker denounced it as a fraud.  Buchanan in his feeble way intended
at fist to support him.  But the Southern hotspurs, who understood
the vacillating old man, threatened secession and general ruin
unless he adopted their program.  He yielded and threw the whole
influence of his office for the admission of the State with this
Constitution.

But this was too much for the patient Northern Democrats.  Murmurs
of criticism, swelling to shouts of denunciation, were heard in
the North without much regard to politics.  Douglas, who was in
Chicago when the news arrived of the attempted swindle, immediately
denounced it and promised his strenuous opposition.  The situation
of Kansas was tragical.  But that of Douglas was still more so.  He
had staked his standing as a statesman upon the establishment of
the right of the settlers to mould their own institutions and had
successfully urged the election of Buchanan on the solemn pledge that
the principle of popular sovereignty would be faithfully applied.
He had reached the parting of the ways.  At the last election Michigan
had defeated Cass for his political sins and elected the radical
Chandler in his place.  Would Illinois' patience last forever?  Was
it certain that the cool, deep-plotting Lincoln would not succeed
in overthrowing his power if he accepted the program of his party?
He must stand for reelection next year and Illinois sentiment
could not be trifled with now.  The rebellion of Northern Democrats
against Southern policies was not limited to Michigan.  If he would
be President, he must retain his Northern Democratic support.  He
would gladly have the South, but he must have Illinois.

Already history has rendered a divided verdict upon this period
of his life.  He heartily abhorred the Kansas fraud and would
really have liked to see the people given a fair chance to make a
government for themselves.  He believed in fair play and despised
sharp practice and pettifogging tricks.  He had the sincere faith
in popular wisdom and virtue characteristic of the West.  His
cherished doctrine had been embodied in a ghastly abortion.  His
pledge to the people had been shamelessly broken.  While the course
of honor happened to be that of prudence, Douglas was not incapable
of choosing it from pure and unselfish patriotism.

The people of Kansas, outraged by the proceedings of the Convention,
in large numbers petitioned the Governor to call a special session
of the legislature to remedy the wrong.  He summoned it to meet
December 7th and it at once ordered the whole Constitution submitted
to the people on January 4th.  The election ordered by the Convention
was held on December 21st.  The free-State people declined to vote.
"The Constitution with slavery" carried by a vote of 6,143 to 589.
On January 4th the pro-slavery men took part in the election of
State officers, but refused to vote on the Constitution, holding
that the legislature had no power to submit it.  More than ten
thousand votes were cast against the Constitution and another set
of officers for an imaginary state selected.

The Constitution was sent to Buchanan to be submitted to Congress.
This was the beginning of Douglas' official relation to the affair.

Congress met on the 5th of December.  When Douglas reached Washington
he called on the President to discuss the program for the winter.
He told him that it would never do to send the Constitution to Congress
for approval.  It violated the plighted faith of the President and
his party.  His advice was that it be summarily rejected.  Buchanan
must submit it and recommend its approval.  Douglas told him he
would denounce it in the Senate.  The President, excited and alarmed,
rose from his seat and said, with great solemnity:

"Mr. Douglas, I desire you to remember that no Democrat ever yet
differed from an Administration of his own choice without being
crushed;" then he bade him beware of the fate of certain noted
insurgents in the old Jackson-VanBuren days.

"Mr. President," replied Douglas, "I wish you to remember that
General Jackson is dead."

On the 8th of December Buchanan transmitted his first message to
Congress, which satisfied the world that he had abandoned such faint
convictions as he had theretofore had and surrendered unconditionally
to the South.  He confessed that he had formerly pledged himself
that the Constitution should be submitted to a vote of the people.
But he said he had reached the conclusion that the only question
upon which it was important to take the popular judgement was that
of slavery.  This question could not be more clearly or distinctly
submitted than it would be under the ordinance of the Convention on
December 21st.  Should the Constitution without slavery be adopted,
it, of course guarded the right of property in all slaves then in
the Territory; but that was only common justice.

It was a great day in Washington.  As a leading statesman declared,
"the Administration had staked their all upon sustaining the Kansas
Constitution, * * * * but Douglas was against it, decidedly, but
not extravagantly."  It was felt that a great storm was brewing,
but of so uncertain and mysterious a character that no one knew what
to expect.  Douglas, who had theretofore scoffed at moral ideas in
politics, had turned stern moralist, though still protesting his
old cynical indifference, and was declaring inexpiable war on those
whose champion he had been on a hundred hard fought fields.  And
strange to say, the allies with whom he was now to join hands, were
Seward and Hale, perhaps even Chase and Sumner.

When the message was read on the 8th, he moved that 15,000 extra
copies of it be printed for the use of the Senate and announced his
intention to attack that part of it relating to Kansas.  The next
day when he rose to speak the galleries were thronged with an
eager multitude.  He congratulated the country that the President
had not endorsed the Constitution or recommended its approval, but
had only expressed his own satisfaction with it.  He patronizingly
apologized for Buchanan's error in supposing that the Kansas-Nebraska
act provided only for the submission of the slavery question to a
vote, recalling the fact that, at the time that act was passed he
was representing the country with great wisdom and distinction at
a foreign court and had never given the matter serious thought.

They had, in fact, repealed the Missouri Compromise and justified
it everywhere on the ground that the people of the Territories had
the right to form all their institutions according to their will.
The President's later doctrine was in error, radical, fundamental,
subversive of the platform on which he was elected.  His suggestion
that the Convention, throughout the territorial legislature, had the
implied sanction of Congress, was without foundation.  The Toombs
bill expressly authorizing the calling of a Convention had recently
passed the Senate, but was defeated in the House, clearly indicating
that Congress disapproved it.  The legislature could not give consent
for Congress which it had itself refused.  The Administration of
Jackson solemnly decided in the case of Arkansas that a Territory
had no right to hold a Constitutional Convention until Congress
passed an act authorizing it.  The Lecompton Convention differed
from the Topeka Convention only in this; that the latter was called
in opposition to the will of the legislature, while the former was
sanctioned by it.  But that body was utterly without authority in
the matter until Congress empowered it to act.

When the delegates to this Convention were elected everyone supposed
that their work would be submitted to a vote.  The President and
his Cabinet so understood it.  Governor Walker so understood it
and pledged his own word and that of the President that it would
be submitted.  A form of submission had been devised such that all
men might come forward freely and vote for the Constitution and no
man was permitted to vote against it.  This resembled the French
election when the First Consul sent the soldiers to the polls telling
them to vote just as they pleased; but adding, "if you vote for
Napoleon all is well; if you vote against him you will be shot."
The objection to submitting the Constitution to a vote was that it
would be voted down.

"Sir," he said, "my honor is pledged; and before it shall be tarnished
I will take whatever consequences personal to myself may come; but
never ask me to do an act which the President in his message has
said is a forfeiture of faith, a violation of honor.  * * * I will
go as far as any of you to save the party.  I have as much heart in
the great cause that binds us together as any man living.  I will
sacrifice anything short of principle and honor for the peace of
the party; but if the party will not stand by its principles, its
faith, its pledges, I will stand there and abide whatever consequences
may result from the position.  * * * It is none of my business
which way the slavery clause is decided.  I care not whether it is
voted up or voted down."

He urged the wisdom of passing a fair enabling act authorizing the
people to hold a Constitutional Convention and providing for the
submission of its work to the people and the orderly admission
of the State.  "But if this Constitution is to be forced down our
throats," he continued, "in violation of the fundamental principles
of free government, under a mode of submission that is a mockery
and an insult, I will resist it to the last.  I have no fear of
any party associations being severed; * * * but if it must be, if
I cannot act with you and preserve my faith and honor, I will stand
on the great principle of popular sovereignty which declares the
right of all people to be left perfectly free to form and regulate
their institutions in their own way."

This remarkable speech was recognized by all who heard it as
marking an epoch, not merely in the life of the orator, but in the
evolution of party politics at a time when parties were bending
in death grapple and them most portentous civil war in history
was looming in the distance.  The speech was a clean, powerful,
dispassionate argument delivered with an air of dignity and fortitude
that greatly mollified the hearts of his old enemies.

Bigler of Pennsylvania, rising to defend the President, reminded
the Senate that only a short year ago Douglas had voted for the
Toombs bill, which provided for the holding of a Constitutional
Convention without submitting its work to the people.  Douglas
protested that he did not so understand the bill and challenged
Bigler for evidence that a single Senator so understood it.  A
remarkable dialogue followed.  Bigler, who was a Democrat and a
humble admirer of Douglas, said:

"I was present when that subject was discussed by Senators before
the bill was introduced, and the question whether the Constitution
when formed should be submitted to a vote of the people.  It was
held by those most intelligent on the subject that * * * it would
be better that there should be no (such) provision in the Toombs
bill; and it was my understanding * * * that the Convention would
make a Constitution and send it here without submitting it to the
popular vote."

Douglas inquired, angrily, whether he meant to insinuate that he had
been present at any such conference.  Bigler hesitated and sought
to avoid the disclosure of the proceedings at their secret caucus,
but Douglas impetuously released him from all secrecy and challenged
him, if he knew, to declare, that, directly or indirectly, publicly or
privately, anywhere on the face of the earth, he was ever present
at such a consultation when it was called to his attention and
he agreed to approve a Constitution without submitting it to the
people.

Bigler, who had an uneasy suspicion that he was improperly disclosing
party secrets, could not decline the challenge, and replied that he
remembered very well that the question was discussed at a conference
held at Douglas' own house.  "It was then urged," he said, "by
Toombs, that there should be no provision for the submission of the
Constitution to the people."  He did not remember whether Douglas
took part in the discussion, but his own understanding of the
sense of the caucus was that the Convention should have the right
to make a Constitution and send it directly to Congress for approval.

Douglas protested that he was innocent of any such conspiracy.  He
confessed that his attention was called to the fact that no provision
was made in the Toombs bill for the submission of the Constitution,
but his understanding was that, powers not delegated being reserved,
it would, of course, be submitted.  Bigler reminded him that, while
he had taken this for granted in the case of Kansas, he had about
the same time drafted a bill for the admission of Minnesota in
which he took care to provide in express terms that the Constitution
must be submitted.  If he then thought general principles of law
secured the submission of the Kansas Constitution without providing
for it in the enabling act, why this care to expressly provide for
it in the Minnesota act?

He was now swimming amid perilous breakers.  He had thrown down
the gage of battle to his party.  In the twinkling of an eye he was
transformed from recognized chief to a rebel; but he was isolated
and unsupported.  He could not consort with Republicans.  The
rankling wounds of the by-gone years could not heal so suddenly.
Moreover, he did not want their society.  He intended to remain
a Democrat and hoped to force upon his party such policies that
Illinois and the Northwest would be solidly at his back.  With the
Democratic States of the North standing firmly with him he could
still dictate terms to the South, which would have to choose between
Northern Democrats and Northern Republicans.





Chapter XII.  The Lecompton Constitution.




On February 2nd Buchanan sent to Congress his message, transmitting
the Lecompton Constitution and urging its approval.  As apology
for his change of front and excuse for a like change in others he
drew a dark picture of the disturbed condition of affairs in the
Territory, portraying the Topeka free State enterprise as a vast
insurrectionary movement.  He told Congress that it was impossible
to submit the whole instrument to a vote because the free State
faction, who were the majority, would vote against any Constitution,
however perfect, except their own.  He commended the entire regularity
of the Lecompton Convention and the fairness with which the slavery
question had been submitted to a vote and urged immediate admission.

When the motion to print and refer to the Committee on Territories
was made, Trumbull denounced the message with great energy and
at some length.  He asked sneeringly what had become of the once
celebrated principle of popular sovereignty?  The people of Kansas
were denied the right of voting on their Constitution at all and the
Dred Scott decision had settled that at no stage had the people of
a Territory power to interfere with slavery.  The whole doctrine,
he declared, had been absolutely repudiated.

The message having been referred to the Committee on Territories
after six days' debate, on the 18th of February a bill was reported
by a majority of the Committee for the admission of Kansas into
the Union under the Lecompton Constitution and Douglas presented
a minority report protesting against it.  For two weeks he was
confined to his room by sickness, but, as the day for the vote was
near, notice was given that he would speak on the 22nd of March.

On that day the Senate met at the early hour of ten.  Already the
galleries were crowded.  Long before noon the passages leading to
the Chamber were thronged with men and women vainly seeking admission.
In a moment of graceful gallantry the Senators admitted the ladies
to the floor.  Through long hours of debate the crowd waited.  The
Senate adjourned until seven o'clock, at which time Douglas was to
speak.  The visitors who were lucky enough to have gained admission
waited with patient good humor for the return of the Senators, who
at last began to force their way back into the Chamber through the
dense throngs.

A little before seven the short figure of Douglas was observed at
the door and he was greeted with loud applause from the galleries.
The session resumed and he rose to speak.  Cheered as he was by
the sympathy and admiration of the visitors, it was to him a stern
enough hour when he must finally break with his powerful party and
battle with his utmost strength against its cherished program.  He
must attack, not Buchanan, but the organized Democracy, now more
powerfully entrenched than ever before.  It controlled the President
and the Supreme Court and had bent them to its will in this precise
quarrel.  The Senate was Democratic nearly two to one, and but
two of the majority followed him in his revolt.  In the House the
Democrats had a majority of twenty-five.

Foreseeing the personal consequences of his act, he opened his speech
with an elaborate review of his course in Congress in relation to
slavery in the Territories, showing that from the beginning he had
favored leaving the whole question fairly to the inhabitants.  He
stood on the principle of the Compromise of 1850 as approved and
interpreted by the legislature of Illinois in 1851.  That body had
declared that the people of a Territory had a right to form such
government as they chose.  But was the Lecompton Constitution the
act and deed of the people of Kansas?  Did it embody their will?
If not, Congress had no right to impose it on them.  Where was the
evidence that it did embody their will?  By a fraudulent vote on
December 12th it was adopted by 5,500 majority.  By a fair vote on
January 4th it was defeated by 10,000 majority.  The election on
December 21st was ordered by the Lecompton Convention, deriving its
authority from the territorial legislature.  The legislature itself
ordered the election on January 4th.  Granting the argument that
the organic act was in effect an enabling act, then the territorial
legislature had power to authorize the Lecompton Convention and
also to order it work submitted to a vote.  The legislature either
had the full power of Congress over the subject or it had none.

But, it was claimed, the Constitution would have been voted down
if submitted.  What right had Congress to force it upon the people?
It was a mockery to call it an embodiment of their will and a crime
to attempt to enforce it.  If it ever became the Constitution of
Kansas it would be the act of Congress that made it so and not the
decision of the people.  That it could be changed thereafter was no
apology for this outrage.  It was as much a violation of fundamental
principle, a violation of popular sovereignty, to force a Constitution
on an unwilling people for a day as for a year or for a longer
time.

If a few thousand Free Soilers had fabricated a Constitution
in this fashion, prohibiting slavery forever, would the gentlemen
from the South have submitted to the outrage?  They were asked to
admit Kansas with a State government brought into existence not
only by fraudulent voting but forged returns sustained by perjury.

He paused to comment on certain diatribes in the Washington Union
which had denounced him as a renegade, traitor and deserter, and
read from its columns an article presenting the extreme claims
of the South, arguing that all laws and Constitutions of the free
States forbidding slavery were violations of the Federal Constitution,
and that the emancipation of slaves in the Northern States was
a gross outrage on the rights of property.  But this article, he
said, was in harmony with the Lecompton Constitution, which declared
the right of property in a slave to be higher than Constitutions.
This meant that the Constitutions of the free States forbidding
slavery were in conflict with the Constitution of the United States
and of no validity.  Hence slavery had right to exist in all the
States.  But this was not the authentic Democratic faith, which
left the whole question to the option of the several States.  If
each one took care of its own affairs, minded its own business
and let its neighbors alone, there would be peace in the country.
Seward had proclaimed a higher law which forbade slavery everywhere.
this instrument and the Administration paper proclaimed a higher
law which established it in all the States.  It was time to quit
this folly and yield obedience to the Constitution and laws of the
land.

It was the most arrant presumption for the Administration to attempt
to make this a party measure.  By what right did these accidental
and temporary holders of office prescribe party politics?  There had
been no Convention, not even a caucus, since this question arose.
The party was not committed.  The President had no right to tell a
Senator his duty and command his allegiance.  He had no power to
prescribe tests.  A Senator's first duty was to his State.  "If
the will of my State is one way and the will of the President is
the other, am I to be told that I must obey the Executive and betray
my State, or else be branded as a traitor to the party and hunted
down by all the newspapers that share the patronage of the Government?
And every man who holds a petty office in any part of my State to
have the question put to him, 'Are you Douglas' enemy?  If not,
your head comes off.'"

What despotism on earth could equal this?  The obedience of Senators
was demanded on this question only.  On all else they were free.
The President was evidently guided by the old adage that a man needs
no friends when he knows he is right and only want his friends to
stand by him when he is wrong.

The President regretted that the Constitution was not submitted
to the people, although he knew that if it had been submitted
it would have been rejected.  Hence, he regretted that it had not
been rejected.  Would he regret that it had not been submitted and
rejected if he did not think it was wrong?  And yet, he demanded
their assistance in forcing it on an unwilling people and threatened
vengeance on all who refused.

"For my part," he continued, * * * "come what may, I intend to vote,
speak and act according to my own sense of duty, so long as I hold
a seat in this Chamber.  * * * I have no professions to make of
my fidelity.  I have no vindication to make of my course.  Let it
speak for itself.  * * * I intend to perform my duty in accordance
with my own convictions.  Neither the frowns of power nor the
influence of patronage will change my action, nor drive me from my
principles.  I stand firmly and immovably upon those great principles
of self-government and State sovereignty upon which the campaign
was fought and won.  I stand by the time honored principles of the
Democratic party, illustrated by Jefferson and Jackson, those principles
of State rights, of State sovereignty, of strict construction, upon
which the great Democratic party has ever stood.  I will stand by
the Constitution of the United States with all its compromises and
perform all my obligations under it.  I will stand by the American
Union as it exists under the Constitution.  If standing firmly by
my principles I shall be driven into private life, it is a fate
that has no terrors for me.  * * * If the alternative be private
life or servile obedience to the Executive will, I am prepared to
retire.  Official position has no charm for me when deprived of
that freedom of thought and action which becomes a gentleman and
a Senator."

When he closed, Toombs rose to reply.  The speech was offensively
bitter and personal, in one memorable passage of which he announced
that the slave States would take care of themselves and were prepared
to bid defiance to the North and to the world.  Green of Missouri
answered in coarser strain, both intimating that Douglas had been
guilty of deliberate perfidy in his change of front.

On the 23rd the vote was taken and the bill passed, 33 being for
it and 25 against it.

The Administration now declared war on him.  The patronage
was unsparingly used against his friends and it was better for an
applicant for Federal appointment to be accused of any crime than
suspected of friendship with Douglas.  This separation from his
party touched his feelings more deeply than any other event of his
life, and we find surprising evidence of his being shaken by deep
emotions that seem out of harmony with his robust and unsentimental
nature.  But when we remember that all his life had been spent
in the activities of politics, that his thoughts, sentiments and
passions had all been political for twenty years, that the Democratic
platform was at once his creed and his philosophy, we can understand
something of the choking emotion that threatened to overpower him
as he announced that he was thenceforth a rebel and a heretic.
After December 9th, the Administration press attacked him bitterly
and he found himself everywhere proclaimed a traitor and deserter.
He told the Senate that he knew the knife would be put to the throats
of his followers.  The Administration Senators assailed him.  But
he was equal to all emergencies and his new position as the recognized
leader of the anti-Lecompton revolt gave him the enthusiastic
applause of the Northwest.

On March 23rd the bill went to the House.  A motion was made to
refer it to a special committee.  A contest over this motion arose,
lasted all night, and degenerated into a general brawl, in which
a Member from Pennsylvania knocked down a South Carolina Member,
and many others were engaged in fisticuffs.  At last a reference
was agreed to.

On April 1st, while the House had the bill under consideration,
Montgomery of Pennsylvania offered a substitute which had been
offered by Crittenden in the Senate and there rejected, providing
that the Constitution should be submitted to a vote, and, if adopted,
the President should at once proclaim the admission of the State;
if rejected, the inhabitants should hold a new Constitutional
Convention.  This substitute passed the House but was rejected by
the Senate.  A conference Committee was appointed, which reported
the notorious English bill, providing that a generous grant of land
should be offered to Kansas, and the people at a special election
vote to accept it.  If they so voted, they were to be admitted
as a State with the Lecompton Constitution.  If they rejected the
grant, they could not be admitted until they numbered 93,000, which
meant indefinite postponement.  The bill was merely an offer of a
bribe to the people to accept a Constitution which they abhorred.
Its form was such that men who still believe it well to maintain
the guise of decency could vote for it on the pretence that it was
a land grant.

Douglas, who had now tried the thorny path of rebellion, faltered.
He was tempted to support the bill and seek reconciliation, but
decided to vote against it.  It passed the Senate by a majority of
nine and the House by a majority of eight.  In the following August
the proposition was submitted and rejected so decisively that the
maddest fanatic must have seen that all hope of making Kansas a
slave State was gone forever.





Chapter XIII.  The Illinois Campaign.




Congress adjourned on June 16th and Douglas, after spending a few
days in New York, returned to Chicago.  Meanwhile the people of
Illinois had awakened to great political activity.  On April 21st
the regular Democratic Convention was held at Springfield and
without opposition passed a resolution endorsing his candidacy for
re-election.  On June 9th the "Administration Democracy," consisting
of the Federal office holders and those democrats who condemned
his anti-Lecompton battle, held a Convention at Springfield, the
purpose of which was to divide the party and insure his defeat.  On
the 17th the Republicans held their Convention at Springfield and
chose Lincoln as their candidate for United States Senator.

The nomination of Lincoln was not an accident.  He was prepared to
accept it in a speech that should serve as the text of his campaign
and was destined to great fame in after years.  Against the resolve of
his friends he announced the dangerous doctrine that the Government
could not endure permanently half slave and half free.  "A house
divided against itself cannot stand."  He did not expect the Union
to be dissolved or the house to fall, but that it would cease to be
divided.  "Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further
spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in
the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its
advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful
in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South."

The repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the establishment of
squatter sovereignty was a great step towards the nationalization of
slavery.  This was followed by the Dred Scott decision forbidding
Congress to interfere with it in the Territories.  All the
legislation of Congress had carefully reserved a place for this
expected decision.  Douglas had hinted it in the Senate long before
it was announced.  Pierce and Buchanan had proclaimed it before the
Judges.  "We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations
are the result of preconcert.  But when we see a lot of framed
timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten
out at different times and different place, and by different
workmen,--Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance,--and
when we see these timbers all joined together and see they exactly
make the frame of a house or mill, all the tenons and mortises
exactly fitting, * * * * * we find it impossible not to believe
that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one
another from the beginning and all worked upon a common plan or
draft drawn up before the first blow was struck."

He repelled the suggestion made in some quarters that the Republicans
ought to cease their fight on Douglas and rally to his support in
his contest with the slavery propagandists.  He reminded them that
the very essence of Republican faith was hostility to slavery, while
Douglas frankly declared that he did not care whether it was voted
up or voted down.  The cause must be entrusted to those whose hearts
were in the work and who did care for the result.

On the 9th of July Douglas returned to Chicago and received
a royal welcome.  A special train loaded with prominent citizens
was dispatched to meet him.  On his arrival he was greeted with
tumultuous applause.  He addressed the vast multitude from the
balcony of the Tremont House.  Thirty thousand people are said
to have gathered to hear him.  He was profoundly pleased by this
splendid ovation so strikingly in contrast with the reception
four years before, when his neighbors refused even to hear him in
defense of his course.  Among the distinguished visitors on the
speakers' stand sat Lincoln.

After thanking his audience for the enthusiastic reception, he plunged
into the subject then uppermost in the public mind by rehearsing
his relation to the whole Kansas problem.  He reminded them of his
early and consistent devotion to popular sovereignty, which had
been so utterly outraged by the Lecompton Constitution.  He assured
his hearers, however, that his opposition to that Constitution arose
from no sentimental morality and bore no relation to the ethics of
slavery.  He insisted, not that it be good or just, but that it be
submitted to a vote of the settlers.

He then addressed himself to Lincoln's Springfield speech.  He
attacked his extreme doctrines with characteristic adroitness.
Lincoln's speech was of doubtful prudence as a campaign argument.
It really foreboded civil war or a peaceful dissolution of the
Union.  While this alternative was, perhaps, inevitable, political
expediency forbade its avowal.  Douglas declared the necessary
result of his philosophy to be a war of sections, a war of the North
against the South, of the free States against the slave States,
to be continued relentlessly until the one or the other should
be subdued and all should either become free States or all become
slave States.  But this was not the true theory of the American
Union.  The States differed widely in soil, climate, resources,
tastes and habits.  Their laws and institutions were utterly unlike.
New Hampshire's laws were unfit for South Carolina; those of New
York were not suited to the Pacific Coast.  Uniformity in local
and domestic affairs would be destructive of State rights, State
sovereignty and personal liberty.  Uniformity was the parent
of despotism the world over.  The only way of attaining Lincoln's
proposed uniformity would be to abolish State legislatures, blot
out State sovereignty and merge the States into one consolidated
empire.  But diversity, dissimilarity, variety in all their local and
domestic institutions was the great safeguard of their liberties.
He insisted on reverently bowing to the Supreme Court as the
authoritative expounder of the Constitution, rather than appealing
from it to a tumultuous town meeting where constitutional questions
arose.  The Federal Government was founded on the white basis.
It was made by white men, for the benefits of white men, to be
administered by white men in such manner as they should determine.
Let each State decide for itself how it would treat the <DW64>s
and let its neighbors alone.

"The issues between Mr. Lincoln and myself," he said, "are made
up, * * * *.  He goes for uniformity in our domestic institutions,
for a war of sections, until one or the other shall be subdued.  I
go for * * * the right of the people to decide for themselves.  On
the other hand Mr. Lincoln goes for a warfare on the Supreme Court.
* * * * I yield obedience to the decisions of that Court.  * * *
* I am opposed to <DW64> equality.  I repeat that this nation is a
white people, * * * * a people that have established this Government
for themselves and their posterity.  * * * * I am opposed to taking
any step that recognizes the <DW64> man * * * as the equal of the
white man.  I am opposed to giving him a voice in the administration
of the Government."

The reception was recognized by the politicians of both parties
as a great success.  It was a brilliant opening of the senatorial
campaign.  The Republicans were anxious to counteract it.  On the
following evening Lincoln spoke at the same place.  He had a large
and enthusiastic audience.  But he was not an impromptu orator at
all comparable to Douglas.  While his carefully prepared Springfield
speech was decidedly better than Douglas' dashing address in
Chicago, his unprepared speech was by no means equal to it.  The
marked disparity between the two speeches must have intensified
the suspicion among Lincoln's friends that he was no match for his
rival on the stump.

On the 16th of July Douglas again spoke to a vast multitude at
Bloomington.  He made an artful appeal for the Whig vote by a well
turned compliment to "Kentucky's great and gallant statesman, John
J. Crittenden," who proposed to refer the whole question back to
the people of Kansas and thus "showed himself a worthy successor
of the immortal Clay."  The Republicans had "endorsed the great
principle of the Kansas-Nebraska bill," they had "come to the
Douglas platform in supporting the Crittenden-Montgomery bill."  The
compromise of 1850 embodied the principle that every people ought
to have the privilege of forming and regulating their own institutions
to suit themselves.  Each State had that right and no reason existed
why it should not be extended to the Territories.  The Illinois
House of Representatives by an almost unanimous vote had asserted
that the principle embodied in the measures of 1850 was the
birth-right of free men, the gift of heaven, a principle vindicated
by our Revolutionary fathers, that no limitation should ever be placed
upon it either in the organization of a territorial government or
the admission of a State into the Union.  In conformity with that
principle he had brought in the Kansas-Nebraska bill, for which
Lincoln and his friends were seeking his defeat.

"I have known Lincoln well," he said, "for a quarter of a century.
I have known him as you all know him, a kind-hearted, amiable
gentleman, a right good fellow, a worthy citizen, of eminent ability
as a lawyer, and, I have no doubt, sufficient ability to make a
good Senator."

He examined Lincoln's "house divided-against-itself" philosophy,
pointing out that the house had been divided for nearly seventy
years and still stood.

"How is Lincoln, if elected Senator, going to carry out that principle
which he says is essential to the existence of this Union; that
slavery must be abolished in all the States, or must be established
in all?  * * * * He invites, by his proposition, a war between
Illinois and Kentucky, a war between the free States and the slave
States, a war between the North and the South, for the purpose of
either exterminating slavery in every Southern State, or planting
it in every Northern State.  * * * * * What man in Illinois would
not lose the last drop if his heart's blood before he would submit
to the institution of slavery being forced upon us by the other
States against our will?  * * * What Southern man would not shed
the last drop of his heart's blood to prevent Illinois or any other
Northern State from interfering to abolish slavery in his State?  *
* * * I am opposed to organizing a sectional party which appeals to
Northern pride and Northern passion and prejudice against Southern
institutions, thus stirring up ill feeling and hot blood between
brethren of the same Republic.  * * * * How is he to carry out his
principles when he gets to the Senate?  Does he intend to introduce
a bill to abolish slavery in Kentucky?  Does he intend to introduce
a bill to interfere with slavery in Virginia?  How is he to accomplish
what he professes must be done to save the Union?

"There would be but one way to carry out his ideas.  That would be
to establish a consolidated empire as destructive to the liberties
of the people and the rights of the citizen as that of Austria
or Russia or any other despotism that rests upon the necks of the
people * * * *.  Who among you expects to live or have his children
live until slavery shall be established in Illinois or abolished in
South Carolina?  * * * * There is but one possible way in which
slavery can be abolished and that is by leaving a State * * *
* perfectly free to form and regulate its institutions in its own
way.  That was the principle upon which this Republic was founded.
* * * * Under its operation slavery disappeared from New Hampshire,
from Rhode Island, from Connecticut, from New York, from New Jersey,
from Pennsylvania, from six of the twelve original slave holding
States; and this gradual emancipation went on so long as we in the
free states minded our own business and left our neighbors alone,
* * * * so long as the free States were content with managing their
own affairs and leaving the South perfectly free to do as they
pleased.  But the moment the North said, 'We are powerful enough to
control you of the South,' * * * * that moment the South combined
to resist the attack and thus sectional parties were formed and
gradual emancipation ceased in all the Northern slave holding States
* * *.

"Lincoln makes another issue, * * * * a crusade against the Supreme
Court of the United Sates because of its decision in the Dred Scott
case.  * * * * I have no crusade to preach against that august
body.  * * * * I receive the decision of the Judges of that Court
when pronounced as the final adjudication upon all questions within
their jurisdiction.  * * * * Unless we respect and bow in deference
to the final decisions of the highest judicial tribunal in our
country, we are driven at once to anarchy, to violence, to mob law,
and there is no security left for our property or our own civil
rights.  * * * * Are we to appeal from the Supreme Court to a country
meeting like this?  * * * Does Mr. Lincoln intend to appeal from
the decision of the Supreme Court to a Republican caucus or a town
meeting?  * * * He tells you that he is opposed to the decision in
the Dred Scott case.  Well, suppose he is; what is he going to do
about it?  I never got beat in a law suit in my life that I was not
opposed to the decision.  * * * * This Government is divided into
three separate and distinct branches.  * * * * Each one is supreme
within the circle of its own powers.  The functions of Congress are
to enact the statutes, the province of the Court is to pronounce
upon their validity, and the duty of the Executive is to carry the
decision into effect."

Yet, he said, Lincoln wants to be elected Senator in order to
reverse the Dred Scott decision by passing another unconstitutional
statute.  He can not get rid of the Judges now on the bench until
they die.  He must first elect a Republican President by Northern
votes bound by pledges to appoint none but Republicans to the bench.
He must then persuade the Judges to die.  The President must pledge
his new Judges in advance to decide this slavery question according
to the wishes of his party, regardless of the Constitution.  What
confidence would the people have in a Court thus constituted?--a
Court composed of partisan Judges, appointed on political grounds,
catechized in advance and pledged in regard to a decision before
the argument and without reference to the state of facts?  Would
such a Court command the respect of the country?  Without regard
to the Dred Scott decision slavery will go just where the people
want it and not one inch further.

"I tell you, my friends, it is impossible under our institutions to
force slavery on an unwilling people.  If this principle of popular
sovereignty * * * be fairly carried out by letting the people decide
the question for themselves by a fair vote at a fair election and
with honest returns, slavery will never exist one day or one hour
in any Territory against the unfriendly legislation of an unfriendly
people.  I care not how the Dred Scott decision may have settled the
abstract question so far as the practical results are concerned.  *
* * If the people of the Territory want slavery they will encourage
it by passing affirmatory laws and the necessary police regulations,
patrol laws and slave code; if they do not want it they will
withhold that legislation and by withholding it slavery is a dead
as if prohibited by a constitutional provision.  * * * * * They
could pass such local laws as would drive slavery out in one day
or one hour, if they were opposed to it; and therefore, so far as
the question of slavery in the Territory is concerned, so far as
the principle of popular sovereignty is concerned in its practical
operation, it matters not how the Dred Scott case may be decided.
* * * * * Whether slavery shall exist or shall not exist in any
State or Territory will depend on whether the people are for or
against it; and which ever way they shall decide it will be entirely
satisfactory to me."

The Dred Scott case, he continued, decides that <DW64>s are
not citizens.  But Lincoln insists on conferring on them all the
privileges, rights and immunities of citizens.  "I believe this
Government of ours was founded on the white basis.  I believe
it was established for white men, of the benefit of white men and
their posterity in all time to come.  I do not believe that it
was the design or intention of the signers of the Declaration of
Independence or the framers of the Constitution to include <DW64>s
as citizens.  * * * The position Lincoln has taken on this question
not only presents him as claiming for them the right to vote, but
their right under the divine law and the Declaration of Independence
to be elected to office, to become members of the legislature, to
go to Congress, to become Governors or United States Senators, or
Judges of the Supreme Court.  * * * He would permit them to marry,
would he not?  And if he gives them that right I suppose he will
let them marry whom they please, provided they marry their equals.
If the divine law declares that the white man is the equal of the
<DW64> woman, that they are on a perfect equality, I suppose he admits
the right of the <DW64> woman to marry the white man.  * * * I do
not believe that the signers of the Declaration had any reference
to <DW64>s when they used the expression that all men were created
equal.  * * * They were speaking only of the white race.  * * *
Every one of the thirteen colonies was a slave-holding constituency.
Did they intend * * * to declare that their own slaves were on an
equality with them?  What are the <DW64>s' rights and privileges?
That is a question which each State and Territory must decide for
itself.  We have decided that question.  We have said that in this
State the <DW64> shall not be a slave but that he shall enjoy no
political rights; that <DW64> equality shall not exist.  * * * For
my own part, I do not consider the <DW64> any kin to me nor to any
other white man; but I would still carry my humanity and philanthropy
to the extent of giving him every privilege and every immunity that
he could enjoy consistent with our own good."

Maine allows the <DW64> to vote on an equality with the white man.
New York permits him to vote, provided he owns $250 worth of
property.  In Kentucky they deny the <DW64> all political and civil
rights.  Each is a sovereign State and has a right to do as it
pleases.  Let us mind our own business and not interfere with them.
Lincoln is not going into Kentucky, but will plant his batteries
on this side of the Ohio and throw his bomb shells--his Abolition
documents--over the River and will carry on the political warfare
and get up strife between the North and South until he elects a
sectional President, reduces the South to the condition of dependent
colonies, raises the <DW64> to an equality and forces the South to
submit to the doctrine that a house divided against itself cannot
stand; that the Union divided into half slave States and half free
cannot endure; that they must be all free or all slave; and that,
as we in the North are in the majority, we will not permit them to
be all slave and therefore they in the South must consent to the
States being all free.

"These are my views and these are the principles to which I have
devoted all my energies since 1850, when I acted side by side
with the immortal Clay and the god-like Webster in that memorable
struggle in which the Whigs and the Democrats united upon a common
platform of patriotism and the Constitution.  * * * And when
I stood beside the death-bed of Mr. Clay and heard him refer with
feelings and emotions of the deepest solicitude to the welfare of
the country, and saw that he looked upon the principle embodied in
the great Compromise of 1850, the principle of the Nebraska bill,
the doctrine of leaving each State and Territory free to decide
its institutions for itself, as the only means by which the peace
of the country could be preserved and the Union perpetuated.  I
pledged him on that death-bed of his that so long as I lived my
energy should be devoted to the vindication of that principle and
of his fame as connected with it.  I gave the same pledge to the
great expounder of the Constitution, he who has been called the
god-like Webster.  I looked up to Clay and him as a son would to a
father, and I call upon the people of Illinois and the people of
the whole Union to bear testimony that never since the sod has been
laid upon the graves of these eminent statesmen have I failed on
any occasion to vindicate the principle with which the last great
crowning acts of their lives were identified.  * * * And now my
life and energy are devoted to this work as the means of preserving
this Union.  * * * It can be maintained by preserving the sovereignty
of the States, the right of each State and each Territory to settle
its domestic concerns for itself and the duty of each to refrain
from interfering with the other in any of its local or domestic
institutions.  Let that be done, and the Union will be perpetuated.
Let that be done, and this Republic which began with thirteen
States and which now numbers thirty-two, which when it began only
extended from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, but now reaches to
the Pacific, may yet expand north and south until it covers the
whole continent and becomes one vast, ocean-bound Confederacy.  *
* * * Let us maintain the great principles of popular sovereignty,
of State rights and of the Federal Union as the Constitution has
made it, and this Republic will endure forever."

On the following day he spoke at Springfield, repeating his
Bloomington speech with slight abridgment.

In the evening, Lincoln, who had attended Douglas' Bloomington meeting
and accompanied him to Springfield, spoke to a large audience.  He
twitted him for his noisy, spectacular campaign, "the thunderings
of cannon, the marching and music, the fizzle-gigs and fireworks.  * * *

"Does Judge Douglas," he asked, "when he says that several of the
past years of his life have been devoted to the question of popular
sovereignty and that all the remainder of his life shall be devoted
to it, mean to say that he has been devoting his life to securing
to the people of the territories the right to exclude slavery?  *
* * He and every one knows that the decision of the Supreme Court,
which he approves and makes a special ground of attack upon me for
disapproving, forbids the people of a Territory to exclude slavery.
This covers the whole ground from the settlement of a Territory
till it reaches the degree of maturity entitling it to form a State
Constitution.  So far as all that ground is concerned, the Judge
is not sustaining popular sovereignty, but absolutely opposing it.
He sustains the decision which declares that the popular will of
the Territory has no constitutional power to exclude slavery during
their territorial existence.  This being so, the period of time
from the first settlement of the Territory till it reaches the point
of forming a State Constitution is not the thing that the Judge is
fighting for; but, on the contrary, he is fighting for the thing
that annihilates and crushes out that same popular sovereignty.  *
* * He is contending for the right of the people, when they come to
make a State Constitution, to make it for themselves and precisely
as best suits themselves.  That is quixotic.  Nobody is opposing or
has opposed the right of the people when they form a Constitution
to form it for themselves.  This being so, what is he going to spend
his life for?  Is he going to spend it in maintaining a principle
that nobody on earth opposes?  Does he expect to stand up in
majestic dignity and go through this apothesis and become a god
in maintaining a principle that neither man nor mouse in all God's
creation opposes?  * * * What is there in the opposition of Judge
Douglas to the Lecompton Constitution that entitles him to be
considered the only opponent to it, * * * the very quintessence
of that opposition? * * *

He in the Senate and his class of men there formed the number of
about twenty.  It took one hundred and twenty to defeat the measure.
There were six Americans and ninety-four Republicans.  Why is it
that twenty should be entitled to all the credit for doing that
work and the hundred to none?  Does he place his superior claim
to credit on the ground that he has performed a good act that was
never expected of him?  Perhaps he places himself somewhat on the
ground of the parable of the lost sheep which went astray upon the
mountains, and when the owner of the hundred sheep found the one
that was lost, there was more rejoicing over the one sheep that was
lost and had been found than over the ninety-and-nine in the fold."

In opposing the Dred Scott decision, he said, he was sustained by
the authority of Mr. Jefferson, who denounced the doctrine that the
Judges were the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions
as dangerous and tending to oligarchic despotism and insisted
that, while they were as honest as other men, they were not more
so, having the common passion for party, for power and the privilege
of their crops, and ought not to be trusted with the dangerous power
of deciding the great questions of State.  The Supreme Court once
decided that the national back was constitutional.  The Democratic
party revolted against the decision.  Jackson himself asserted
that he would not hold a national back to be constitutional, even
though the Court had decided it to be so.  The declaration that
Congress had not power to establish a bank was contained in every
Democratic platform since that time, in defiance of the solemn
ruling of the Court.  In fact, they had reduced the decision to an
absolute nullity.  And still Douglas boasted in the very speeches
in which he denounced others for opposing the Dred Scott decision
that he stood on the Cincinnati platform which repudiated and
condemned the old bank decision.  He was for Supreme Court decisions
when he liked them and against them when he did not like them.
Would he not graciously allow the Republicans to do with the Dred
Scott decision what they did with the bank decision?

Springfield was Lincoln's home.  He knew his audience and met it
with confidence.  He now felt that he was Douglas' equal in the
field in which he had hitherto eclipsed all rivals.

But it was evident that the current was running with Douglas.
The great reception at Chicago had been a glorious opening.  His
journeys through the State were triumphal processions.  Special
trains, splendidly decorated, were at his service.  Military
escorts received him with the firing of cannon and the loud music
of bands.  He commanded and marshaled with the skill of a great
artist all the pomp and circumstance of victory.  He owned much
property in Chicago, which with the growth of the city had greatly
increased in value.  He mortgaged this for campaign funds, borrowing
eighty thousand dollars, a debt that harassed him to the grave.
Wealthy friends contributed freely and the campaign was run regardless
of expense.

Yet with all these advantages the contest was evidently a hard one.
Two years before, the combined Republicans and Whigs of the State
outnumbered the Democrats by nearly thirty thousand.  The Whig party
was breaking up.  It was a serious question of practical politics
whether they would drift to the Democrats or the Republicans.
Illinois comprised two utterly distinct communities.  The northern
part of the State was settled by people from New England and the
Northwest.  The Southern part was settled from Kentucky and the other
Southern States.  The growth of Chicago and the rapid development
of the northern counties had made the State extremely doubtful
even for Douglas.  To any other man his task was hopeless.  In the
north the anti-slavery sentiment was strong, even to fanaticism,
and many of his own supporters prayed fervently for the arrival
of the day when slavery would be blotted from existence.  In the
south, though slavery was prohibited by law, it was cherished in
the hearts of the people who remembered with warm affection the
old homesteads in Kentucky and Tennessee.

Lincoln had, with more frankness than discretion announced his views
on the great question.  It was supremely important to compel Douglas
to explicitly declare himself, to hold him down to the dangerous
issue and force him to speak plainly.  Each had the disadvantage
of pleasing one section of the State at the cost of offending the
other section.  But Douglas was further embarrassed by the necessity
of avoiding offense to the slave holding States of the South.  He
was a candidate not only for the Senate, but also for the Presidency.





Chapter XIV.  The Debates with Lincoln.




Chicago, Ill., July 24, 1858.  "Hon. S. A. Douglas:

"My dear Sir:--Will it be agreeable to you to make an arrangement
for you and myself to divide time and address the same audiences the
present canvass?  Mr. Judd, who will hand you this, is authorized
to receive your answer; and, if agreeable to you, to enter into
the terms of such an arrangement.

"Your obedient servant,

"A. Lincoln."

This is the note received by Douglas a week after his return from
Springfield.  On the same day he returned the following answer:

"Chicago, Ill., July 24, 1858.  "Hon. A. Lincoln:

"Dear Sir:--Your note of this date * * * was handed me by Mr. Judd.  *
* * I went to Springfield last week for the purpose of conferring
with the Democratic State Central Committee upon the mode of conducting the
canvass, and with them * * * made a list of appointments covering
the entire period until late in October.  The people of the
several localities have been notified of the times and places of
the meetings.  * * * I cannot refrain from expressing my surprise,
if it was your original intention to invite such an arrangement,
that you should have waited until after I had made my appointments,
in as much as we were both here in Chicago together for several
days after my arrival, and again at Bloomington, Atlanta, Lincoln
and Springfield, where it was well known I went for the purpose
of consulting with the State Central Committee and agreeing upon
the plan of campaign.  * * * I will, in order to accommodate you,
as far as it is in my power to do so, take the responsibility of
making an arrangement with you for a discussion between us at one
prominent point in each congressional district in the State, except
the Second and Sixth, where we have both spoken and in each of
which you had the concluding speech.  If agreeable to you, I will
indicate the following places as the most suitable in the several
congressional districts at which we should speak, to wit:  Freeport,
Ottawa, Galesburg, Quincy, Alton, Jonesboro and Charleston.  * * *

"Very respectfully, your most obedient servant,

"S. A. Douglas."

Lincoln replied:

"Springfield, July 29, 1858.

"Hon. S. A. Douglas:

Dear Sir:--Yours of the 24th in relation to an arrangement to divide
time and address the same audiences, is received; and, in apology
for not sooner replying, allow me to say that, when I sat by you at
dinner yesterday, I was not aware that you had answered my note,
nor, certainly, that my own note had been presented to you.  An
hour after, I saw a copy of your answer in the Chicago Times, and
reaching home I found the original awaiting me.  * * * As to your
surprise that I did not sooner make the proposal to divide time
with you, I can only say, I made it as soon as I resolved to make
it.  I did not know but that such a proposal would come from you;
I waited respectfully to see.  * * * I agree to an arrangement
for us to speak at the seven places you have named and at your own
times, provided you name the times at once, so that I, as well as
you, can have to myself the time not covered by the arrangement.
As to the other details, I wish perfect reciprocity, and no more.
I wish as much time as you and that conclusions shall alternate.
That is all.

"Your obedient servant,

"A. Lincoln."

On the next day Douglas wrote:

"Bement, Piatt Co., Ill., July 30, 1858.

"Dear Sir:--Your letter, dated yesterday, accepting my proposition
for a joint discussion at one prominent point in each congressional
district * * * was received this morning.  The times and places
designated are as follows:

Ottawa, La Salle County ......... August 21, 1858.
Freeport, Stephenson County ..... August 27, 1858.
Jonesboro, Union County ...... September 15, 1858.
Charleston, Coles County ..... September 18, 1858.
Galesburgh, Knox County ......... October 7, 1858.
Quincy, Adams County ........... October 13, 1858.
Alton, Madison County .......... October 15, 1858.

"I agree to your suggestion that we shall alternately open and close
the discussion.  I will speak at Ottawa one hour, you can reply,
occupying an hour and a half, and I will then follow for half an
hour.  At Freeport, you shall open the discussion and speak one hour;
I will follow for an hour and a half, and you can then reply for
half an hour.  We will alternate in like manner in each successive
place.

"Very respectfully, your obedient servant,

"S. A. Douglas."

To which Lincoln replied:

"Springfield, July 31, 1858.

"Hon. S. A. Douglas:

"Dear Sir:--Yours of yesterday, naming places, time and terms for
joint discussions, between us, was received this morning.  Although
by the terms as you propose, you take four openings and closes
to my three, I accede, and thus close the arrangement.  * * *

"Your obedient servant,

"A. Lincoln."

Now that Lincoln has become idealized and is safely classed
with the great men of all ages, his modest challenge seems like
a condescension of the immortal President to his rival.  It then
seemed an act of temerity bordering on madness.  Lincoln's friends
thought it rash.  Douglas' friends had no hope that his adversary
would be so easily delivered into his hands.

Yet Lincoln was not a despised antagonist.  He was the most prominent
Republican in Illinois.  But Douglas was the recognized head of a
great national party, the giant of the Senate, the most resourceful
American statesman then living.  Through years of desperate battling
he had successfully repelled the assaults of Seward, Sumner and
Chase.  He had more recently encountered with equal ease all the
Southern Senators.  It seemed a simple task to meet this humble
Western lawyer and make his friends ashamed of their senatorial
candidate.  Douglas did not share the pleasant illusion of his
friends.  Before leaving Washington, when he heard that Lincoln
was nominated, he said to Forney:

"I shall have my hands full.  He is a strong man of his party,--full
of wit, facts, dates,--and the best stump speaker, with his droll
ways and dry jokes, in the West.  He is as honest as his is shrewd;
and if I beat him my victory will be hardly won."

Lincoln was burning with jealousy.  He believed himself to be
Douglas' full equal in mental endowment.  Fortune, he thought, with
a tinge of bitterness, had dealt with them most unequally, clothing
his rival with the glory of a world-renowned statesman, and leaving
him to waste his powers on the obscure quarrels of litigious clients
in a small town.  He yearned for the opportunity to measure himself
with the great Senator on a conspicuous stage.

This series of debates was a rare piece of strategy on Lincoln's
part.  Douglas had so long been wrapped in his senatorial toga
that his greatness had become exaggerated to the popular mind of
Illinois; while Lincoln had been a plain, modest lawyer, moving
among the people in the daily round of routine life.  The dogmatic
statement of the great Senator carried more weight than the
profoundest argument of the clearest demonstration of the country
lawyer.  But these debates brought them to a common level.  They
measured their intellectual strength in the presence of the people,
with all official trappings laid aside; and while no one could well
be disappointed in Douglas' strength, the whole country was amazed
at the unexpected power of Lincoln.

There were disadvantages to Douglas in this mode of combat.  He
must sacrifice the glamour of senatorial dignity and enter the arena
on equal footing with his antagonist.  He was a brilliant debater.
"In the whole field of American politics no man has equaled him
in the expedients and strategy of debate.  * * * He was tireless,
ubiquitous, unseizable.  It would have been as easy to hold
a globule of mercury under the finger's tip as to fasten him to a
point he desired to evade.  * * * In spirit he was alert, combative,
aggressive; in manner patronizing and arrogant by turns."  But
he had to meet in argument a man of imperturbably temper, who had
thought deeply on the great questions of the time, who by unerring
instinct could lay his finger on every flaw in his chain of
reasoning, could rise to heights of eloquence beyond the reach of
his unimaginative mind and pour out streams of quaint humor that
must have filled him with despair.

So great was the interest of the people in this extraordinary contest
that it was found impossible to hold the meetings in halls.  They
were held during the warm autumn days in the open air, where the
crowds, numbering from five to twenty thousand, struggled to get
within range of the speakers' voices.

It would be difficult to conceive a more picturesque contest than
that now waged by these politicians as they strove for the mastery,
and the enormous crowds of friends and sympathizers listened with
intense interest to the weighty arguments, or shouted applause when
their favorite scored a point.  The audiences, consisting largely
of farmers, who had made long journeys in wagons and lived in tents
or camped out in the open air while awaiting the great event, were
in stern earnest, despite their holiday appearance, and listened
with thoughtful faces and troubled hearts as the grave theme was
discussed which had distracted the country for years.

And the orators, who were unconsciously playing a great role on
the historic stage, were surely among the most interesting products
of modern times.  Lincoln's lank, ungainly figure, nearly six and
a half feet tall, clad in loose fitting clothes, contrasted oddly
with the short, stout figure of Douglas, barely five feet in height,
trimly and rather sprucely dressed.  The sad, calm face o Lincoln,
his humble and unheroic bearing, were in marked contrast with the
finely chiseled, powerful, defiant face and magnificent Napoleonic
head surmounting the short, thick neck of Douglas, who strode with
kingly air before he admiring throngs.  The manner of Douglas was
so masterful and strong that a wavering audience must have been
swept away by it.  His finely modulated voice reached with ease to
the utmost limits of the crowds as he thundered out his decisive
arguments or condescended to compliment his aspiring rival; while
Lincoln manifestly labored to so pitch his unmusical voice that the
distant listeners could hear, and was never betrayed into a single
gracious compliment to the distinguished Senator whose seat he
aspired to fill.  And the contestants, however great their posthumous
fame, were as yet merely ambitious politicians, supremely interested
in winning the splendid prize.  To Lincoln the possibility of a
seat in the Senate was stimulus enough.  Douglas was in mid career,
assured of the Presidency in the near future, but compelled at all
hazards to hold the ground already won.  His commanding eminence
attracted universal attention to the contest.  He must not only
win, but bear himself throughout with the air of an assured conqueror.

With all their disparity of rank and fame, they were not badly
matched, and all the substantial advantages of the situation lay
with Lincoln.  The greatness of Douglas' fame excited sympathy for
his rival.  Success in the contest would give power and prestige to
Lincoln, and even defeat would not be humiliating.  Douglas could
not expect much glory even from victory.  Though he crushed his
opponent in argument, he must still measure himself with the Douglas
of the Senate and not fall below his own standard.  In his contest
for the Senate, he must remember the Presidency and shape his
arguments for a larger audience than that addressed by Lincoln.

During the period of the debates both were actively engaged in the
State campaign, addressing one or two audiences daily, so arranging
their routes as to meet at the appointed times and places.  On
August 21st, in presence of a vast multitude, Douglas opened the
first debate at Ottawa.

"Prior to 1854," he said, "this country was divided into two great
political parties, known as the Whig and Democratic parties.  Both
were national and patriotic.  * * * Whig principles had no boundary
sectional line, * * * but applied and were proclaimed wherever the
Constitution ruled or the American flag waved over American soil.
So it was, and so it is, with the great Democratic party, which
from the days of Jefferson to this period has proven itself to be
the historic party of this Nation.  * * * The Whig party and the
Democratic party jointly adopted the Compromise measures of 1850
as the basis of a proper and just solution of this slavery question
in all its forms.  Clay was the great leader, with Webster on his
right and Cass on his left, and sustained by the patriots in the
Whig and Democratic ranks.  * * * * In 1851 the Whig party and the
Democratic party united in Illinois in approving the principles of
the Compromise measures of 1850.  * * * In 1852 the Whig party in
Convention at Baltimore declared the Compromise measures of 1850
a suitable adjustment of that question.  * * * * The Democratic
Convention assembled in Baltimore the same year and adopted the
Compromise measures of 1850 as the basis of Democratic action.  *
* * They both stood on the same platform with regard to the slavery
question.  That platform was the right of the people of each State
and Territory to decide their local and domestic institutions for
themselves, subject only to the Federal Constitution.

"In 1854 I introduced into the Senate a bill to organize the
Territories of Kansas and Nebraska on that principle which had
been adopted in the Compromise measures of 1850, and indorsed by
the Whig party and the Democratic party in National Convention in
1852.  * * * Thus you see that up to 1854, when the Kansas-Nebraska
bill was brought into Congress for the purpose of carrying out the
principles which both parties up to that time had indorsed and
approved, there was no division of opinion in this country in regard
to that principle, except the opposition of the Abolitionists.  In
the House of Representatives of Illinois upon a resolution asserting
that principle every Whig and every Democrat voted in the affirmative."

In 1854 Lincoln, the leader of the Whigs, and Trumbull, one of
the Democratic chiefs, entered into an arrangement to dissolve the
old Whig and Democratic parties and to unite the members of both
into the Abolition party under the name and guise of a Republican
party.  The terms were that Lincoln should have Shield's place in
the Senate, then about to become vacant, and that Trumbull should
have Douglas' seat when his term expired.  Lincoln went to work to
Abolitionize the old Whig party, pretending that he was as good a
Whig as ever, and Trumbull began preaching Abolitionism in milder
and lighter form, hoping to Abolitionize the Democratic party.
The party met at Springfield in October, 1854, and proclaimed its
platform.  This document christened the coalition the Republican
party.  It pledged the party to bring the administration of the
Government back to the control of first principles; to restore
Kansas and Nebraska to the position of free Territories; to repeal
the Fugitive Slave Law; to restrict slavery to those States in
which it existed; to prohibit the admission of any more slave States
into the Union; to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia; to
exclude it from all the Territories and resist the acquirement of
more unless it should be prohibited therein.  He asked Lincoln to
answer whether he stood pledged to each article in that creed and
would carry it out.

"I ask Abraham Lincoln to answer these questions in order that
when I trot him down to lower Egypt (Southern Illinois) I may put
the same questions to him.  My principles are the same everywhere.
I can proclaim them alike in the North and the South, the East
and the West.  My principles will apply wherever the Constitution
prevails and the American flag waves.  I desire to know whether
Mr. Lincoln's principles will bear transplanting from Ottawa
to Jonesboro.  I put these questions to him to-day distinctly and
ask an answer.  I have a right to an answer, for I quote from the
platform of the Republican party, made by himself and others at the
time that party was formed and bargain made by Lincoln to dissolve
and kill the old Whig party and transfer its members, bound hand
and foot to the Abolition party.  * * * I mean nothing personally
disrespectful or unkind to Lincoln.  I have known him for nearly
twenty-five years.  There were many points of sympathy between us
when we first got acquainted.  We were both comparatively boys and
both struggling with poverty in a strange land.  I was a school
teacher in the town of Winchester, and he a flourishing grocery
keeper in the town of Salem.  * * * I made as good a school teacher
as I could and, when a cabinet maker, I made a good bedstead and
tables, although my old boss said I succeeded better with bureaus
and secretaries than anything else.  * * * Lincoln was then just
as good at telling an anecdote as now.  He could beat any of the
boys wrestling or running a foot race, in pitching quoits or tossing
a copper, could ruin more liquor than all the boys of the town
together, and the dignity and impartiality with which he presided
at a horse race or a fist fight excited the admiration and won the
praise of everybody."

After Lincoln and Trumbull had formed their combination to
Abolitionize the old parties and put themselves into the Senate, he
said, Trumbull broke faith by demanding Shield's place for himself
when it fell vacant and leaving Lincoln to fight for Douglas' seat
two years later.  Trumbull was stumping the State for Lincoln in
order to quiet him.  Lincoln was opposed to the Dred Scott decision
and would not submit to it because it deprived the <DW64> of the
rights and privileges of citizenship.

"Do you desire," he asked, "to * * * allow the free <DW64>s to flow
in and cover your prairies with black settlements?  Do you desire
to turn this beautiful State into a free <DW64> colony, in order that
when Missouri abolishes slavery she can send one hundred thousand
emancipated slaves into Illinois to become citizens and voters
on an equality with yourselves?  * * * Mr. Lincoln, following the
example and lead of all the little Abolition orators who go around
and lecture in the basements of schools and churches, reads from
the Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal,
and then asks, 'How can you deprive the <DW64> of that equality
which God and the Declaration of Independence awards him?'" * * *

"Now I do not believe that the Almighty ever intended the <DW64> to
be the equal of the white man.  If he did he has been a long time
demonstrating the fact.  For thousands of years the <DW64> has been
a race upon the earth and during all that time, in all latitudes
and climates, wherever he has wandered or been taken, he has been
inferior to the race which he there met.  He belongs to an inferior
race and must always occupy an inferior position.  The question,
what rights and privileges shall be conferred on the <DW64>, is
one which each State and Territory must decide for itself.  This
doctrine of Mr. Lincoln, of uniformity among the institutions
of the different States, is a new doctrine, never dreamed of by
Washington, Madison or the founders of this Government.  Mr. Lincoln
and the Republican party set themselves up as wiser than these men
who made this Government which has flourished for seventy years
under the principle of popular sovereignty, recognizing the right
of each state to do as it pleased.  Under that principle we have
grown from a nation of three or four millions to a nation of about
thirty millions of people; we have crossed the Allegheny Mountains
and filled up the whole Northwest, turning the prairie into a garden
and building up churches and schools, thus spreading civilization
and Christianity where before there was nothing but savage barbarism.

"Under that principle we have become, from a feeble nation, the
most powerful on the face of the earth; and if we only adhere to
that principle, we can go forward increasing in territory, in power,
in strength and in glory, until the Republic of America shall be the
North Star that shall guide the friends of freedom throughout the
civilized world.  * * * I believe that this new doctrine preached
by Mr. Lincoln and his party will dissolve the Union if it succeeds.
They are trying to array all the Northern States in one body against
the South, to excite a sectional war between the free States and
the slave States, in order that the one or the other may be driven
to the wall."

When the applause subsided, Lincoln rose to reply.  Addressing
himself first to the personal matters contained in Douglas' speech, he
denied the charge of a secret bargain between himself and Trumbull
dividing the two seats in the Senate between them.  "All I have
to say upon that subject is, that I think no man--not even Judge
Douglas--can prove it, because it is not true."  He denied utterly
that he had anything to do with the Republican platform drafted by
the party leaders in 1854, having refused to meet with the committee
or take any part in the organization.

"I have no means," he said, " of totally disproving such charges
as this.  I cannot prove a negative; but have a right to say that,
when he makes an affirmative charge, he must offer some proof of
its truth.  Douglas' argument about 'perfect social and political
equality with the <DW64>' is but a specious and fantastic arrangement
of words by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut
horse.  I will say here, while upon the subject, that I have no
purpose directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution
of slavery in the States where it exists.  I believe I have no
lawful right to do so.  I have no purpose to introduce political
and social equality between the white and black races.  There is
a physical difference between the two, which in my judgement will
forever forbid their living together upon a footing of perfect
equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must
be a difference, I am in favor of the race to which I belong having
the superior position.  I agree with Judge Douglas that the <DW64>
is not my equal in many respects--certainly not in color--perhaps
not in moral or intellectual endowment.  But in the right to eat
the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand
earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas and
the equal of every living man.  * * *

"In the history of our Government this institution of slavery
has always been an apple of discord and an element of division in
the house.  I have a right to say that in regard to this question
the Union is a house divided against itself.  The public mind
did formerly rest in the belief that slavery was in the course of
ultimate extinction.  But lately Douglas and those acting with him
have placed it on a new basis which looks to the perpetuity and
nationalization of slavery.  * * * * I believe we shall not have
peace upon the question until the opponents of slavery arrest the
further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest
in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or,
on the other hand, that its advocates will push it forward until
it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new,
North as well as South.

"Now, I believe if we could arrest the spread and place it where
Washington and Jefferson and Madison paced it, it would be in the
course of ultimate extinction and the public mind would, as for
eighty years past, believe that it was in the course of ultimate
extinction.  The crisis would be passed and the institution might
be let alone for a hundred years, if it should live so long, in the
States where it exists; yet it would be going out of existence in
the way best for both the black and the white races.  * * * Popular
sovereignty as now applied to the question of slavery, does allow
the people of a Territory to have slavery if they want it, but
does not allow them not to have it if they do not want it.  * * *
As I understand the Dred Scott decision, if any one man wants slaves
all the rest have no way of keeping that one man from holding them. * * *

"The Nebraska bill contains this clause:  'It being the true intent
and meaning of this bill not to legislate slavery into any Territory
or STATE.'  I have always been puzzled to know what business the
word State had in that connection.  Judge Douglas knows.  He put
it there.  * * * What was it placed there for?  After seeing the
Dred Scott decision, which holds that the people cannot exclude
slavery from a Territory, if another Dred Scott decision shall come
holding that they cannot exclude it from a State, we shall discover
that when the word was originally put there it was in view of
something that was to come in due time, we shall see that it was
the other half of something.

"I ask the attention of the people here assembled to the course that
Judge Douglas is pursuing every day as bearing upon this question
of making slavery national.  In the first place what is necessary
to make slavery national?  Not war.  There is no danger that the
people of Kentucky will shoulder their muskets, and, with a young
<DW65> stuck on every bayonet, march into Illinois and force them
upon us.  There is no danger of our going over there and making
war upon them.  Then what is necessary for the nationalization of
slavery?  It is simply the next Dred Scott decision.  It is merely
for the Supreme Court to decide that no State under the Constitution
can exclude it, just as they have already decided that Congress
nor the territorial legislature can do it.  When that is decided
and acquiesced in the whole thing is done.  * * * Let us consider
what Judge Douglas is doing every day to that end.  What influence
is he exerting on public sentiment?  With public sentiment nothing
can fail; without it nothing can succeed.  Consequently, he who
moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or
pronounces decisions.  He makes statutes possible or impossible
to be executed.  * * *

"Judge Douglas is a man of vast influence.  Consider the attitude
he occupies at the head of a large party.  This man sticks to
a decision which forbids the people of a Territory from excluding
slavery, and he does so not because it is right in itself, but
because it has been decided by the Court; and, being decided by
the Court, he is, and you are, bound to take it in your political
action as law.  * * * You will bear in mind that thus committing
himself unreservedly to this decision commits him to the next one
just as firmly as to this.  The next decision, as much as this,
will be a 'Thus saith the Lord.'  It is nothing that I point out to
him that his great prototype, General Jackson, did not believe in
the binding force of decisions.  It is nothing to him that Jefferson
did not so believe.  He claims now to stand on the Cincinnati
platform which affirms that Congress cannot charter a national
bank, in the teeth of that old standing decision that Congress can
charter a bank.  And I remind him of another piece of history on
the question of respect for judicial decisions belonging to a time
when the large party to which Judge Douglas belongs were displeased
with a decision of the Supreme Court of Illinois, because they had
decided that a Governor could not remove a Secretary of State.  I
know that he will not deny that he was then in favor of overslaughing
that decision by the mode of adding five new Judges, so as to vote
down the four older ones.  Not only so, but it ended in the Judge's
sitting down on that very bench as one of the five new Judges to
break down the four old ones.

"Now, when the Judge tells me that men appointed conditionally to
sit as members of a Court will have to catechized beforehand upon
some subject, I say, 'You know, Judge; you have tried it.'  When
he says a Court of this kind will lose the confidence of all men,
will be prostituted and disgraced by such a proceeding, I say, 'You
know best, Judge; you have been through the mill.'  But I cannot
shake Judge Douglas' teeth loose from the Dred Scott decision.  Like
some obstinate animal that will hang on, when he has once got his
teeth fixed, you may cut off a leg, or you may tear away an arm,
still he will not relax his hold.  He hangs to the last to the
Dred Scott decision.  These things show there is a purpose strong
as death and eternity for which he adheres to this decision and for
which he will adhere to all other decisions of the same Court.  *
* * When he invites any people willing to have slavery to establish
it, he is blowing out the moral lights around us.  When he says he
cares not whether slavery is voted down or voted up--that is the
sacred right of self-government--he is, in my judgement, penetrating
the human soul and eradicating the light of reason and
the love of liberty.  * * *

"And now I will only say that when, by all these means and appliances,
he shall succeed in bringing public sentiment to an exact accordance
with his own; when these vast assemblages shall echo back all
these sentiments; when they shall come to repeat his views and to
avow his principles and to say all that he says on these mighty
questions, then it needs only the formality of a second Dred Scott
decision, which he endorses in advance, to make slavery alike lawful
in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South."

Douglas, in his brief reply, reminded the audience that Lincoln
had not frankly answered the question put in his opening speech;
whether he approved of each article of the Republican resolutions
adopted in Springfield in October, 1854.  Lincoln's only answer had
been that he was not present and had nothing to do with drafting
the resolutions.  "But this denial is a miserable quibble to avoid
the main issue, which is that this Republican platform declares in
favor of the unconditional repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law.  His
reply to all these questions is 'I was not on the Committee at the
time; I was up in Tazewell County trying a case.'  I put to him
the question whether, if the people of the Territory, when they had
sufficient population to make a State, should form their Constitution
recognizing slavery, he would vote for or against its admission?
He is a candidate for the United States Senate and it is possible
that, if he should be elected, he would have to vote directly on
that question.  He dodges it also under the cover that he was not
on the Committee.  * * * He knows I will trot him down to Egypt.
I intend to make him answer there.  * * * The Convention to which
I have been alluding pledges itself to exclude slavery from all the
Territories.  * * * I want to know whether he approves that provision.
* * * I want to know whether he will resist the acquirement of any
more territory, unless slavery therein shall be prohibited.  These
are practical questions, based upon the fundamental principles of
the black Republican party; and I want to know whether he is the
first, last and only choice of a party with whom he does not agree
in principle.

"He does not deny but that that principle was unanimously adopted
by the Republican party; and now I want to know whether that party
is unanimously in favor of a man who does not adopt that creed and
agree with them in their principles; I want to know whether the
man who does not agree with them and who is afraid to avow his
differences is the first, last and only choice of the party.  *
* * The party stands pledged that they will never support Lincoln
until he has pledged himself to that platform; but he cannot devise
his answer.  He has not made up his mind whether he will or not.
* * * I have not brought a charge of moral turpitude against
him.  When he brings one against me, instead of disproving it
I will say that it is a lie and let him prove it if he can. * * *

"Mr. Lincoln has not character enough for integrity and truth merely
on his own ipse dixit to arraign President Buchanan, President
Pierce and nine Judges of the Supreme Court, not one of whom would
be complimented by being put on an equality with him.  There is
an unpardonable presumption in any man putting himself up before
thousands of people and pretending that his ipse dixit, without
proof, without fact and without truth, is enough to bring down and
destroy the purest and best of living men.  * * * The word 'State'
as well as 'Territory' was put into the Nebraska bill to knock in
the head this Abolition doctrine that there will be no more slave
States even if the people want them.  * * * The people of Missouri
formed a Constitution as a slave State and asked admission into the
Union; but the Free Soil party of the North, being in a majority,
refused to admit her because she had slavery as one of her
institutions.  Hence, the first slavery agitation arouse upon a
State and not upon a Territory.  * * * The whole Abolition agitation
arose on that doctrine of prohibiting a State from coming in with
slavery or not as it pleased, and that same doctrine is here in
this Republican platform of 1854."

The peculiar difficult of meeting Douglas in argument before a
popular audience is here exhibited in its most perfect form.  The
persuasive force of his last proposition lay in a most ingenious
play on the words "State" and "Territory."  Although the people
of Missouri had formed a State Constitution, they did not become
a State until Congress approved it and formally admitted them.
During the entire period of dispute they continued a Territory.
Douglas' argument assumes that they became a State on forming a
Constitution.





Chapter XV.  The Debates with Lincoln Continued.




The second debate was held at Freeport on August 27th.  Lincoln
opened his speech with a series of answers to the questions asked
at Ottawa.

"I do not," he said, * * * "stand in favor of the unconditional
repeal of the Fugitive Slave law.  * * *

"I do not * * * stand pledged against the admission of
any more slave States into the Union.  * * * *

"I do not stand pledged against the admission of a new State.  *
* * with such a Constitutions as the people * * * may see
fit to make.  * * *

"I do not stand pledged to the abolition of slavery in
the District of Columbia. * * *

"I'm impliedly, if not expressly, pledged to a belief in the right
and duty of Congress to prohibit slavery in all the United
States Territories.  * * *

"I am not opposed to the honest acquisition of territory.  * * * I
would or would not oppose such acquisition accordingly as I might
think such acquisition would or would not aggravate the slavery
question among ourselves."

The questions asked and answered were, whether he was PLEDGED to
any of these things.  He was willing, however, to state what he
really thought of them.

"I do not hesitate to say that * * * under the Constitution of the
United States the people of the Southern States are entitled to
a Congressional Fugitive Slave Law.  * * * The existing Fugitive
Slave Law should have been so framed as to be free from some of the
objections that pertain to it without lessening its efficiency.  *
* * * In regard to the admission of any more slave States into the
Union, I state to you frankly that I would be exceedingly sorry
ever to be put in a position of having to pass upon that question.
I should be exceedingly glad to know that there would never be
another slave State admitted into the Union; but I must add that,
if slavery be kept out of the Territories during their territorial
existence, * * * * and then the people shall * * * adopt a slave
Constitution, * * * I see no alternative but to admit them into
the Union.  * * * I should not be in favor of abolishing slavery in
the District of Columbia, unless upon the condition that abolition
should be gradual; that it should be on the vote of a majority
of the qualified voters of the District; and that compensation be
made to unwilling owners.  * * * What I am saying here I suppose I
say to a vast audience as strongly tending to Abolitionism as any
audience in the State of Illinois, and I believe I am saying that
which, if it would be offensive to any persons and render them
enemies to myself, would be offensive to persons in this audience."
He then asked Douglas four questions:

1st.  "If the people of Kansas shall * * * adopt a State Constitution
and ask admission * * * * before they have the requisite number of
inhabitants under the English bill, * * * will you vote to admit
them?

2nd.  "Can the people of a * * * Territory in any lawful way,
against the wish of any citizen, * * * exclude slavery from its
limits prior to the formation of a State Constitution?

3rd.  "If the Supreme Court * * * * shall decide that States cannot
exclude slavery from their limits, are you in favor of acquiescing
in, adopting and following such decision as a rule of political
action?

4th.  "Are you in favor of acquiring additional territory in
disregard of how such action may affect the Nation on the slavery
question?

When the Nebraska bill was introduced, he continued, it was declared
the intent and meaning of the act not to legislate slavery into
any State or Territory or to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the
people perfectly free to regulate their own domestic institutions
in their own way.  Chase of Ohio introduced an amendment expressly
declaring that the people of a Territory should have the power to
exclude slavery if they saw fit.  Douglas and those who agreed with
him, voted it down.  A little later the Supreme Court decided that
a territorial legislature had no right to exclude slavery.

"For men who did intend that the people of the Territory should
have the right to exclude slavery * * * * the voting down of Chase's
amendment is wholly inexplicable.  It is a puzzle, a riddle.  But
* * * with men who did look forward to such a decision * * * *
the voting down of that amendment would be perfectly rational and
intelligible.  It would keep Congress from coming into collision
with the decision when it was made.  * * * If there was an intention
or expectation that such a decision was to follow, it would not be
very desirable for the Democratic Supreme Court to decide one way
when the party in Congress had decided the other.  Hence it would
be very rational for men expecting such a decision to keep the niche
in that law clear for it.  * * * It looks to me as though here was
the reason why Chase's amendment was voted down.  * * * If it was
done for a different reason, * * * he knows what that reason was and
can tell us what it was.  * * * It will be vastly more satisfactory
to the country for him to give some other intelligible, plausible
reason why it was voted down than to stand upon his dignity and
call people liars."

Cass, it was said, on behalf of the Democrats in the Senate, proposed
to Chase that he so change his amendment as to provide that the
people of a Territory should have power either to introduce or exclude
slavery, and they would accept it.  Chase, having conscientious
scruples on the question of slavery, declined to do this and his
amendment was voted down.  But it was quite possible for them to
have accepted Chase's amendment, forbidden by the Senate rule, but
an amendment to the amended bill, which was permitted.

Douglas, in his reply, with admirable readiness, addressed himself
to Lincoln's four questions.  "In reference to Kansas," he said,
"it is my opinion that, as she has population enough to constitute
a slave State, she has people enough for a free State.  * * * The
next question is, 'Can the people of a Territory * * * exclude
slavery prior to the formation of a State Constitution?'  * * * In
my opinion they can.  * * * It matters not in what way the Supreme
Court may hereafter decide as to the abstract question whether
slavery may or may not go into a Territory under the Constitution,
the people have the lawful means to introduce it or exclude it as
they please, for the reason that slavery cannot exist a day or an
hour anywhere, unless it is supported by local police regulations.
Those police regulations can only be established by the local
legislature; and if the people are opposed to slavery they will elect
representatives to that body who will, by unfriendly legislation,
effectually prevent the introduction of it into their midst.  If
on the contrary they are for it, their legislation will favor its
extension.  Hence, no matter what the decision of the Supreme Court
may be on that abstract question, still the right of the people to
make a slave Territory or a free Territory, is perfect and complete
under the Nebraska bill."

This bill provided that the legislative power of the Territory
should extend to all rightful subjects of legislation.  It made
no exception as to slavery, but gave full power to introduce or
exclude it.  What more could Chase's amendment do?  Chase offered
it for the purpose of having it rejected.  He expected it to be
capital for small politicians, and he was not mistaken.  He was
amazed that Lincoln should ask his third question.  He had denounced
in the Senate an article in the Washington Union claiming that any
provision in the laws or Constitutions of the free States excluding
slavery was in conflict with the Constitution of the United States.
Senator Toombs, on behalf of the South, had utterly repudiated the
doctrine.  The question cast an imputation upon the Supreme Court.
Such a decision was not possible.  It would be an act of moral
treason that no man on the bench could ever descend to.

"As to Lincoln's fourth question," he said:  "I answer, that whenever
it becomes necessary in our growth and progress to acquire more
territory, I am in favor of it without reference to the question
of slavery; and when we have acquired it I would leave the people
free to do as they please, either to make it slave or free territory as
they preferred.  * * * I tell you, increase, multiply and expand
is the law of this Nation's existence.  * * * Just as fast as
our interests and our destiny require additional territory in the
North, in the South or on the islands of the ocean, I am for it;
and, when we acquire it, will leave the people * * * free to do as
they please on the question of slavery and every other question."

At all the Republican Congressional Conventions held in Illinois
in 1854, the resolutions adopted declared that the continued
aggressions of slavery were destructive of the best rights of a
free people and must be resisted by the united political action of
all good men; Kansas and Nebraska must be made free Territories,
the Fugitive Slave Law repealed, slavery restricted to the States
in which it then existed, no more slave States admitted, slavery
excluded from the Territories and no more Territories acquired unless
slavery therein were prohibited; and no man must be supported for
office unless positively pledged to support these principles.

"Yet Lincoln denies that he stands on this platform and declares
that he would not like to be placed in a position where he would
have to vote for these things.  * * * I do not think there is much
danger of his being placed in such a position.  * * * I propose,
out of mere kindness, to relieve him from any such necessity."

When the legislature elected in 1854 came to choose between Lincoln
and Trumbull for Senator, before a ballot was taken, Lovejoy, the
Abolitionist introduced resolutions declaring that slavery must be
excluded from all the territory then owned or thereafter acquired
by the United States; that no more slave States should be admitted
and that the Fugitive Slave Law should be unconditionally repealed.
On the following day every man who had voted for these resolutions,
with two exceptions, voted for Lincoln.  Members so voting were
all pledged to vote for no man who was not pledged to support their
platform.  "Either Lincoln was committed to these propositions, or
your members violated their faith.  Take either horn of the dilemma
you choose.  There is no dodging the question; I want Lincoln's
answer.  He is altogether undecided on these grave questions and
does not know what to think or do.  If elected Senator he will have
to decide.  Do not put him in a position that would embarrass him
so much.  He does not know whether he would vote for the admission
of more slave States, yet he has declared his belief that this
Union cannot endure with slave States in it.  I do not think that
the people of Illinois desire a man to represent them who would like
to be put to the test on the performance of a high constitutional
duty.

"I will retire in shame from the Senate of the United States when
I am not willing to be put to the test in the performance of my duty.
I have been put to severe tests.  I have stood by my principles
in fair weather and foul, in the sunshine and in the rain.  I have
defended the great principles of self-government here among you
when Northern sentiment ran in a torrent against me, and I have
defended that same great principle when Southern sentiment came
down like an avalanche upon me.  I was not afraid of any test they
put me to.  I knew my principles were right; I knew my principles were
sound; I knew that the people would see in the end hat I had done
right and I knew that the God of heaven would smile upon
me if I was faithful in the performance of my duty.  * * *

At the time the Nebraska bill was introduced, Lincoln says there
was a conspiracy between the Judges of the Supreme Court, President
Pierce, President Buchanan and myself, that bill and the decision
of the court to break down the barriers and establish slavery
all over the Union.  * * *

"Mr. Buchanan was at that time in England and did not return for
a year or more after.  That fact proves the charge to be false as
against him.  * * * The Dred Scott case was not then before the
Supreme Court at all; * * * * and the Judges in all probability knew
nothing of it.  * * * * As to President Pierce, his high character
as a man of integrity and honor is enough to vindicate him from
such a charge; and as to myself I pronounce the charge an infamous
lie whenever and wherever made and by whomsoever made."

Lincoln closed the debate.  As to the discrepancy between the
various Republican resolutions adopted in local conventions in 1854
and the views stated in his opening speech, he said that at the
beginning of the Nebraska agitation a new era in American politics
began.

"In our opposition to that measure we did not agree with one another
in everything.  * * * * These meetings which the Judge has alluded
to and the resolutions he has read from were local.  * * * We at
last met together in 1856 from all parts of the State and agreed
upon a common platform.  * * * We agreed then upon a platform for
the party throughout the entire State and now we are all bound to
that platform.  * * * If any one expects that I will do anything not
signified by our Republican platform and my answers here to-day, I
will tell you very frankly that person will be deceived.  I do not
ask for the vote of anyone who supposes that I have secret purposes
or pledges that I dare not speak out.  * * * Douglas says if I
should vote for the admission of a slave State I would be voting
for the dissolution of the Union, because I hold that the Union
cannot permanently exist half slave and half free.  * * * It does
not at all follow that the admission of a single slave State will
permanently fix the character and establish this as a universal
slave Nation."

In March, 1856, Douglas, speaking in the Senate upon an article
published, apparently by authority, in the Washington Union,
the organ of the Administration, charged a conspiracy between the
President, his cabinet and the Lecompton Convention to establish the
proposition that all State laws and Constitutions, which prohibited
the citizens of one State from settling in another with their
slave property, were violations of the Constitution of the United
States.  He declared that a fatal blow was being struck at the
sovereignty of the States.  Charges of conspiracy were not entirely
unheard of when the one was made at Springfield so sharply condemned
by Douglas.

"But his eye is farther South now than it was last March.  His
hope then rested on the idea of visiting the great black Republican
party and making it the tail of his new kite.  He was then
expected from day to day to turn Republican and place himself at
the head of our organization.  He has found that these despised
black Republicans estimate him, by a standard which he has taught
them, none to well.  Hence he is crawling back into the old camp
and you will find him eventually installed in full fellowship among
those whom he was then battling and with whom he still pretends to
be at such fearful variance."

There is an interesting and well authenticated tradition, perhaps
too strongly established to be questioned, that Lincoln's second
interrogatory was designed as a snare for Douglas and that he was
forced by it to proclaim his unfortunate doctrine of unfriendly
legislation, which gave such deep offense to the South.  It is related
on the highest authority that on the night before the Freeport
debate, "Lincoln was catching a few hours' rest at a railroad center
named Mendota, to which place the converging trains brought, after
midnight, a number of excited Republican leaders on their way to
attend the great meeting at the neighboring town of Freeport.  *
* * * Lincoln's bedroom was invaded by an improvised caucus, and
the ominous question was once more brought under consideration.
The whole drift of advice ran against putting the interrogatory
(number two) to Douglas, but Lincoln persisted in his determination
to force him to answer it.  Finally his friends in a chorus cried:
'If you do, you can never be Senator.'

"'Gentlemen,' replied Lincoln, 'I am killing larger game.  If
Douglas answers, he can never be President, and the battle of 1860
is worth a hundred of this.'"

Whatever may be the truth as to the Mendota conference, it is unjust
to Douglas to say that he was surprised by the question, or that
his answer was a mere extemporized feat of ingenuity to meet an
embarrassing exigency.  Long before this and on many occasions he
had announced his opinion that the people of a Territory could by
unfriendly legislation, in defiance of the Constitution, the Supreme
Court and Congress, effectually prevent slavery among themselves.
It was one of his most deliberately formed, openly avowed and widely
known opinions.  It is incredible that Lincoln and his advisors
were in doubt how he would answer the question.  Whatever may be
our view of the soundness of his doctrine, it is not just to the
ablest debater and foremost statesman of the time to say that he
was taken by surprise and driven into a corner by a question which,
as he was taken by surprise and driven into a corner by a question
which, as he said then, he had answered a hundred times from every
stump in Illinois.

The third debate was held at Jonesboro, near the southern boundary
of the State, on September 15th.

Douglas, in his opening speech, stated anew his now familiar
argument that the Republican party was sectional, threatening to
disrupt the Union by its slavery agitation, while the Democratic
party was national, with a wholesome creed, alike applicable in
all latitudes.  Lincoln and Trumbull had conspired to abolitinize
the old parties and secure seats in the Senate.  Lincoln's doctrine
of the house divided against itself was examined and the implied
threat emphasized that Southern institutions must be overthrown
and a dead level of uniformity reached in order that the Government
should stand.  The finality of the Dred Scott decision and the
exclusion of <DW64>s from the Declaration of Independence were
insisted on.  Much of the speech was devoted to the local and
transient questions of Illinois politics.

Lincoln, replying to the charge that the slavery agitation was the
result of the aggressive attitude of Northern Abolitionists, again
insisted that the propagandists of slavery were the aggressors,
having attempted to change it from a local and declining institution
and spread it through all the Territories, removing it "from the
basis on which the fathers left it to the basis of its perpetuation
and nationalization."  The agitation began with the repeal of the
Missouri Compromise.

"Who," he asked, "did that?  Why, when we had peace under the
Missouri Compromise, could you not have left it alone?"

He quoted Douglas' speech in the Senate on June 9th, 1856, in which
he had declared that "whether the people could exclude slavery
prior to the formation of a Constitution or not, was a question to
be decided by the Supreme Court.  * * * * When he says, after the
Supreme Court has decided the question, that the people may yet
exclude slavery by any means whatever, he does virtually say that
it is not a question for the Supreme Court.  * * * the proposition
that slavery cannot enter a new country without police regulations
is historically false.  * * * Slavery was originally planted upon
this continent without these police regulations.  * * * How came
the Dred Scott decision to be made?  It was made upon the case
of a <DW64> being taken and actually held in slavery in Minnesota
Territory, claiming his freedom because the act of Congress prohibited
his being so held there.  Will the Judge pretend that Dred Scott
was not held there without police regulations?  * * * * This shows
that there is vigor enough in slavery to plant itself in a new
country, even against unfriendly legislation.  It takes not only
law, but the enforcement of the law, to keep it out.  This is the
history of this country upon the subject.  * * * The first thing
a Senator does is swear to support the Constitution of the United
States.  Suppose a Senator believes, as Douglas does, that the
Constitution guarantees the right to hold slaves in a Territory.
How can he clear his oath unless he supports such legislation as is
necessary to enable the people to enjoy their property?  Can you,
if you swear to support the Constitution, and believe that the
Constitution establishes a right, clear your oath without giving
it support?  * * * * There can be nothing in the words, 'support
the Constitution,' if you may run counter to it by refusing to
support it.  * * * * And what I say here will hod with still more
force against the Judge's doctrine of unfriendly legislation.  * *
* Is not Congress itself bound to give legislative support to any
right that is established in the United States Constitution?  A
Member of Congress swears to support the Constitution * * * and
if he sees a right established by that Constitution which needs
specific legislative protection, can he clear his oath without
giving that protection.  * * * If I acknowledge * * * that this
(Dred Scott) decision properly construes the Constitution, I cannot
conceive that I would be less than a perjured man if I should
refuse in Congress to give such protection to that property as in
its nature is needed."

He then stated his fifth interrogatory:  If slave-holding citizens
of the United States Territory should need and demand congressional
legislation for the protection of their slave property in such
Territory, would you as a Member of Congress, vote for or against
such legislation?

Douglas in his reply took up Lincoln's rather evasive answer to
his second interrogatory submitted at Ottawa.  "Lincoln," he said,
"would be exceedingly sorry to be put in a position where he would
have to vote on the question of the admission of slave States.  Why
is he a candidate for the Senate if he would be sorry to be put in
that position?  * * * * If Congress keeps out slavery by law while
it is a Territory and then the people should have a fair chance
and should adopt slavery, he supposes he would have to admit the
State.  Suppose Congress should not keep slavery out during their
territorial existence, then how would he vote when the people
applied for admission with a slave Constitution?  That he does not
answer; and that is the condition of every Territory we have now
got.  His answer only applies to a given case which he knows does
not exist in any Territory.  But Mr. Lincoln does not want to be
held responsible for the black Republican doctrine of no more slave
States.  Why are men running for Congress in the northern Distracts
and taking that Abolition platform for their guide when Mr. Lincoln
does not want to be held to it down here in Egypt?  His party in
the northern part of the State hold to that Abolition platform,
and if they do not in the south, they present the extra-ordinary
spectacle of 'a house divided against itself' and hence 'cannot
stand.'"

In answer to Lincoln's last question, he said:  "It is a fundamental
article of the Democratic creed that there should be non-interference
or non-intervention of Congress with slavery in the States or
Territories.  The Democratic party have always stood by that great
principle and I stand on that platform now.  * * * * Lincoln himself
will not answer this question.  * * * It is true * * * (he admits)
that under the decision of the Supreme Court, it is the duty of a
man to vote for a slave code in the Territories.  If he believed
in that decision he would be a perjured man if he did not give the
vote.  I want to know whether he is not bound to a decision which
is contrary to his opinions just as much as to one in accordance
with his opinions?  * * * Is every man in this land allowed to resist
decisions he does not like and only support those which meet his
approval?  * * * * It is the fundamental principle of the judiciary
that its decisions are final.  * * * * My doctrine is that, even
taking Mr. Lincoln's view that the decision recognizes the right of
a man to carry his slaves into the Territories, yet after he gets
them there he needs affirmative law to make that right of any value.
The same doctrine applies to all other kinds of property.

"Suppose one of your merchants should move to Kansas and open
a liquor store; he has a right to take groceries or liquor there;
but the circumstances under which they shall be sold and all the
remedies must be prescribed by local legislation; and if that is
unfriendly it will drive him out just as effectually as if there
was a constitutional provision against the sale of liquor.  Hence,
I assert, that under the Dred Scott decision you cannot maintain
slavery a day in a Territory where there is an unwilling people
and unfriendly legislation.  If the people want slavery they will
have it, and if they do not want it you cannot force it upon them."

Neither Lincoln nor Douglas could as yet fairly and fearlessly
grapple with the great problem.  Lincoln's virtual rejection and
defiance of the decision of the Supreme Court suggests not reform
but revolution.  These dark hints that the decisions of the highest
tribunal should not be accepted or obeyed, that they were binding
only on those who believed in them, portended nothing less than
war.  Slavery being an established institution, recognized by the
Constitution and regulated by law, had the right to exist.  Lincoln
and his party abhorred it and resented the injustice of the law.
Obeying the dominant instinct of the race, the scrupulously observed
the form of the law while waging war upon it.  On the other hand
it is impossible to find either legal or philosophical foundation
for Douglas' arguments.  Slavery had been adjudged lawful in all
the Territories.  The proposition gravely argued by him, that the
people could lawfully exclude a thing from a place where it had a
lawful right to be, was monstrous.  He sternly rebuked Lincoln for
his irreverence in refusing to cordially accept the Dred Scott
decision and in the next breath, with shocking inconsistency, dissolved
its entire force in the menstruum of unfriendly legislation.  The
decision was utterly repugnant to the people of the State.  The
both viewed it as a political rather than a philosophic problem.
Both rejected it and the consequences flowing from it.  Lincoln
quibbled when asked to accept it as a rule governing his political
conduct.  Douglas, by a cunning device, sought to destroy its force
as a rule of private right.  Lincoln insisted on the essential
dishonesty of the juggling trick by which Douglas got rid of the
adjudicated law.  Douglas insisted on the anarchic spirit with
which Lincoln bade defiance to it.

It would be tedious to follow the debates through in detail.
Necessarily the later arguments were mainly a repetition of those
made in the earlier speeches.  Thee was a marked falling off in
the good temper and mutual courtesy of the combatants in the later
stages of the contest.  The abiding question to which the argument
constantly recurred was that of <DW64> slavery, as to which Lincoln
was darkly oracular and Douglas was resolutely evasive.  Lincoln
again and again pressed Douglas to say whether he regarded slavery
as wrong.  Douglas persistently declined the question on the pleat
that it was one wholly foreign to national politics.  Each State
had a right to decide for itself; and that right had been delegated
to the Territories by the Compromise act of 1850 and again by the
Kansas-Nebraska act of 1854.

"I look forward," he said, "to a time when each State shall be allowed
to do as it pleases.  If it chooses to keep slavery forever, it is
not my business, but its own; if it chooses to abolish slavery, it
is its own business, not mine.  I care more for the great principle
of self-government, the right of the people to rule, then I do for
all the <DW64>s in Christendom.  I would not endanger the perpetuity
of this Union, I would not blot out the great inalienable rights
of the white man, for all the <DW64>s that ever existed."

Lincoln persistently pressed his argument:  "When Douglas says he
don't care whether slaver is voted up or voted down, he can thus
argue logically if he don't see anything wrong in it; but he cannot
say so logically if he admits that slavery is wrong.  He cannot say
that the would as soon see a wrong voted up as voted down.  When
he says that slave property and horse and hog property are alike
to be allowed to go into the Territories upon the principle of
equality, he is reasoning truly if there is no difference between
them and property; but if the one is property held rightfully and
the other is wrong, then there is no equality between the right and
the wrong.  * * * That is the real issue.  That is the issue that
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 that have stood face to face from
the beginning of time and will ever continue to struggle.  The one
is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of
kings.  It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops.  It
is the same spirit that says, 'you work and toil and earn bread,
and I'll eat it.'  No matter in what shape it comes, whether from
the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own
nation and live by the fruit of their labor or from one race of men
as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical
principle."

In the Quincy debate, and again in the last debate at Alton, Douglas,
with great skill, took up the attack made upon him by the Buchanan
Administration because of his alleged heresies on the Kansas
question.  The Washington Union in an editorial had condemned his
Freeport declaration that the people could by their unfriendly
attitude exclude slavery from a Territory.  It argued that his plan
was to exclude it by means of his device of popular sovereignty and
declared that he was not a sound Democrat and had not been since
1850.  He quoted from Buchanan's letter accepting the nomination,
in which he warmly applauded those "principles as ancient as free
government itself * * * in accordance with which * * * * the people
of a Territory, like those of a State, shall decide for themselves
whether slavery shall or shall not exist within their limits."

He also quoted in vindication of the soundness of his Democracy
a speech of Jefferson Davis declaring that, if the inhabitants of
a Territory should refuse to enact laws to protect and encourage
slavery, the insecurity would be so great that the owner could not
hold his slaves.

"Therefore," said Davis, "though the right would remain, the remedy
being withheld, it would follow that the owner would be practically
debarred from taking slave property into a Territory when the sense
of its inhabitants was opposed to its introduction."

These latter arguments were addressed to the Administration
Democrats, who, however, proved a quite unimportant factor in the
campaign.  They were an utter negation politically.  Were it an
academic problem, much could be said in their defense.  In a time
of stormy passion, they were passionless.  In a time of fanatical
convictions and intolerant opinions, they were coldly neutral,
appealing with impotent pride to the traditions and precedents of
the past.

The election was held on the 2nd of November.  The Republicans
elected their State ticket by a popularity of nearly 4,000, but
lost the legislature.  When that body met Douglas was again chose
Senator.





Chapter XVI.  The South Rejects Popular Sovereignty.




Although victorious in the greatest battle of his life the position
of Douglas was not easy.  The people of Illinois were evidently no
longer in sympathy with him.  The Buchanan Administration and the
Southern extremists had openly declared war on him for his cool
indifference to the special interests of the South, his carelessness
whether slavery was voted up or voted down in the Territories, and
his hostility to their plans for planting it in Kansas.  He was
preparing for his last struggle for the Presidency.  Having won
this doubtful victory at home, he decided to make a tour of the
South in the hope of stimulating its waning enthusiasm.  In order
to hold the Senatorship it had been necessary to please Illinois,
even though the South were alienated.  In order to win the Presidency
he now resolved to satisfy the South, even though he offended
Illinois.  Moreover, being at war with the Administration, he
hoped to return to Washington with the prestige of a re-election
and a great Southern ovation.  He intended to force Buchanan and
his Cabinet to sue for peace.  He was political strategist enough
to understand the importance of a bold front and an imposing display
of power at the outset of his next campaign.

He took boat at St. Louis for New Orleans and enjoyed the leisurely
autumn trip down the River.  He spoke at Memphis on November
29th, and at New Orleans on December 6th.  He sailed to Havana and
thence to New York, where he received a royal welcome.  On reaching
Philadelphia he was formally welcomed at Independence Hall.  He
then went to Baltimore and spoke in Monument Square on the evening
of January 5th, returning to Washington next day.  On the 10th he
resumed his seat in the Senate.

He had told the people of Illinois that, in spite of the Constitution,
the Supreme Court, the President and Congress, it was within the
power of the inhabitants of a Territory to prohibit slavery by their
unfriendly attitude.  This doctrine was utterly abhorrent to the
South, which now rested its entire case on the judicial interpretation
of the Constitution and regarded all attempts to evade the full
force of the Dred Scott decision as little less than treason.  The
net result of the struggles of a decade had been the establishment
of a principle that the Constitution carried slavery with it wherever
it went.  To lightly treat the Constitution as a thing that could
be quietly defied and annulled by the squatters, was to strip their
great victory of all value and snatch from them the fruit of their
labors.  Had this doctrine of local nullification been sound, it
was not to be expected that it would be received with enthusiasm
or even with patience by men whose dearest hopes it must obviously
defeat and whose subtle art and long protracted labors it utterly
thwarted.  But that daring sophism which attacked the very foundation
of all legal authority, did violence to every sound principle of
philosophy, and was utterly subversive of the peculiar and cherished
doctrines of the South, should have been resorted to by Douglas to
avoid defeat in Illinois, was viewed as a shameless outrage.  It
was believed that he had sacrificed their sacred cause in order to
avoid a local reverse; that his seat in the Senate was dearer to
him than their most valued interests.

It was probable that in his eagerness to win the Illinois campaign
he had not considered seriously the irreconcilable repugnance of
his distinctive dogma to the compact body of Southern political
philosophy.  It was now necessary to present it to the South in
such dress that it might, if possible, gain acceptance, at least
that it might not shock the deepest prejudices of that section.

In addressing his Southern audiences he attempted to take the
sting out of his obnoxious doctrine by showing that it was entirely
harmless.  The people of the Territories, he said, doubtless had
the practical power, in spite of the Constitution, statutes and
decisions, to exclude slavery by their unfriendly attitude toward
it.  But what would determine their attitude?  Clearly their selfish
interests.  If slavery would be profitable, their attitude would be
friendly and it would take root and flourish under the protection of
the law.  If by reason of soil or climate it would be unprofitable,
their attitude would be unfriendly and neither laws nor Constitutions
could successfully foster it.  But it could not injure the South
to exclude slavery from regions where it could only be maintained
at a loss.  It was not a question of ethics, but purely of physical
geography.  Where soil and climate rendered it profitable, it would
spring up in precisely the same way as pine trees or maize.

But it was clear to his keen eye that these feats of ingenuity
were taken at their real worth.  While the people treated him with
gracious courtesy, they prudently reserved their judgement.  They
paid generous honor to the great leader whom they would gladly use
but dared not trust.  He had chosen to hold Illinois and had lost
the South.

While he was vainly trying to woo back the alienated South,
a significant event occurred in Washington.  When the Senate was
organized during his absence, he was removed from the chairmanship
of the Committee on Territories, which he had held since his first
election.  This was done by the Democratic caucus and indicated a
deeper resentment than he had suspected.  The Puritans of Illinois
had once risen in insurrection against him.  The Cavaliers of the
South were now sternly protesting against his easy political morals.

For six weeks he preserved almost complete silence.  His situation
was anomalous.  The quarrel with the Administration was implacable.
A few months before, the Republicans were inclined to court him;
but the desperate battle with Lincoln had made it clear that his
quarrel with them was on perennial questions of principle.  Solitary
and out of touch with all parties, he was yet recognized as the
chief of the Northern Democrats and a formidable candidate for the
Presidency.

While diplomatically awaiting developments, he was suddenly drawn into
an important debate.  On February 23rd Senator Brown of Mississippi
discussed with great plainness his attitude on the slavery question.
With ill concealed contempt for men whose opinions shaped themselves
to suit the demands of political strategy he said:

"I at least am no spoilsman.  I would rather settle one sound
principle in a presidential contest than secure all the patronage
of all the Presidents who have ever been elected to or retired
from the office.  * * * The Constitution never gave us rights and
denied us the means of protecting and defending those rights.  The
Supreme Court has decided that we have a right to carry our slaves
into the Territories and, necessarily, to have them protected after
we get there.  * * * I neither want to cheat nor to be cheated in
the great contest that is to come off in 1860.  * * * I think I
understand the position of the Senator from Illinois and I dissent
from it.  * * * He thinks that a territorial legislature may, by
non-action or unfriendly action, rightfully exclude slavery.  I
do not think so.  * * * * The Senator from Illinois thinks the
territorial legislature has the right, by non-action or by unfriendly
action to exclude us with our slaves.  * * * We have a right of
protection for our slave property in the Territories.  The Constitution
as expounded by the Supreme Court awards it.  We demand it, and we
mean to have it."

Douglas at once answered.  He said that his obnoxious doctrine
only meant that the territorial legislature by the exercise of the
taxing power and other functions within the limits of the Constitution
could adopt unfriendly legislation which would practically drive
slavery out.  The real demand of the South was for a congressional
slave code for the Territories.  But no Northern man, whether Democrat
or Republican, would ever vote for such a code.  The inhabitants
would protect slavery if they wanted it, if the climate were
such that they could not cultivate the soil without it.  It was a
question of climate, of production, of self-interest, and not of
constitutional law.  The slave owner had no higher rights than the
owner of liquor or inferior cattle, which the territorial legislature
could exclude.  Under the doctrine of the Kansas-Nebraska act the
Territories had the right to pass such laws as they pleased, subject
only to the Constitution.

If their laws conflicted with that it was the business, not of
Congress, but of the Courts to decide their nullity.  When Buchanan
accepted the nomination in  1856, he declared that the people of
a Territory, like those of a State, should decide for themselves
whether slavery should exist within its limits.  He could not have
carried half the Democratic vote in any free State if the people had
not so understood him.  "I intend to use language," he continued,
"which can be repeated in Chicago as well as in New Orleans, in
Charleston as well as in Boston.  * * * No political creed is sound
or safe which cannot be proclaimed in the same sense wherever the
American Flag waves over American soil.  If the North and the South
cannot come to a common ground on the slavery question the sooner
we know it the better.  * * * I tell you, gentlemen of the South,
in all candor, I do not believe a Democratic candidate can ever carry
one Democratic State of the North on the platform that it is the
duty of the Federal Government to force the people of a Territory
to have slavery when they do not want it."

Davis, the leader of the Southern Democracy, answered him.  He
reminded the Senate that Congress had no power to exclude slavery
from a Territory and the legislature had no power except that
given it by Congress.  Hence it could not possibly have the power
to exclude it.  Douglas could not claim more than this unless he
could illustrate the philosophical problem of getting more out of
a tub than it contained.  Congress, having no power to prohibit
slavery, was bound to see that it was fully enjoyed.

"I agree with my colleague," he continued, "that we are not, with
our eyes open, to be cheated, and that we have no more respect for
that man who seeks to evade the performance of a constitutional
duty than for one who openly wars upon constitutional rights."

Mason, of Virginia, insisted that the Constitution construed by the
Supreme Court denied Congress the power to exclude slavery form a
Territory.  Douglas admitted that the legislature derived all its
power from Congress.  Hence, he must admit that it had no power to
interfere with slavery.

Green, of Missouri, the new chairman of the Committee on Territories,
next attacked him.  Slaves, he declared, were property, as decided
by the Supreme Court.  The Territories of Kansas and Nebraska could
not, by either direct or indirect legislation, prohibit or abolish
slavery; and if they should undertake to do either it would be the
duty of Congress to interpose.  The legislature had no more power,
by direct or indirect means to prohibit the introduction of slaves
than the introduction of horses or mules, and it was a dishonest
subterfuge to say that it could be done.

"What is meant by unfriendly legislation?  I had thought that rights
of person and property were beyond the power of legislation.  * *
* There never was a legislative body in existence on the face of
the globe that could justly take any right of person or property
from a citizen without rendering a just compensation."  He reminded
the Senators that in 1857 Douglas had urged the interposition
of Congress in Utah affairs, even to the extent of repealing the
organic act, thus recognizing that Territories were mere dependencies
of the Federal Government.  Why this tenderness about Kansas?  A
Territory had no power except what was conferred by Congress.
Douglas said that all legislative power not inconsistent with the
Constitution, was conferred.  But if the power to destroy any kind
of property was conferred, it would be consistent with the Constitution
and the grant would be void.  If all power not inconsistent with
the Constitution was conferred by the organic act, then the power
to call the Lecompton Convention and draft a Constitution was conferred.
"All the power the Territory has is derived from Congress and can
be resumed at pleasure.  The creature can never be equal to its
creator."

Douglas said, that if the people of a Territory wanted slavery they
would protect it.  But suppose the majority did not want it?  The
Constitution still declared slaves to be property and forbade
the majority to take away the property in a slave from a single
individual.  If they had no right to take it away, what right
had they by unfriendly legislation to render it valueless?  If a
Territory persistently attempted to destroy a species of property
protected by the Constitution, ought not Congress to intervene for
the protection of the citizens?

Douglas replied to these deadly attacks.  He reminded them that when
they repealed the Missouri Compromise they had agreed to leave all
these questions to the people of the Territories and the decision of
the Supreme Court.  This was the true Democratic doctrine.  Davis
and Mason had both said that no man holding his views could receive
the support of the South for the Presidency.  Yet this was the
doctrine of Cass when candidate for President, but the whole South
gave him their votes.  When did this change of creed occur?

Davis answered briefly, regretting that Douglas had not denied or
explained any of his Illinois speeches, and said he was now satisfied
that he was as full of heresy as he once was of the true theory of
popular sovereignty.  He declared that this doctrine was "offensive
to every idea of conservatism and sound government; a thing offensive
to every idea of the supremacy of the laws of the United States,"
and announced plainly that the South would not support him for
President.  He persistently pressed him to say whether he meant to
abide by the Dred Scott decision.

The Court, answered Douglas, had decided that neither Congress nor
the territorial legislature could prohibit the settler from bringing
his slaves to a Territory.  "In other words, the right of transit
is clear, the right of entry is clear.  * * * You have the same
right to hold them as other property, subject to such local laws as
the legislature may constitutionally enact.  If those laws render
it impracticable to HOLD your property, whether it be your horse
or your slave, why, it is your misfortune."

He had reached the brink of the abyss.  The South was preparing
for treason and rebellion.  Its mood was altogether too tragic to
be even amused by his philosophic refinements.  It rejected them now,
not with contempt, but with horror.  The North, too, was in stern
mood.  Its abhorrence of slavery had intensified with constant
agitation.  It was grimly earnest in its resolve to resist all further
extension of it and resented the indifference of the statesman who
did not care whether the burning crime of the ages was voted up or
voted down.

Douglas, who regarded the ethics of this question with indifference
and who supremely desired to conciliate the South without alienating
the North, blundered in plunging into this debate.  The Southern
Senators were unanswerably right.  Since the Dred Scott decision
his position was so clearly untenable that to insist upon it amid
conditions so threatening seemed to them the most intolerable
trifling.  The Republicans looked on as pleased spectators while
the battle raged between Northern and Southern Democrats and the
party was hopelessly torn asunder.  It was clear the part of prudence
to restrain his impulsive pugnacity for the remaining weeks of
the session.  But when challenged to defend himself his impatient
eagerness to speak was uncontrollable.





Chapter XVII.  Seeking Reconciliation.




After the adjournment he devoted himself to a new and unfamiliar
task.  He prepared an article for Harper's Magazine on the slavery
question and its relation to party politics, in which he defended
his position, explained his philosophy and sought to throw light
on this confused subject.  The article made some stir at the time.
It contained nothing, however, which he had not already said much
better in his speeches.  He was not a man of literary culture or
habits.  His thought was brightest and his eloquence highest when
the battle was raging.

The article had the good fortune to provoke a rather elaborate
anonymous reply from Jeremiah S. Black, Buchanan's Attorney-general.
Black was a profound lawyer and better writer than Douglas.  While
he would have been no match for him in senatorial debate or on the
stump, he completely eclipsed him as a literary controversialist.
Moreover, Black was standing on firm ground, simply insisting
that his party accept the decision of the Supreme Court as law and
conform its conduct to it without evasion or pettifoggery; while
Douglas was striving to stand in mid-air, nullifying the decision
by clever tricks and condemning as anarchists the Republicans, who
frankly confessed their hostility to it.  He gravely argued that
Congress could grant to a territorial legislature power which the
Constitution denied to itself.  Black's answer was crushing and
showed conclusively that there was no basis in either law or logic
for those peculiar doctrines in which Douglas differed from his
party.  Black judiciously avoided all discussion of the ethics
of the question, confining himself to an examination of the legal
basis of Douglas' special creed, proving clearly that it had been
utterly swept away.

On the night of October 16th occurred John Brown's mad exploit at
Harper's Ferry.  Congress opened on December 5th.  On the 12th of
January Douglas' heretical opinions on the right of the people to
exclude slavery from the Territories were called in question.  The
Southern Senators pressed upon him the fact that he had agreed to
abide by the decision of the Supreme Court on the disputed question,
and, now that the South had been sustained by the decision, he had
virtually repudiated it by his Illinois speeches.  No man holding
such opinions, they declared, was a sound Democrat or could possibly
receive the vote of a Southern State at the Charleston Convention.
They justified their action in removing him from his chairmanship
of the Committee on Territories by a rehearsal of his heretical
opinions and announced their purpose to oppose his presidential
aspirations.  He defended himself against this irregular attack
with great ability and courage, maintaining the soundness of his
Democracy and imputing heresy to his accusers,  who were seeking
to debauch the ancient Democratic faith by infusing into it their
late-invented doctrines.  At last, wearied by the irregular debate,
he sarcastically proposed that, as his health was poor, they all
make their attacks upon him and present their charges; when they
were through he would "fire at the lump" and vindicate every word
he had said.

A few days later he offered a resolution to instruct the Judiciary
Committee to prepare a bill to suppress and punish conspiracies in
one State to invade or otherwise molest the people or property of
another, and addressed the Senate upon it.  He expressed his firm
and deliberate conviction that the John Brown raid at Harper's
Ferry was the natural, logical, inevitable result of the doctrines
and teachings of the Republican party as explained and the enforced in
speeches of its leaders in and out of Congress.  He said that when
he returned home in 1858 for the purpose of canvassing Illinois with
a view to reelection, he had to meet this issue of the irrepressible
conflict.  Lincoln had already proclaimed the existence of inexpiable
hostility between free States and slave States.  Later, Seward had
announced it in his Rochester speech.  It was evidently the creed
of his party.  The Harper's Ferry outrage was a natural and logical
consequence of these pernicious doctrines.  John Brown was simply
practicing their philosophy at Harper's Ferry.  The causes that
produced this invasion were still in active operation.  These
teachers of rebellion were disseminating their deadly principles.
Let Congress pass appropriate laws and make such example of the
leaders of these conspiracies as to strike terror into the hearts
of the others and there would be an end of this crusade.

With all his courage in meeting recent attacks, it was plain
that his only hope of the Presidency lay in the prospect of his
reconciliation with the Southern leaders.  They needed his help
to prevent the Radicals, Seward, Chase and Lincoln, from carrying
the next election.  He needed their help to compass the nomination.
He decided without lowering his standard to win them back by the
mere efficiency of his service.  But the Southern leaders were not
in search of a Northern master.  They wanted servants in the high
places of Government not less humble than the blacks who tilled
their plantations.  They instinctively knew that he was not and
could not be such a servant.  Rather than support him they would
see Seward elected.  He at least frankly avowed his hostility.  If
they elected Douglas and he declined to obey, their position would
be awkward.  If a sectional Republican were elected, they could
secede and set up an independent Government.

On the 7th of May Davis spoke in support of a series of radical
resolutions introduced by him on February 2nd, declaring that
neither Congress nor a territorial legislature had power to impair
the Constitutional right of any citizen of the United States to
take his slave property into the common Territories and there hold
it; that it was the duty of Congress to protect this right; and
that the inhabitants had no power either by direct legislation or
by their unfriendly attitude to exclude slavery until they formed
a State Constitution.  He spoke with great force in support of them.
He ascribe the authorship of the pernicious heresy of squatter
sovereignty to Cass, and threw doubt on the soundness of Douglas'
Democracy by a long recital of what he regarded as unsound and
heretical opinions and votes.  He showed the complete failure of
his distinctive policy in Kansas and the authoritative rejection
of his principles by the Supreme Court.  While the speech was
courteous and dignified in manner, apparently delivered to elucidate
the subject rather than to injure Douglas, it portrayed the wreck
of his statesmanship and exposed the unsoundness of his Democracy
with dangerous clearness while his candidacy was in the hands of
the National Convention.

A week later he replied.  Already the Charleston Convention, and
with it his candidacy, had virtually gone to pieces because of
Southern hostility to him and his principles.  Davis was the head
o the Southern junta, and the debate in the Senate was known to
express in cold phrase, the passions that had rent the Convention
and threatened to disrupt the party.

As Douglas, anxious but unfaltering, rose to speak, there was
a hush in the crowded Chamber.  After a sneering allusion to his
controversy with Black, he announced his purpose to defend himself
against the attack made by Davis.  The speech occupied two days
in its delivery and was a unique and artistic piece of senatorial
politics.  It was addressed less to the Senate than to the adjourned
Charleston Convention.  He exhaustively proved the soundness
of Democracy and repelled the charge of heresy by rehearsing the
history of Democratic Conventions and platforms since 1848, quoting
the declarations of the party and its leaders in Convention, on
the platform and through the press.

Cass, he said, the author of the now deadly doctrine of popular
sovereignty, was nominated in 1848.  The Compromise of 1850
embodied that principle.  The Kansas-Nebraska struggle was settled
by expressly adopting it.  The Cincinnati platform, on which all
Democrats had stood for four years, distinctly affirmed it.  The
Charleston Convention, within a few days, had reaffirmed it.  His
own speeches showed that he had adhered to it constantly from the
beginning of his career.  The change was not in him but in the
Southern wing of the party.  He protested that he did not desire
the nomination and only permitted his name to be used that he might
be vindicated against the presumptuous efforts of a little coterie
to cast doubt upon his Democracy and their attempt to proscribe
him as a heretic might be rebuked.

The most hostile critic must feel some sympathy for him in his
new and indefensible position.  His now heretical opinions had
but recently borne the authentic stamp of Democracy.  His party,
following its real sentiments and the judicial interpretation of
the Constitution, had silently abandoned its old creed to which he
still clung with tenacity and ardor.

Davis, answering, asked him the blunt question, whether, if elected
President, he would sign a bill to protect slave property in States,
Territories, or the District of Columbia.  He declined to answer
suggesting the impropriety of declaring in advance what he would
do if elected.

Congress adjourned on June 25th.





Chapter XVIII.  A Noontide Eclipse.




While events in Washington in the spring of 1860 were full of
historic interest, greater and more memorable events were occurring
in Charleston.  The Democratic Convention met in that city on April
23rd, which brought to the surface a state of feeling at the South
that had long been suspected but not certainly known.

There was but one prominent candidate in the field.  Douglas was
incomparably the most eminent Democratic statesman of the time.
According to the settled custom of the party, the South, which
did not ask the Presidency itself, should have supported him.  But
the Southern delegates had resolved that in no event should he be
nominated on any platform.

He had a clear majority of the Convention.  But the Democrats,
though still wearing a common badge, now constituted two distinct
and antagonistic parties, held together not so much by common
beliefs as by habits, traditions and sentimental attachment to an
old and venerable name.  The Northern Democrats were wholly estranged
from those of the South.  The two sections of the party quarreled
about the platform; yet the Southerners cared little about that
matter if they could name the candidate.  They did not demand a
Southern man, for he could not be elected.  They wanted a "Northern
man with Southern principles," like Pierce or Buchanan.  Of all
living men the dexterous and domineering Douglas least suited their
demands.  He was probably the only man who could have carried a
large enough Northern vote to be elected.  But they could not forget
that his popularity at the North was, in part, the result of his
great battle against the South which had caused their disastrous
defeat.

The Northern delegates insisted on merely approving the Cincinnati
platform, while the Southern delegates, who hoped to render Douglas'
candidacy impossible, insisted on radical pro-slavery declarations
and a denial of all right of the people of a Territory to prevent
the holding of slaves.  After a fierce struggle the Northern platform
was adopted by a small majority.  Immediately the delegates from
Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, Florida, Texas,
Arkansas and three-fourths of that from Georgia refused to abide
by it and withdrew.

The seceders organized another Convention, adopted the radical
platform which had been rejected and adjourned to meet at Richmond
on the 11th of June.

The regular Convention, meanwhile, found itself unable to do anything.
The settled rule required a vote of two-thirds of all the delegates
to select a candidate.  The chairman ruled that in order to be
nominated Douglas must have two-thirds of all the delegates elected,
notwithstanding the secession.  This required 202 votes.  He had
but 152 and the other 50 were not to be had.  On May 3rd, after
57 ballots, the Convention adjourned to meet at Baltimore on June
18th.  Davis, Toombs and the other leaders of the Southern junta
in Congress issued an address approving the course of the seceders
at Charleston, advising them to take no action at Richmond, but
to await the result of the Baltimore Convention and expressing the
conviction that, if fair concessions were not made to the South,
other delegations would join them.

They accordingly came to Baltimore and demanded their seats in that
Convention.  But some of the States had elected new delegations
which claimed them.  For days confusion prevailed.  Douglas sent two
messages suggesting that his candidacy be dropped.  But there were
suppressed by his friends, who inexorably demanded his nomination.
Five more States withdrew and the chairman resigned and joined
the seceders.  The Convention reorganized itself and proceeded to
ballot.  Douglas received all but thirteen votes; less, however,
than the required two-thirds of all the delegates elected.  But a
resolution was passed declaring him nominated on the ground that
he had received the votes of two-thirds of all delegates present.
Senator Fitzpatrick of Alabama was nominated for Vice-President
and the Convention adjourned.  He declined and the Committee placed
Herschel V. Johnson of Georgia in his place.

The seceders, joined by the recent recruits, held their Convention
in Baltimore on the 28th of June and nominated John C. Breckenridge
of Kentucky for President and Joseph Lane of Oregon for Vice-President.

This did not bring about a new condition, but revealed one which
had existed for many years.  The South was technically right in it
demand that the Convention declare itself explicitly in favor of
the honest and faithful maintenance of its constitutional rights
in the Territories.  These rights had been vehemently denied by
the Republicans, but triumphantly established on a solid basis by
the decision of the Supreme Court.  Douglas had quibbled over the
decision and explained it away until it seemed doubtful whether it
in fact settled anything.  The platform adopted by his supporters
in the Convention recited the differences of opinion among Democrats
as to the exact limits of the powers of the territorial legislature
and those of Congress and referred the question again to the Court
with a pledge to abide by its decision.  They seemed to forget that
the whole question had already been decided in the most sweeping
terms in favor of the extreme Southern demands.  It is not impossible
that, had the South consented tot his vague and disingenuous platform
and vigorously supported Douglas, he might have been elected.  But
"the South was implacable towards him and deliberately resolved to
accept defeat rather than secure a victory under his lead."

The Republicans, meanwhile, had held their memorable Convention
at Chicago, where, on May 18th, Lincoln had been nominated.  When
the news arrived in Washington, it made a great stir.  The Republican
Senators and Members gathered around Douglas to hear his judgement
of the new statesman who had risen in the West.

"Gentlemen," he said, " you have nominated a very able and a very
honest man."

On the adjournment of Congress, disregarding the decorous custom
of seventy years, he entered the campaign, making speeches in his
own behalf.  He knew from the outset that with only a fraction of
his party at his back, his chances of election were slight.  But he
fought on fiercely, partly from temperament and partly from conviction
that he ought, if possible, to prevent Lincoln's election.  Besides,
there was a shadowy possibility of an election by the House of
Representatives.  At times his old Democratic enthusiasm returned.
He told one audience that had his party given him undivided support
he would have carried every State in the Union against Lincoln,
except two.

He was sincerely alarmed for the safety of the Union in case of
Lincoln's election, which he believed probable.  He urged upon the
South the duty of submitting to the result whatever it might be.
At Norfolk, Virginia, he was asked whether, if Lincoln was elected,
the Southern States would be justified in seceding from the Union?

To this he said, "I answer emphatically, No!  The election of a man
to the Presidency * * * in conformity with the Constitution * * *
would not justify any attempt at dissolving this glorious Confederacy."

He further told them that if Lincoln were elected he would aid him
to the extent of his power in maintaining the supremacy of the laws
against all resistance to them from whatever quarter, and that it
would be the President's duty to treat all attempts to break up
the Union as Jackson treated the nullifiers in 1832.  His candidacy
was obviously hopeless.  He exerted himself to avert the coming
storm.  Lincoln received one million eight hundred and sixty-seven
thousand votes, Douglas one million two hundred and ninety-one
thousand, and Brekenridge eight hundred and fifty thousand.  Of the
three hundred and three electoral votes Douglas received but twelve.
Lincoln had an electoral majority over all opposing candidates.

On the 13th of November, South Carolina called a Convention to consider
the dangers incident to her position in the Federal Union which,
on December 20th, unanimously adopted an ordinance of secession.
Three weeks later Mississippi declared herself out of the Union
and was promptly followed by Florida, Alabama and Georgia.  By the
20th of May eleven States had seceded.  The President looked on it
as a lawsuit between the States and exhausted his very respectable
legal learning and ingenuity in proving that he had no power
to raise his hand in defense of the country.  It may be that the
lawyer, with his quiddits and quillets, had survived the man.  It
may be that he had so long breathed the atmosphere of treason in
the Cabinet counsels that he was tinctured with the widely prevalent
pestilence.  It is much more likely that the timorous old man,
finding his term of office ending amid universal ruin, his friends
and masters rushing into mad rebellion against his Government,
weakly adopted that famous sentiment of the French King:  "It will
outlast my time."

Congress met on the third of December.  In his message the President
charged the entire trouble to the aggressive anti-slavery activity
of the North, which had at last driven the South to open rebellion.
He protested that he was powerless to act and referred the whole
matter to Congress.  Three of the Cabinet were serving the enemy
and many seats in the House and Senate were held by unblushing
traitors.  The forts in Charleston harbor were besieged by South
Carolina.  The Government at first dared not and later could not
relieve them.

Congress, if not as completely palsied as the President, was
without remedy for the fearful evils of the time.  Besides its
quota of positive traitors, many of its members were infected with
the mild, moonshiny political philosophy which had been currently
in Washington for a quarter of a century.  Many were about to retire
to private life, and, like Buchanan, thought the Government would
outlast their time.  A famous Senate Committee of Thirteen, and a
corresponding House Committee of Thirty-three, were appointed to
consider the state of the Nation; both of which toiled much and
accomplished nothing.

The Committee of Thirteen reported late in December that it was
unable to agree, and on January 3rd Douglas addressed the Senate
upon this report.  He reviewed at great length the history of
slavery legislation and drew from it all the conclusion that the
trouble had arisen from unwarrantable interference in the local
affairs of the Territories, and that, had popular sovereignty been
given a chance it would have solved the problem long since and
would do it yet if fairly tried.  He ascribed the trouble to the
pernicious agitation of the Republicans, and recalled Lincoln's
most radical anti-slavery utterances in the famous campaign of 1858.
He assured the people of the South that Lincoln would be powerless
to hurt them if they remained in the Union, for there would be
a majority against him in both the Houses of Congress.  He denied
utterly the right of South Carolina to secede and repudiate its
constitutional duties, and insisted on the right of the Federal
Government to enforce the law in all of the States.  Yet, while
there was a ray of hope, war must not be resorted to.

"In my opinion," he continued, "war is disunion, certain, inevitable,
and irrevocable.  * * * We have reached a point where disunion is
inevitable unless some compromise, founded upon mutual concession,
can be made.  I prefer compromise to war.  I prefer concession to
a dissolution of the Union."

He asked the Republicans to consent to the reestablishment of the
Missouri Compromise line, which he had swept away six years before
amid their earnest protestations.  He also proposed to establish
popular sovereignty by constitutional amendment, such sovereignty
to begin when a Territory had 50,000 inhabitants, and, by another
amendment, to prohibit future acquisition of territory without
a concurrent vote of two-thirds of each House of Congress.  His
purpose, he said, was not to settle the slavery question, but to
expel slavery agitation from the arena of Federal politics forever.

This was his last important speech in the Senate.  It was delivered
under circumstances of awful solemnity.  He seemed not deeply
impressed with the gravity of the situation and was still interested
in it chiefly as a party problem.  He did not expect the baptism
of blood that followed, but cheerfully looked forward to compromise
and reconciliation.  The Northern Democrats might yet rescue
the country by mediating a truce between radical Republicans and
radical Southern Democrats.  In the present state of affairs who,
but himself, the chief of these neutrals, could lead this great
movement?  His mental habits were those of the politician.  He saw
all event primarily in their relation to party tactics.  Now that
the earth began to rock beneath his feet, he suspected that it
was only a theatrical earthquake and prepared to seize upon every
advantage that might be gathered out of the confusion.  He could not
comprehend the deep and unappeasable passions that rent the Nation.
The grim earnestness of his fellow-countrymen was as inconceivable
to him as the demoniac enthusiasm of the great Apostle was to
the scoffing Athenians who heard him on the Hill of Mars.  But,
as the great tragedy deepened and darkened, he quit his political
speculations and began to think, not of the success of his party,
but of the possibility of saving the Union from imminent wreck.

He returned to Illinois and addressed the legislature, urging
energetic support of the war, and on May 1st was welcomed back to
Chicago by an immense assembly of all parties.  He was escorted
to the great hall in which Lincoln had been nominated and there
addressed the people.  He spoke not as a politician but as a generous
patriot.  He denounced in unmeasured terms the Southern conspiracy
which had resulted in secession and now had ripened into open and
bloody rebellion.  He saw the treason of the South no longer as a
mere element in an interesting political game, but as the blackest
of human crimes and an awful menace to the life of the Republic.

"There are only two sides to the question," he said.  "Every man must
be for the United States or against it.  There can be no neutrals
in this war; only patriots or traitors.  * * * It is a sad task to
discuss questions so fearful as civil war; but sad as it is, bloody
and disastrous as I expect it will be, I express it as my conviction
before God that it is the duty of every American citizen to rally
around the flag of his country."

Not long after his return home he was stricken with serious sickness.
The disease was not of such a character that it was expected to
prove fatal, but the highest medical skill and most tender nursing
were unavailing.  The truth was, although unsuspected, that his
vital energies were completely exhausted by the enormous labors
and deep agitations of the past ten years.  He had just passed his
48th birthday but was already gray and prematurely old.  He had
dwelt amid the tempest for twenty years and had felt more of severe
strain than most men who had seen the Psalmist's three score years
and ten.  When told that his end was near, and asked what message
he would send to his boys:

"Tell them," he said, "to obey the laws and support the Constitution
of the United States."

On the morning of June 3rd he died.  His remains lie buried in
Chicago on the shore of Lake Michigan, a spot fitly chosen as the
last resting place of this most ceaselessly active and inexhaustibly
resourceful of American statesmen.

History has not been kind to Douglas.  The farther we recede from
events the more trivial seem the temporary circumstances which
influence them and the clearer appear the changeless principles
which ought to mold men's conduct.  But to the eager, impetuous man
of action, the temporary circumstances are apt to be of overmastering
force.  He was a practical man of action, whose course was generally
guided by the accidental circumstances of the hour, rather than
by fixed principles.  His education was defective.  He entered the
great arena with little of either mental or moral culture.  Yet,
severely as we now judge him, he did not fall below the prevailing
standard of political morals.  His real sin was that he did not
rise above the ethics of the times; that he remained deaf as an
adder to the voices of the great reformers who sought to regenerate
the age, and who were compelled to grapple with him in deadly struggle
before they could gain footing on the stage.  The time was out of
joint and he felt no vocation to set it right.  While his ethics
has fared hard, his mental gifts have been over-estimated.  The
availability of all his resources, his overwhelming energy and marvelous
efficiency among men of intellect, gave rise to the impression
which still survives that he was a man of original genius.  But of
all his numerous speeches, heard or read by millions, not a sentence
had enough vitality to survive even one generation.  Though for
ten years of stormy agitation he was the most commanding figure in
our public life and wielded power of which Presidents and Cabinets
stood in awe, the things for which he is chiefly remembered are
his unfortunate doctrine of popular sovereignty and the resistless
power with which he defended his most dubious relation to the
question of slavery.

His powerful influence upon the overshadowing question of the times,
his restless activity in shaping the course of great political
events, fast drifting into darkest tragedy, have obscured his work
in less conspicuous fields.  While it does not come within the
scope of this work to do more than portray his relation to the
great national tragedy which was slowly evolving during the entire
period of his political life, it should not be forgotten that his
activity covered the whole field of legislation and that no man
responded more generously or efficiently to the countless demands
upon time and energy which so greatly burden the American statesman.

It is pleasant to find a Lieutenant General of the United States army
in his old age and retirement recalling a visit in his boyhood to
Washington, to seek redress of some West Point grievance, and how
the only man he could find who had the leisure enough to effectively
interview the Secretary of War on his behalf was Douglas.

It is sufficient for our purposes to say that for thirteen years
he had practical control of all legislation affecting the Western
Territories, that he drafted the bills establishing territorial
governments for Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, Utah, New Mexico and
Washington and prepared the acts for the admission of Wisconsin,
California, Minnesota and Oregon.  He secured for his State an
enormous grant of public land, which resulted in the building of
the Illinois Central Railroad.  He warmly advocated the building
of a railway to the Pacific.  He consistently favored the most
liberal appropriations for internal improvements, and, with that
provincial patriotism and jealousy of Old World interference which
was fashionable fifty years ago, vigorously opposed the Clayton-Bulwer
treaty as a practical annulment of the Monroe doctrine.

It is not to be set down in his list of sins that he failed to
bridge over the widening chasm between the North and the South;
but it must be charged to him as a mental defect that he hopelessly
failed to comprehend the significance of the great movements which
he seemed to lead, that in the keenness of his interest in the
evolutions of political strategy he failed to discern the symptoms
of coming revolution.

When the storm that had been brewing before his eyes for ten years
broke upon the country it took him by surprise.  The ardor of his
temperament, the eagerness of his ambition, make his conduct at
times painfully resemble that of the selfish demagogue.  But the
range of his vision was small.  He erred less from corruption of
the heart than from deficiency of the mind.  But what statesman of
note during those strange and portentous years preceding the war
could safely expose his speech and conduct to the searchlight of
criticism?  The wisest walked in darkness and stumbled often.  It
was not the fate of Douglas to see the mists amid which he had
groped swept away by the hurricane of war.

What he would have done had his life been protracted ten year
longer, is subject of interesting speculation.  By temperament and
habit he belonged to the preceding generation and it is difficult
to conceive him working in harmony with the fiery and unyielding
Puritans who succeeded.  He loved the Union heartily and hated
secession.  He would have supported Lincoln in the great crisis.
In the regenerated America, which rose from the fiery baptisms of
the war, with its new ideal, its new hopes, its new convictions
and deeper earnestness, he would probably have found himself sadly
out of place.  The epoch of history to which he belonged was closed.
Young as he was, he had outlived his historic era and there is a
dramatic fitness in the ending of his career at this time.





End of Project Gutenberg's The Life of Stephen A. Douglas, by Gardner

