DUKE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2017 with funding from 
 Duke University Libraries 
 
 https://archive.org/details/stephenarnolddou01brow 
 
Gftje RiPcrsifle Biographical Series 
 
 NUMBER 13 
 
 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM GARROTT BROWN 
 

 
 
 
STEPHEN ARNOLD 
 DOUGLAS 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM GARROTT BROWN 
 
 e 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 (aflbe Ciibersibe Wre0, Cambribee 
 1902 
 
COPYRIGHT, I902, BY WILLIAM GARROTT BROWN 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published March) iqos 
 
°i 2.3. 3.73 
 ^3(oS> 
 
 To J. S. Jr. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. Youth and the West . . . . 1 
 
 II. The House and the Senate ... 31 
 
 HI. The Great Question 58 
 
 IV. Leadership 82 
 
 Y. The Rivals 112 
 
 The portrait is from a photograph by 
 Brady in the Library of the State 
 Department at Washington. 
 
STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 YOUTH AND THE WEST 
 
 The ten years of American hi story fr om 
 1850 to 1860 have a fascination second only 
 to that of the four years whi ch followed. 
 Indeed, unless one has a taste for military 
 science, it is a question whether the great ^ 
 war itself is more absorbing than the great ^ 
 debate that led up to it ; whether even 
 Gettysburg and Chickamauga, the March to 
 the Sea, the Wilderness, Appomattox, are 
 of more surpassing interest than the dramatic 
 political changes, — the downfall of the 
 Whig party, the swift rise and the equally 
 swift submergence of the Know-Nothing 
 party, the birth of the Republican party, the 
 disruption and overthrow of the long-domi- 
 nant Democratic party, — through which the 
 
2 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 country came at last to see that only the 
 sword could make an end of the long contro- 
 versy between the North and the South. 
 
 The first years of the decade were marked 
 by the passing of one group of statesmen and 
 the rise of another group. Calhoun’s last 
 speech in the Senate was read at the be- 
 ginning of the debate over those measures 
 which finally took shape as the Compromise 
 of 1850. The Compromise was the last in- 
 stance of the leadership of Clay. The fa- 
 mous Seventh of March speech in defense of. 
 it was Webster’s last notable oration. These 
 voices stilled, many others took up the preg- 
 nant theme. Davis and Toombs and Stephens 
 and other well-trained Southern statesmen 
 defended slavery aggressively ; Seward and 
 Sumner and Chase insisted on a hearing for 
 the aggressive anti-slavery sentiment ; Cass 
 and Buchanan maintained for a time their 
 places as leaders in the school of compromise. 
 But from the death of Clay to the presiden- 
 tial election of 1860 the most resonant voice 
 of them all was the voice of Stephen Arnold 
 Douglas. It is scarcely too much to say that 
 
YOUTH AND THE WEST 
 
 3 
 
 during the whole period the centre of the stage 
 was his, and his the most stirring part. In 
 1861 , the curtain fell upon him still resolute, 
 vigorous, commanding. When it rose again 
 for another scene, he was gone so completely 
 that nowadays it is hard for us to understand 
 what a -place he had. Three biographers 
 writing near the time of his death were 
 mainly concerned to explain how he came to 
 be first in the minds of his contemporaries. 
 A biograph er writing now must try to explain 
 why he has been so lightly es teeme d by tha t 
 posterity to which they confidently committed 
 his fame. Blind Tom, the negro mimic, hav- 
 ing once heard him speak, was wont for many 
 years to entertain curious audiences by re- 
 producing those swelling tones in which he 
 rolled out his defense of popular sovereignty, 
 and it is not improbable that Douglas owes 
 to the marvelous imitator of sounds a consid- 
 erable part of such fame as he has among 
 uneducated men in our time. Among his- 
 torical students, however seriously his de- 
 serts are questioned, there is no question of 
 the importance of his career. 
 
4 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 He was born April 23, 1813, at Brandon, 
 Vermont, the son of Stephen Arnold Douglas 
 and Sarah Fisk, his wife. His father, a 
 successful physician, was doubtless of Scotch 
 descent ; hut the founder of the Douglas 
 family in America was married in North- 
 amptonshire. He landed on Cape Ann in 
 1639-40, but in 1660 he made his home at 
 New London, Connecticut. Dr. Douglas’s 
 mother was an Arnold of Rhode Island, de- 
 scended from that Governor Arnold who 
 was associated with Roger Williams in the 
 founding of the colony. Sarah Fisk’s mother 
 was also an Arnold, and of the same family. 
 Their son was therefore of good New Eng- 
 land stock, and amply entitled to his middle 
 name. Dr. Douglas died suddenly of apo- 
 plexy in July, 1813 ; it is said that he held 
 the infant Stephen in his arms when he was 
 stricken. His widow made her home with a 
 bachelor brother on a farm near Brandon, and 
 the boy’s early years were passed in an en- 
 vironment familiar to readers of American 
 biography — the simplicity, the poverty, the 
 industry, and the serious-mindedness of rural 
 
YOUTH AND THE WEST 
 
 5 
 
 New England. He was delicate, with a lit- 
 tle bit of a body and a very large head, but 
 quick-witted and precocious, and until he was 
 fifteen years of age his elders permitted him 
 to look forward to a collegiate education and 
 a professional career. 
 
 But by that time the uncle was married, 
 and an heir was born to him. Stephen was 
 therefore made to understand tliat the ex- 
 pense of his education could be met only 
 from his mother’s limited means. He 
 promptly resolved to learn a trade, walked 
 fourteen miles to the neighboring town of 
 Middlebury, and apprenticed himself to a 
 cabinet-maker. He worked at cabinet-mak- 
 ing two years, and afterwards, even when 
 he had risen so high that many of his 
 countrymen were willing he should try his 
 hand at making cabinets of men, he pro- 
 tested that those two years were by far the 
 happiest of his life, and that he would never 
 willingly have exchanged his place in the 
 Middlebury workshop for any other place 
 whatsoever. As it was, he left it because 
 he was not strong enough for that sort of 
 work. 
 
6 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 The following year he pursued his studies 
 at the academy of Brandon. Therrlmr mo- 
 ther married again, and he went with her to 
 the home of his stepfather, Gehazi-Granger, 
 Esquire, near Canandaigua, New York, and 
 finished his schooling at the Canandaigua 
 Academy, which appears to have been an ex- 
 cellent one. Meanwhile, he also read law, 
 and showed great proficiency both in his 
 classical and his legal studies. Not much 
 is on record concerning his schoolboy life. 
 It is known, however, that he had a way of 
 making his fellows like him, so that they of 
 their own accord put him forward, and that 
 he had a lively interest in polities. It is 
 said that even so early as the campaign of 
 1828 , when he was but fifteen, he organized 
 a band of his playmates to make war on the 
 “ coffin handbills ” wherewith the Adams 
 men sought to besmirch the military fame 
 of General Jackson, already become his 
 hero. At Canandaigua, four years later, he 
 espoused the same cause in debating clubs, 
 and won an ascendency among his fellows by 
 his readiness and the extent of his informa- 
 
YOUTH AND THE WEST 
 
 7 
 
 tion. In tlie life of another man, these boy- 
 ish performances might be set down merely 
 as signs of promise ; but Douglas was so 
 soon immersed in real politics, and I’ose to 
 distinction with such astounding swiftness, 
 that his performances as a schoolboy may 
 well be accounted the actual beginning, and 
 not merely a premonition, of his career. 
 
 He was only twenty, when, in June, 1833, 
 he set forth to enter upon it. 
 
 Save that he was going West, he does 
 not seem to have had any destination clearly 
 in mind. He carried letters to certain per- 
 sons in Cleveland, and stopped there to 
 see them, and so made the acquaintance of 
 Sherlock J. Andrews, a leading lawyer of 
 the town, who persuaded him to remain and 
 read law in his office until a year should/^-" — 
 elapse and he could be admitted to the Ohio 
 bar. However, in less than a week he fell 
 ill of a fever which did not leave him until 
 the expense of it had well-nigh emptied his 
 slender purse. His physicians, fearing he 
 was too slight and delicate for Western hard- 
 ships, urged him to go back to Canandaigua, 
 
8 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 but when he left Cleveland he again turned 
 westward, resolved in his own mind never to 
 go back without the evidences of success in 
 his life. It is doubtful if among all the 
 thousands who in those days were constantly 
 faring westward, from New England towns 
 and the parishes of Virginia and the Caro- 
 linas, there ever was a youth more reso- 
 lutely and boldly addressed to opportunity 
 than he. Poor, broken in health, almost 
 diminutive in physical stature, and quite un- 
 known, he made his way first to Cincin- 
 nati, then to Louisville, then to St. Louis, 
 in search of work. Coming almost to the 
 end of his resources, he reasoned that it 
 would be best for him to seek some country 
 town, where his expenses would be slight ; 
 and guided merely by a book of travel he 
 had read he fixed on a town which, as it 
 happened, bore the name of his political 
 patron saint. In November, 1833, being 
 now twenty years and six months old, he ar- 
 rived at Jacksonville, Illinois, with a sum 
 total of thirty-seven cents in his pocket. 
 The glimpses we get of him during his wan- 
 
YOUTH AND THE WEST 9 
 
 derings, from the recollections of certain men 
 with whom he made acquaintance in stages 
 and on river steamboats, make a curious and 
 striking picture of American character. The 
 feverish, high-strung boy was never dismayed 
 and never a dreamer, but always confident, 
 purposeful, good-humored. 
 
 He found no work at Jacksonville, and 
 walked to Winchester, sixteen miles to the 
 southwestward, where he hoped to get work 
 as a teacher. The next morning, seeing a 
 crowd assembled in the public square of the 
 village, he pushed his way to the centre and 
 learned that there was to be an auction of 
 the wares of a merchant who had recently 
 died. The auctioneer was in need of a clerk 
 to keep the record of the sales, and the place 
 was offered to the young stranger. He took 
 it, served three days, earned six dollars, made 
 acquaintance with the farmers gathered for 
 the sale, and got a chance in the talk about 
 politics to display those qualities which he 
 never failed to display when opportunity 
 offered — the utmost readiness in debate, 
 good-natured courtesy, and keen political 
 
10 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 instinct. A school was arranged for him, 
 and within a week he had forty pupils en- 
 tered for three months. A lawyer of the 
 place befriended him with the loan of some 
 hooks, and he gave his evenings to law and 
 politics. When the three months were ended, 
 he went back to Jacksonville and opened an 
 office. March 4, 1834, he was licensed to 
 practice, and from that time he rose faster 
 than any man in Illinois, if not in the whole 
 country, notwithstanding that he rose on the 
 lines along which many and many another 
 young American was struggling toward pro- 
 minence, and notwithstanding that Illinois 
 was exceptionally full, as later years were to 
 prove, of young men fitted for such careers as 
 Douglas sought — notwithstanding, too, that 
 there had already drifted to New Salem, in 
 the very next county, a young Kentuckian 
 destined to such eminence that the Illinois 
 of those years is oftenest studied now for 
 light on him, and is most amply revealed to 
 us in the hooks about him. 
 
 But for the very reason that Douglas rose 
 so fast it is not necessary, in order to under- 
 
YOUTH AND THE WEST 
 
 11 
 
 stand how or why he rose, to study the con- 
 ditions and men he had to deal with so care- 
 fully as they have done who seek to explain 
 for us the slower progress of that strange ca- 
 reer with which his is indissolubly associated. 
 Jacksonville, which was to be his home for a 
 few years, was a small country town, but it 
 was the county seat of Morgan, one of the 
 two wealthiest and most populous counties 
 in the State. A few years earlier, that 
 whole region had been a frontier, but the first 
 roughness was now worn away. True, the 
 whole northern half of Illinois was practically 
 unsettled, and Chicago was but three years 
 old, and not yet important. But it appears 
 that the general character of the central 
 counties was already fixed, and what fol- 
 lowed was of the nature of growth rather 
 than change. Certain small towns, like 
 Springfield, were to become cities, and certain 
 others, like New Salem, were to disappear. 
 Railroads were not yet, though many were 
 planning, and manufactures were chiefly of 
 the domestic sort. But in the matter of the 
 opportunities it presented to aspiring youth 
 
12 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 the country was already Western, and no 
 longer wild Western. Hunting shirts and 
 moccasins were disappearing. Knives in 
 one’s belt had gone out of fashion. The 
 merely adventurous were passing beyond the 
 Mississippi, and the field was open to the 
 enterprising, the speculative, the ambitious. 
 
 Enterprise and speculation were in the 
 air, and ambition, if it took a political turn, 
 must perforce take account of them. The 
 whole country was prosperous, and Illinois 
 was possessed with the fever of development 
 then epidemic throughout the West and the 
 South. If one examines the legislation of 
 any of the States west of the Alleghanies 
 during the second administration of President 
 Jackson, by far the most numerous category 
 of bills will be found to deal with internal 
 improvements, particularly railroads and 
 canals. Money, however, was needed for 
 these things, and Illinois, like all new coun- 
 tries, had to look backward to older commu- 
 nities for capital. President Jackson had 
 but lately made his final assault upon the 
 National Bank, the principal dispenser of 
 
YOUTH AND THE WEST 13 
 
 capital, by the removal of the deposits, and 
 public opinion was much divided on his 
 course, when Douglas opened his law office 
 and began to discuss public questions with 
 his neighbors. While he still lived at Win- 
 chester, he had helped to get subscribers for 
 a Democratic newspaper at Jacksonville, 
 and he soon called upon the editor, who was 
 first surprised at his visitor's youthful ap- 
 pearance and then, as he himself tells us, at 
 “ the strength of his mind, the development 
 of his intellect, and his comprehensive know- 
 ledge of the political history of his country.” 
 
 Boy as he looked, and boy as he was, for 
 he had not yet passed his twenty-first birth- 
 day, Douglas actually got the leadership of 
 the Jackson party in that neighborhood be- 
 fore he had lived there a month. An en- 
 thusiastic supporter of the President’s pol- 
 icy on the bank question, he talked about 
 the matter so well on Saturdays, when, ac- 
 cording to the Western and Southern cus- 
 tom, the country people flocked into town, 
 that he was put forward to move the Jack- 
 son resolutions at a mass meeting of Demo- 
 
14 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 crats which he and his friend, the editor, 
 had contrived to bring about. There was a 
 great crowd. Josiah Lamborn, an orator 
 of some reputation, opposed the resolutions. 
 Douglas replied in an hour’s speech, discom- 
 fited Lamborn, and so swept his audience 
 that they seized upon him and bore him on 
 their shoulders out of the room and around 
 the public square. He was the “ Little 
 Giant ” from that day, and the speech be- 
 came a Democratic tradition. Of course, 
 in after years, the men who could say they 
 heard it could not be expected to admit that 
 he ever made a better speech in his life. 
 
 Within a year, he was so well known that 
 he was chosen to the office of public prose- 
 cutor, or district attorney, of the first judi- 
 cial circuit, the most important in Illinois, 
 and his successful candidacy for the place is 
 all the more remarkable because he was 
 chosen by the legislature, and not by his 
 neighbors of the circuit. Moreover, his com- 
 petitor, John J. Hardin, was one of the 
 foremost men of Illinois. It is true that 
 Hardin was a Whig, and that by this time 
 
YOUTH AND THE WEST 15 
 
 there was a pretty clear division between 
 Whigs and Jackson men on offices as well as 
 measures, so that the contest was a party as 
 well as a personal affair ; but from auction- 
 eer’s clerk to district attorney was a promotion 
 hardly to be won hi a year by a youth of 
 qualities less than extraordinary. 
 
 The election was in February, 1835, and 
 Douglas held the office the better part of 
 two years. A justice of the supreme court 
 had declared, on hearing of the legislature’s 
 choice, that the stripling could not fill the 
 place because he was no lawyer and had no 
 law books. Nevertheless, he was an efficient 
 prosecutor. No record of his service is avail- 
 able, but there was a tradition in later years 
 that not one of his indictments was quashed. 
 Certainly, his work in the courts of the dis- 
 trict increased Iris reputation and strength- 
 ened his hold on his own party. In the 
 spring of 1836, the Democrats of Morgan 
 held a convention to nominate candidates 
 for the six seats in the house of representa- 
 tives to which the county was entitled. This 
 was a novel proceeding, for the system of 
 
16 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 conventions to nominate for office was not 
 yet developed ; tlie first of the national party 
 conventions was held in preparation for the 
 presidential campaign of 1832. Douglas 
 Avas a leader in the movement, and as a re- 
 sult of it he himself was drawn into the con- 
 test. Morgan was a Whig county, hut the 
 solid front of the Democracy so alarmed the 
 Whigs that they also abandoned the old 
 plan of letting any number of candidates 
 take the field and united upon a ticket with 
 Hardin at its head. No man on the Demo- 
 cratic ticket was a match for Hardin. One 
 of the candidates was withdrawn, therefore, 
 and Douglas took his place, and he and 
 Hardin canvassed the county together in a 
 series of joint debates. Mainly through his 
 championship, the convention plan was ap- 
 proved, and the Democrats won the election ; 
 hut Hardin’s vote was greater than the 
 weakest Democrat’s, and so the rivalry beL-' 
 tween him and Douglas was continued in 
 the legislature, where they took their seats f, 
 in December, 1836. 
 
 In that same house of representatives were 
 
YOUTH AND THE WEST 
 
 17 
 
 John A. McClernancl, James Shields, Wil- 
 liam A. Eichardson, and other men who 
 rose to national distinction. Abraham Lin- 
 coln, a Whig representative from. Sangamon 
 County, was already well known for his un- 
 gainly length of body, for his habit of reason- 
 ing in parables which were now scriptural 
 and now vulgar to the point of obscenity, 
 and for a quaint and rare honesty. He was 
 four years older than the new member from 
 Morgan, and nearly two feet taller. Doug- 
 las, many years later, declared that he was 
 drawn to Lincoln by a strong sympathy, for 
 they were both young men making an uphill 
 struggle in life. Lincoln, at his first sight 
 of Douglas, during the contest with Hardin 
 for the attorneyship, pronounced him “ the 
 least man he ever saw.” 
 
 Douglas was the youngest member of an 
 unusual house, but he at once took his place 
 among the leaders. When the governor’s 
 message, animadverting severely on the Pre- 
 sident’s course with the Bank, brought on 
 a discussion of national party questions, he 
 and Hardin seem to have won the chief lion- 
 
18 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 ors of the debate. He was appointed chair- 
 man of the Committee on Petitions, to which/* 
 numerous applications for divorce were re- 
 ferred, and introduced a resolution which 
 passed and which put an end to divorces by 
 act of the legislature. On the great question 
 of the hour, the question of development and 
 internal improvements, he declared that the 
 State ought to attempt no improvement which 
 it could not afford to construct and to own. 
 He favored a few specific enterprises and 
 the making of careful surveys and estimates 
 before any others should be taken up. But 
 it was the very height of “ flush times ” in 
 Illinois, and the legislature added millions to 
 the vast sums in which the State was already 
 committed to the support of canals, rail- 
 roads, river improvements, and banks. It 
 was but a few weeks from the adjournment 
 in March to the great financial panic of 1837, 
 which crushed every one of the state-aided 
 banks, stopped the railroad building and river 
 dredging, and finally left Illinois burdened 
 with an enormous debt. There was a special 
 session of the legislature in the summer, oeca- 
 
YOUTH AND THE WEST 19 
 
 sionecl by the depression and hard times 
 which had followed so hard upon the flush 
 times of the winter, but Douglas was not 
 there to tax his associates with their unwis- 
 dom. He had taken another step in his un- 
 exampled career of office-holding by accept- 
 ing from President Van Buren the office of 
 ^register of public lands at Spring-field, the 
 growing town in Sangamon County which 
 the legislature had just made the capital of 
 the State, and where, within a few years, 
 Shields, McClernand, Lincoln, and other 
 rising young men were gathered. 
 
 From this time, Douglas and Lincoln 
 knew each other well, for they lived to- 
 gether several years in an atmosphere of 
 intimate personal scrutiny. For searching- 
 study of one’s fellows, for utter disregard 
 of all superficial criteria of character and 
 conventional standards of conduct, there is 
 but one sort of life to be compared with 
 the life of a Southern or Western town, 
 and that is the life of students in a board- 
 ing-school or a small college. In such 
 communities there is little division into 
 
20 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 classes, as of rich and poor, educated and 
 illiterate, well and obscurely horn. On the 
 steps of the court-house, in the post-office 
 while the daily mail is sorted, in the corner 
 drug store on Sundays, in lawyers’ offices, 
 on the curbstone, — wherever a group of 
 men is assembled, — there is the freest talk 
 on every possible subject ; and the lives of 
 men are open to their fellows as they cannot 
 be in cities by reason of the mass or in 
 country districts by reason of the solitude 
 and the shyness which solitude breeds. 
 Against Douglas there was the presumption, 
 which evei’y New England man who goes 
 southward or westward has to live down, 
 that he would in some measure hold himself 
 aloof from his fellows. But the prejudice was 
 quickly dispelled. No man entered more 
 readily into close personal relations with 
 whomsoever he encountered. In all our 
 accounts of him he is represented as sur- 
 rounded with intimates. Not without the 
 power of impressing men with his dignity 
 and seriousness of purpose, we nevertheless 
 hear of him sitting on the knee of an emi- 
 
YOUTH AND THE WEST 
 
 21 
 
 nent judge during a recess of the court ; 
 dancing from end to end of- a dinner-table 
 with the volatile Shields — the same who 
 won lam-els in the Mexican W ar, a seat in the 
 United States Senate, and the closest ap- 
 proach anybody ever won to victory in battle 
 over Stonewall Jackson ; and engaging, de- 
 spite his height of five feet and his weight 
 of a hundred pounds, in personal encounters 
 with Stuart, Lincoln's athletic law partner, 
 and a corpulent attorney named Francis. 
 
 On equal terms he mingled in good- 
 humored rivalry with a group of uncom- 
 monly resourceful men, and he passed them 
 all in the race for advancement. There is 
 some reason to believe that Lincoln, strange 
 as it seems, was his successful rival in a love 
 affair, but otherwise Douglas left Lincoln 
 far behind. Buoyant, good-natured, never 
 easily abashed, his maturity and savoir faire 
 were accentuated by the smallness of his 
 stature. His blue eyes and his dark, abun- 
 dant hair heightened his physical charm of 
 boyishness ; his virile movements, his face, 
 heavy-browed, round, and strong, and his 
 
22 
 
 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 well-formed, uncommonly large liead gave 
 \hjm an aspect of intellectual power. He 
 liad a truly Napoleonic trick of attacking 
 men to his fortunes. He was a born leader, 
 beyond question ; and be himself does not 
 seem ever to have doubted bis fitness to 
 lead, or ever to have agonized over the choice 
 of a path and the responsibilities of leader- 
 ship. Principles he had — the principles 
 of Jefferson and Jackson as he understood 
 them. These, apparently, he held sufficient 
 for every problem and every emergency of 
 political life. 
 
 He believed in party organization quite 
 as firmly as he believed in pai'ty principles, 
 and in the summer of 1837 he had a hand 
 in building up the machinery of conventions 
 and committees through which the Illinois 
 Democrats have governed themselves ever 
 since. He defended Van Buren’s plan of a 
 sub-treasury when many even of those who 
 had supported Jackson’s financial measures 
 wavered in the face of the disfavor into 
 which hard times had brought the party 
 in power, and in November, although the 
 
YOUTH AND THE WEST 
 
 23 
 
 Springfield congressional district, even be- 
 fore the panic, liad shown a Whig majority 
 of 3000, be accepted the Democratic nomi- 
 nation for the seat in Congress to be filled 
 at the election in August, 1838, and threw 
 himself with the utmost ardor into the can- 
 vass. The district was the largest in the 
 whole country, for it included all the north- 
 ern counties of the State. His opponent 
 was John T. Stuart, Lincoln's law partner, 
 and for five months the two spoke six days 
 every week without covering the whole of 
 the great region they aspired to represent. 
 The northern counties had been filling up 
 with immigrants, and more than 36,000 votes 
 were cast. Many ballots were thrown out 
 on technicalities ; most of the election offi- 
 cials were Whigs. After weeks of uncer- 
 tainty, Stuart was declared elected by a 
 majority of five. The moral effect, however, 
 was a triumph for Douglas, who at the time 
 of his nomination was not of the age required 
 
 of congressmen. 
 
 He announced that he would now devote 
 himself to his profession. But it was by this 
 
24 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 time very difficult, even if lie so wished, to 
 withdraw from politics. He was constantly 
 in council with the leaders of his party, 
 and belonged to a sort of “ third house ” at 
 Springfield which nowadays would probably 
 be called a lobby. During the winter there 
 was an angry controversy between the Demo- 
 cratic governor and the Whig senate over 
 the question of the governor’s right to ap- 
 point a secretary of state, the senate re- 
 fusing to confirm his nomination of McCler- 
 nand on the ground that the office was not 
 vacant. The question was brought before 
 the supreme court, whose Whig majority, by 
 deciding against the governor, strengthened 
 a growing feeling of discontent with the 
 whole judiciary among the Democrats, and 
 Douglas took strong ground in favor of re- 
 organizing the court. In March, addressing 
 a great meeting at Springfield, he defended 
 the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 
 1798, and when the presidential campaign 
 opened in November he had a debate with 
 Lincoln and other Whig orators. He was, 
 in fact, the leading Democratic orator 
 
YOUTH AND THE WEST 25 
 
 throughout the campaign in Illinois, and 
 there is no doubt that his enthusiasm and 
 his shrewdness had much to do with the re- 
 sult there. Of all the Northern States, only 
 Illinois and New Hampshire went for Van 
 Buren. 
 
 Meanwhile, however, he had practiced 
 law with such success that no account of the 
 Illinois bar of those days omits his name 
 from the list of eminent attorneys. It was 
 noted that whereas Lincoln was never very 
 successful save in those cases where his 
 client’s cause was just, a client with but a 
 slender claim upon the court’s favor found 
 Douglas a far better advocate. He never 
 seems to have given much time to the read- 
 ing of law or to the ordinary drudgery of 
 preparing cases for trial, but he mastered 
 the main facts of his cases with the utmost 
 facility, and his mind went at once to the 
 points that were sure to affect the decision. 
 Early in his experience as a lawyer he had 
 to be content with fees that seem absurdly 
 small ; once, he rode from Springfield to 
 Bloomington to argue a case, and got but 
 
26 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 five dollars for liis services. But lie was 
 a first-rate man of business, and soon liad a 
 good income from his profession. 
 
 In January, 1841, the legislature, now 
 Democratic in both branches, removed the 
 Whig incumbent from the office of secretary 
 of state, and the governor at once appointed 
 Douglas to succeed him. That office, how- 
 ever, he held less than a month, for the 
 legislature had also reconstructed the su- 
 preme court in such a way as to increase the 
 number of Judges, and in February, being 
 then less than twenty-eight years old, he 
 was named for one of the new places. One 
 of the reasons why the court was recon- 
 structed was its opposition to the Democratic 
 position on the franchise question. Douglas, 
 arguing a famous franchise case before it, 
 had made himself the champion of unnatu- 
 ralized inhabitants claiming the right to 
 vote, and had thus established himself in the 
 good-will of a large and increasing constitu- 
 ency throughout the State. Under the new 
 law, each justice was assigned to a particu- 
 lar circuit, — Douglas to the westernmost, 
 
YOUTH AND THE WEST 27 
 
 whose principal town was Quincy, on the 
 Illinois River, where he made his home. 
 
 The Mormon settlement of Nauvoo was 
 in that circuit, and the most interesting of 
 all the cases brought before Judge Douglas 
 grew out of the troubles between the followers 
 of Joe Smith and their neighbors. On one 
 occasion, Joe Smith was himself on trial, and 
 the Christian populace of the neighborhood, 
 long incensed against him and his people, 
 broke into the court-room clamoring for his 
 life. The sheriff, a feeble-bodied and spirit- 
 less official, showed signs of yielding, and the 
 judge, promptly assuming a power not vested 
 in his office, appointed a stalwart Kentuckian 
 sheriff, and ordered him to summon a posse 
 and clear the room. By these means the 
 defendant’s life was saved, and Douglas, not- 
 withstanding various decisions of his against 
 them, earned the gratitude of the religious 
 enthusiasts. There is a story that some years 
 later, when he was no longer a judge, but 
 a major in a militia regiment sent on an 
 expedition against Nauvoo, he was ordered 
 to take a hundred men and arrest the “ twelve 
 
28 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 apostles.” Tlie Mormons, outnumbering the 
 militia, were fortified for defense. Major 
 Douglas, however, proceeded alone into their 
 lines, persuaded the twelve to enter their 
 apostolic coach and come with him to the 
 Christian camp, and so brought about an 
 agreement which prevented a fight. 
 
 Both as a judge and as a member of the 
 council of revision Douglas stood out with 
 commendable firmness against the popular 
 feeling, strong throughout the country during 
 the hard times, and which in some of the 
 States got a complete ascendency over courts 
 and legislatures, in favor of the relief of 
 debtors. He enforced the old laws for the 
 collection of debts, and he baulked several 
 legislative schemes to defraud creditors of 
 their due by declaring the new laws uncon- 
 stitutional. For the rest, his decisions have 
 seemed to competent critics to show that he 
 possessed unusual legal ability and grasp of 
 principles and a corresponding power of 
 statement, scant as his legal training was. 
 
 According to the American usage, he 
 was “ Judge Douglas ” all the rest of his 
 
YOUTH AND THE WEST 
 
 29 
 
 life, but tbe state bench no more satisfied his 
 ambition than the other state offices he had 
 held. In December, 1842, when the legisla- 
 ture proceeded to ballot for a United States 
 senator, his name was presented, though 
 again his age fell short of the legal require- 
 ment, and on the last ballot he had fifty-one 
 votes against the fifty-six which elected his 
 successful competitor. The next year, be- 
 ing nominated for the lower house of Con- 
 gress, he accepted, and at once resigned his 
 place on the bench, though the district had 
 a Whig complexion. At the end of a can- 
 vass which left both himself and his oppo- 
 nent, Browning, seriously ill, he was elected 
 by a majority of several hundred. 
 
 On his way to Washington, he visited 
 Cleveland, where his westward journey had 
 come so near an abortive ending, and then 
 his home-folk at Canandaigua. He was but 
 thirty years old, yet he had held five impor- 
 tant political offices, he had risen to high 
 rank in his profession, he was the leader of 
 the dominant party in a great State ; and all 
 this he had done alone, unaided. Few aged 
 
30 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 men have brought back such laurels from 
 their Western fortune-seeking. In Decem- 
 ber, 1843, he took his seat in the House of 
 Representatives and began to display before 
 the whole country the same brilliant spectacle 
 of daring, energy, and success which had 
 captivated the people of Illinois. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE 
 
 It was the aggressive energy of the man, 
 unrestrained by such formality as was still 
 observed by the public men of the older 
 Eastern communities, which most impressed 
 those who have left on record their judg- 
 ments of the young Western congressman. 
 The aged Adams, doubtless the best repre- 
 sentative of the older school in either branch 
 of Congress, gave a page of his diary to one 
 of Douglas’s early speeches. “ His face was 
 convulsed,” — so the merciless diary runs, — 
 “ his gesticulation frantic, and he lashed 
 himself into such a heat that if his body had 
 been made of combustible matter it would 
 have burnt out. In the midst of his roaring, 
 to save himself from choking, he stripped 
 and cast away his cravat, unbuttoned his 
 waistcoat, and had the air and aspect of a 
 half-naked pugilist. And this man comes 
 
32 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 from a judicial bench, and passes for an 
 eloquent orator ! ” On another occasion, 
 the same critic tells us, Douglas “ raved an 
 hour about democracy and anglophobia and 
 universal empire.” Adams had been pro- 
 fessor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard 
 College, and he was the last man in the 
 country to appreciate an oratorical manner 
 that departed from the established rides and 
 traditions of the art. Ampere, a French 
 traveler, thought Douglas a perfect repre- 
 sentative of the energetic builders of the 
 W estern commonwealths, and predicted that 
 he would come into power when it should be 
 the turn of the West to dominate the coun- 
 try. “ Small, black, stocky,” so this observer 
 described him, “ his speech is full of ner- 
 vous power, his action simple and strong.” 
 Douglas, however, quickly adapted himself 
 to his new environment, — no man in the 
 country excelled him in that art, — and took 
 on all the polish which the Washington of 
 that day demanded, without any loss of fight- 
 ing spirit or any abandonment of his demo- 
 cratic manners and principles. 
 
THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE 33 
 
 He soon got a good opportunity to plant 
 laimself on a powerful popular sentiment by 
 urging, in a really excellent speech, that the 
 country should repay to the aged Jackson 
 the fine which had been imposed upon him 
 for contempt of court during the defense of 
 New Orleans. An experienced opponent 
 found him ready with a taking retort to 
 every interruption. It being objected that 
 there was absolutely no precedent for refund- 
 ing the fine, “ I presume,” he replied, “ that 
 no case can be found on record, or traced by 
 tradition, where a fine, imposed upon a gen- 
 eral for saving his country, at the peril of 
 his fife and reputation, has ever been re- 
 funded.” When he visited The Hermitage 
 during the following summer, Jackson sin- 
 gled him out of a distinguished party and 
 thanked him, not without reason, for defend- 
 ing his course at New Orleans better than 
 he himself had ever been able to defend it. 
 Douglas won further distinction during the 
 session by defending, in a report from the 
 committee on elections, the right of the sev- 
 eral States to determine how their represent- 
 
34 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 atives in Congress should be chosen. Later, 
 in a debate with John J. Hardin, his rival 
 in Congress as in the Illinois legislature, he 
 contrasted the Whig and Democratic posi- 
 tions on the questions of the day with so 
 much force and skill that the speech was 
 used as the principal Democratic document 
 in the presidential campaign of 1844. 
 
 In Congress, distinction does not always, 
 or usually, imply power ; but Douglas was 
 consummately fit for the sort of struggling 
 by which things are in fact accomplished at 
 Washington. Whatever the matter in hand, 
 his mind always moved with lightning rapid- 
 ity to positive views. He was never without 
 a clear purpose, and he had the skill and 
 the temper to manage men. He knew how 
 to conciliate opponents, to impress the 
 thoughtful, to threaten the timid, to button- 
 hole and flatter and cajole. He breathed 
 freely the heated air of lobbies and com- 
 mittee rooms. Fast as his reputation grew, 
 his actual importance in legislation grew 
 faster still. At the beginning of his second 
 term he was appointed chairman of the 
 
THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE 35 
 
 . House Committee on Territories, and so was 
 charged in an especial way with the affairs 
 of the remoter W est. In the course of that 
 service, he framed many laws which have 
 affected very notably the development of our 
 younger commonwealths. He was particu- 
 larly opposed to the policy of massing the 
 Indians in reservations west of the Missis- 
 ' sippi, fearing that the new Northwest, the 
 Oregon country, over which we were still in 
 controversy with Great Britain, would thus 
 he isolated. To prevent this, he introduced 
 during Iris first term a bill to organize into 
 a territory that part of the Louisiana Pur- 
 chase which lay north and west of Missouri. 
 As yet, however, there were scarcely any 
 white settlers in the region, and no interest 
 could be enlisted in support of the bill. But 
 he renewed his motion year after year until 
 finally, as we shall see, he made it the most 
 celebrated measure of his time. 
 
 His advocacy of the internal improve- 
 ments needed for the development of the 
 West brought him in opposition to a power- 
 ful element in his own party. Adams, writ- 
 
36 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 ing in his diary under date of April 17, 
 1844, says : “The Western harbor bill was 
 taken up, and the previous question was 
 withdrawn for the homunculus Douglas to 
 poke out a speech in favor of the constitu- 
 tionality of appropriations for the improve- 
 ment of Western rivers and harbors. The 
 debate was continued between the conflict- 
 ing absurdities of the Southern Democracy, 
 which is slavery, and the W estern Demo- 
 cracy, which is knavery.” Under the lead- 
 ership of Jackson and other Southerners, the 
 Democrats, notwithstanding their long as- 
 cendency, had adhered to their position on 
 internal improvements more consistently, 
 perhaps, than to any other of the contentions 
 which they had made before they came into 
 power. Douglas did not, indeed, commit 
 himself to that interpretation of the Consti- 
 tution which justified appropriations for any 
 enterprise which could be considered a con- 
 tribution to the “ general welfare,” and he 
 protested against various items in river and 
 harbor bills. But as a rule he voted for 
 the bills. 
 
THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE 37 
 
 He was particularly interested in the 
 scheme for building a railroad which should 
 rim north and south the entire length of 
 Illinois, and favored a grant of public lands 
 to aid the State in the enterprise. For 
 years, however, he had to contend with a 
 corporation which had got from the State a 
 charter for such a railroad and was now try- 
 ing to get help from Congress. In 1843, 
 and for several sessions thereafter, bills were 
 introduced to give aid directly to the Great 
 Western Railway Company, and it was 
 mainly the work of Douglas that finally 
 secured a majority in Congress for the plan 
 of granting lands to the State, and not to 
 the company. That was in 1851. To his 
 chagrin, however, the promoters of the com- 
 pany then persuaded the Illinois legislature 
 to pass a bill transferring to them what- 
 ever lands Congress might grant to the 
 State for the railroad. He at once sent 
 for Holbrook, the leading man in the com- 
 pany, and informed him that no bill would 
 be permitted to pass until he and his as- 
 sociates should first execute a release of all 
 
38 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 the rights they had obtained from the leg- 
 islature. Such a release they were at last 
 forced to sign, the bill passed, and the 
 Illinois Central was built. It became an 
 important agency in the development, not 
 of Illinois merely, but of the whole Mis- 
 sissippi Valley ; and it is the most notable 
 material result of Douglas’s skill in legis- 
 lation. But throughout the whole course 
 of his service at Washington he never neg- 
 lected, in his concern about the great na- 
 tional questions with which his name is for- 
 ever associated, the material interests of 
 the people whom he especially represented. 
 His district and his State never had cause to 
 complain of his devotion to his party and his 
 country. 
 
 But the questions which had the foremost 
 place while he was a member of the lower 
 house were questions of our foreign relations, 
 and as it happened they were questions to 
 which he coidd give himself freely without 
 risking his distinctive role as the champion 
 of the newer West. The Oregon boundary 
 dispute and the proposed annexation of 
 
THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE 39 
 
 Texas were uppermost in the campaign of 
 1844, and on both it was competent for him 
 to argue that an aggressive policy was de- 
 manded by Western interests and Western 
 sentiment. It was in discussing the Oregon 
 boundary that he first took the attitude of 
 bitter opposition to all European, and par- 
 ticularly to all English interference in the 
 affairs of the American continents which he 
 steadily maintained thereafter. The long- 
 standing agreement with Great Britain for 
 joint occupation of the Oregon country he 
 characterized as in practice an agreement for 
 non-occupation. Arguing in favor of giving- 
 notice of the termination of the convention, 
 he shrewdly pointed out that as the British 
 settlers were for the most part fur-traders 
 and the American settlements were agri- 
 cultural, we would “ squat them out ” if no 
 hindrance were put upon the westward 
 movement of our pioneers. He would at 
 once organize a territorial government for 
 Oregon, and take measures to protect it ; 
 if Great Britain threatened war, he would 
 put the country in a state of defense. “ If 
 
40 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 war comes,” he cried, “let it come. We 
 may regret the necessity which produced it, 
 but when it does come, I would administer 
 to our citizens Hannibal’s oath of eternal 
 enmity. I would blot out the lines on the 
 map which now mark our territorial bound- 
 aries on this continent, and make the area 
 of liberty as broad as the continent itself.” 
 He even broke with the Polk administration 
 when it retreated from the advanced posi- 
 tion which the party had taken during the 
 campaign, and was one of a hardy ten who, 
 in the debate over the resolutions that led 
 to the final settlement, voted for a substi- 
 tute declaration that the question was “no 
 longer a subject of negotiation and com- 
 promise.” There can be little doubt that 
 his hostility to England, as well as his ro- 
 bust Americanism, commended him at that 
 time to the mass of his countrymen every- 
 where but in the commercial East. 
 
 On the annexation of Texas, popular sen- 
 timent, even in his own party, was far from 
 unanimous, but the party was, nevertheless, 
 thoroughly committed to it. After the elec- 
 
THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE 41 
 
 tion, when it appeared that Tyler was quite 
 as favorable to the measure as his incoming 
 Democratic successor, Douglas was one of 
 those who came forward with a new plan for 
 annexing territory by joint resolution of 
 Congress, and in January, 1845, he stated 
 as well as it ever has been stated the argu- 
 ment that Texas became ours by the Louisi- 
 ana Purchase of 1803, and was without the 
 consent of her people retroceded to Spain by 
 the treaty of 1819. When President Polk 
 sent in his announcement that war existed 
 by the act of Mexico, Douglas was ready 
 with a defense of that doubtful casus belli 
 and an ardent support of the army bill which 
 followed. His speech on the army bill was 
 an admirable exhibition of his powers, and 
 it was the best speech on that side in the de- 
 bate. Adams, who interrupted him, was in- 
 stantly put upon the defensive by a citation 
 from the argument which he himself, as 
 Secretary of State, had made in 1819 for 
 the American claim to the line of the Rio 
 del Norte. When he asked if the treaty 
 of peace and boundaries concluded by Mex- 
 
42 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 ico and Texas in 1836 had not since been 
 discarded by the Mexican government, Dong- 
 las retorted that he was unaware of any 
 treaty ever made by a Mexican government 
 which was not either violated or repudiated. 
 Adams came finally to acknowledge the un- 
 usual powers of the Western “ homuncu- 
 lus ” as a debater. 
 
 But the reputation and the influence won 
 in the House of Representatives were to be ex- 
 tended in a moi’e favorable arena. In 1846, 
 Douglas being now thirty-three years of age, 
 the Illinois legislature elected him United 
 States senator for the six years beginning 
 March 4, 1847. In April, 1847, he was 
 married to Martha, daughter of Colonel 
 Robert Martin, of Rockingham, N. C., a 
 wealthy planter and a large slaveholder. 
 Active as he continued to be in politics, he 
 found time for business as well as love-mak- 
 ing. He invested boldly in the lands over 
 which Chicago was now spreading in its rapid 
 growth and made the young city his home. 
 His investments were fortunate, and within 
 a few years he was a wealthy man according 
 
THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE 43 
 
 to tlie standard of those times. He used 
 his wealth freely in hospitality, in charity, 
 and in the furtherance of his political enter- 
 prises. In the year 1856, the corner-stone 
 of the University of Chicago was laid on land 
 which he had given. 
 
 The assembly of which Douglas was now 
 a member had gradually risen to a higher 
 place in our system than the founders in- 
 tended. The House, partly by reason of its 
 exclusive right to originate measures of a 
 certain class, partly because it was felt to be 
 more accurately representative of the people, 
 had at first a sort of ascendency. The great 
 constructive measures of the first administra- 
 tion were House measures. Even so late as 
 Jefferson’s and Madison’s administrations, 
 one must look oftenest to the records of that 
 chamber for the main lines of legislative his- 
 tory. But in Jackson’s time the Senate 
 profited by its comparative immunity from 
 sudden political changes, by its veto on ap- 
 pointments, and by the greater freedom of 
 debate which its limited membership permit- 
 ted. It came to stand, as the House could 
 
U STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 not, for conservatism, for deliberation, for 
 independence of the executive. The advan- 
 tage thus gained was increased as the growth 
 of the Speaker’s power into a virtual premier- 
 ship and the development of the committee 
 system undermined the importance of the 
 individual representative, and as the more 
 rapid increase of population in the free 
 States destroyed in the House that balance 
 of the sections which in the Senate was still 
 carefully maintained. Moreover, the coun- 
 try no longer sent its strongest men into the 
 White House, and the Supreme Court was 
 no longer favorable to that theory of the 
 government which, as Marshall expounded 
 it, had tended so markedly to elevate the 
 court itself. The upper house had gained 
 not merely as against the lower, but as 
 against the executive and the judiciary. The 
 ablest and most experienced statesmen were 
 apt to be senators ; and the Senate was the 
 true battleground in a contest that was be- 
 ginning to dwarf all others. From the begin- 
 ing to the end of Douglas’s service there, 
 saving a brief, delusive interval after the 
 
THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE 45 
 
 Compromise of 1850, the slavery question 
 in its territorial phase was constantly upper- 
 most, and in the Senate, if anywhere, those 
 measures must be devised, those compro- 
 mises agreed on, which should save the coun- 
 try from disunion or war. There was open 
 to him, therefore, a path to eminence which, 
 difficult as it might prove, was at least a 
 plain one. To win among his fellows in the 
 Senate a leadership such as he had readily 
 won among his fellows at school, at J ackson- 
 ville, at Springfield, in the legislature and 
 the Democratic organization of Illinois, and 
 such as he was rising to in the lower house 
 when he left it, and then to find and estab- 
 lish the right policy with slavery, and partic- 
 ularly with slavery in the Territories — there 
 lay his path. It was a task that demanded 
 the highest powers, a public service ade- 
 quate to the loftiest patriotism. How he 
 did, in fact, attempt it, how nearly he suc- 
 ceeded in it, and why he failed in it, are 
 the inquiries with which any study of his 
 life must be chiefly concerned. 
 
 But Douglas was too alert and alive to 
 
46 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 limit his share in legislation to a single 
 subject or class of subjects. Save that he 
 does not appear to have taken up the tariff 
 question in any conspicuous way, he had a 
 leading part in all the important discussions 
 of his time, whether in the Senate or before 
 the people. Unquestionably, his would he 
 the best name to choose if one were attempt- 
 ing - to throw into biographical form a politi- 
 cal history of the period of his senatorship. 
 
 The very day he took his seat, he was ap- 
 pointed chairman of the Senate Committee 
 on Territories, and so kept the role of sponsor 
 for young commonwealths which he had be- 
 gun to play in the House. No other public 
 man has ever had so much to do with the 
 organizing of Territories and the admitting 
 of States into the Union ; probably no other 
 man ever so completely mastered all the de- 
 tails of such legislation. He reported the 
 bills by which Utah, New Mexico, Washing- 
 ton, Kansas, Nebraska, Oregon, and Minne- 
 sota became Territories, and those by which 
 Texas, Iowa, Florida, California, Wisconsin, 
 Oregon, and Minnesota became States. His 
 
THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE 47 
 
 familiarity with all questions concerning the 
 public domain was not less remarkable. In 
 dealing with both subjects, he seems always 
 to have been guided by his confidence in the 
 Western people themselves. He was for a 
 liberal policy with individual settlers, holding 
 that the government, in disposing of its lands, 
 should aim at development and not at profit ; 
 and he was no less liberal in his view of the 
 rights and privileges with which each new 
 political community ought to be invested. 
 As to the lands, he held to such a policy as 
 looked forward to the time when they should 
 be turned into farms and towns and cities. 
 As to the government of the Territories, he 
 held to such a policy with them as looked 
 constantly forward to their becoming States, 
 and his theory was that all the powers of 
 the general government in reference to them 
 were based on its power to admit States 
 into the Union. To that rule of construc- 
 tion, however, he made a very notable ex- 
 ception. Declaring that the Mormons were 
 for the most part aliens by birth, that they 
 were trying to subvert the authority of the 
 
48 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 United States, that they themselves were 
 unfit for citizenship and their community 
 unfit for membership in the Union, he fa- 
 vored the repeal of the act by which the 
 territorial government of Utah was set up. 
 He went farther, and maintained that only 
 such territory as is set apart to form new 
 States must he governed in accordance with 
 those constitutional clauses which relate to 
 the admission of States, and that territory 
 acquired or held for other purposes could 
 be governed quite without reference to any 
 rights which through statehood, or the expec- 
 tation of statehood, its inhabitants might 
 claim. This theory of his has assumed in 
 our later history an interest and importance 
 far beyond any it had at the time ; but 
 Douglas in that and in many other of his 
 speeches clearly had in mind just such exi- 
 gencies as have brought us to a practical adop- 
 tion of his view. 
 
 His interest in the government’s efforts 
 to develop the country, and particularly the 
 West, by building highways, dredging rivers, 
 and deepening harbors, did not diminish, 
 
THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE 49 
 
 and lie made more than one effort to bring 
 design and system into that legislation. Al- 
 ways mindful of results, he pointed out that 
 the conditions under which the river and 
 harbor bills were framed, — the pressure 
 upon every representative and -senator to 
 stand up for the interests of his constituents, 
 and the failure to fix anywhere the responsi- 
 bility for a general plan, — made it inevita- 
 ble that such measures would either fail to 
 pass or fail of their objects if they did pass. 
 He suggested, in 1852, a plan which a year 
 or two later, in a long letter to Governor 
 Matteson, of Illinois, he explained and ad- 
 vocated with much force. It was for Con- 
 gress to consent, as the Constitution provided 
 it might, and as in particular cases it had 
 consented, to the imposition by the States of 
 tonnage duties, the proceeds to be used in 
 deepening harbors. The scheme commended 
 itself for many practical reasons ; and it was 
 more consonant with Democratic theory than 
 the practice of direct appropriations by Con- 
 gress. 
 
 However, in his ardent advocacy of a Pa- 
 
50 
 
 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 cific railroad, Douglas made no question of 
 the government’s powers in that connection. 
 True, in 1858, the committee of which he 
 was a member threw the bill into the form 
 of a mail contract in order that it might not 
 run counter to the state-rights views of 
 senators, but he seems to have favored 
 every one of the numerous measures look- 
 ing to the building of the road which had 
 any prospect of success. At first, he was 
 for three different roads, a northern, a cen- 
 tral, and a southern, but it was soon clear 
 that Congress would not go into the mat- 
 ter on so generous a scale. Arguing, then, 
 for a central line, he used a language char- 
 acteristic of his course on all questions that 
 arose between the sections. “ The North,” 
 he said, “ by bending a little down South, 
 can join it ; and the South, by leaning a 
 little to the North, can unite with it, too ; 
 and our Southern friends ought to be able 
 to bend and lean a little, as well as to require 
 us to bend and lean all the time, in order to 
 join them.” 
 
 His practical instinct and his democratic 
 
THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE 51 
 
 inclinations were both apparent in the plan 
 which he proposed in 1855 for the relief of 
 the Supreme Court. A bill reported by the 
 Committee on the Judiciary freed the jus- 
 tices from their duties on circuit and provided 
 for eleven circuit judges. Douglas proposed, 
 as a substitute, to divide the country into 
 nine circuits, and to establish in each of these 
 a court of appeals which should sit once a 
 year and which should consist of one supreme 
 court justice and the district judges of the 
 circuit, the assignment of each justice to be 
 changed from year to year. His aim was 
 twofold : to relieve the Supreme Court by 
 making the circuit courts the final resort in 
 all cases below a certain importance, and to 
 keep the justices in touch with the people, 
 and familiar with the courts, the procedure, 
 and the local laws in all parts of the country. 
 The scheme, though different in details, is in 
 its main features strikingly like the system of 
 circuit court of appeals which was adopted 
 in 1891. 
 
 But the questions, apart from that of 
 slavery, on which Douglas’s course has the 
 
52 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 most interest for a later generation were still 
 questions of our foreign relations. On the 
 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, on the Treaty of 
 Peace with Mexico, on the Oregon Boundary 
 Treaty of 1853, on the negotiations for the 
 purchase of Cuba, on the filibuster expedi- 
 \s tions of 1858, and the controversy of that 
 year over Great Britain’s reassertion of the 
 right of search — on all these questions he 
 had very positive opinions and maintained 
 them vigorously. In the year 1853, he 
 ^ went aJbroad, studied the workings of Euro- 
 pean systems, and made the acquaintance of 
 various foreign statesmen ; but he did not 
 change his opinions or his temper of mind. 
 In England, rather than put on court cos- 
 tume, he gave up an opportunity to be pre- 
 sented to the Queen ; and in Russia he ap- 
 pears to have made good his contention that, 
 as persons of other nationalities are presented 
 to foreign rulers in the dress which they 
 would wear before their own sovereigns, an 
 American should be presented in such dress 
 as he would wear before the President. 
 
 But if he maintained the traditional, 
 
THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE 53 
 
 old - fashioned American attitude toward 
 “abroad,'’ he was very sure, when he dealt 
 with a particular case, to take a practical 
 and modern line of reasoning-. O ppo sing 
 the treaty of peace with Mexico, he objected 
 to the boundary line, to the promise we made 
 never to acquire any more Mexican territory 
 as we acquired Texas, and to the stipulations 
 about the Indians. His o bjections were d is- 
 r egard ed, and the tr eaty was ratifi ed ; but 
 five years later the United States paid ten 
 million dollars to get it altered in those 
 respects. He vigor ously opposed the Clay- 
 ton-Bulwer Treaty in 1850, when it was 
 ratified, and three years later, when the 
 subject was brought up in open Senate, he 
 stated at l ength his views on the whole sub- 
 ject of our relations with England and Cen- 
 tral America, with Spain and Cuba, with 
 European monarchies and Latin-American 
 states. Whether right or wrong, they are 
 the views on which the American people 
 have acted as practical occasions have arisen 
 and bid fair to act in the future. 
 
 It would have been possible, he thought, 
 
54 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 but for Clayton’s mismanagement, to get 
 from Nicaragua a grant to the United 
 J States of exclusive and perpetual control 
 over all railroad and canal routes through 
 that country from the Atlantic to the Pacific. 
 Instead, we had pledged ourselves to Eng- 
 1/ land “ not to do, in all coming time, that 
 which, in the progress of events, our inter- 
 ests, duty, and even safety may compel us 
 to do.” lie opposed the t reaty because it 
 invited European intervention in American 
 affairs ; because it denied us the right to 
 fortify any canal that might be built ; be- 
 cause its language was equivocal in regard 
 to the British protectorate over the Mosquito 
 coast, and otherwise clearly contrary to the 
 Moni’oe Doctrine ; and because we made 
 an unnecessary promise never to occupy 
 any part of Central America. To all these 
 objections, save the last, time has added 
 force ; and the principle of the last is now 
 established in our national policy. That 
 principle Douglas proclaimed so often that 
 it almost rivals the principle of popular sov- 
 ereignty itself in the matter of the frequency 
 
THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE 55 
 
 of its appearance in bis speeches. “ You 
 
 may make,” he declared, “ as many treaties 
 
 as you please to fetter the limbs of this giant 
 
 Republic, and she will hurst them all from j 
 
 her, and her course will be onward to a limit 
 
 which I will not venture to prescribe.” The 
 
 Alleghanies had not withheld us from the 
 
 basin of the Mississippi, nor the Mississippi 
 
 from the plains, nor the Rocky Mountains 
 
 from the Pacific coast. Now that the Pacific 
 
 barred our way to the westward, who could 
 
 say that we might not turn, or ought not to 
 
 turn, northward or southward ? Later, he 
 . . ✓ 
 came to contemplate a time when the Pacific 
 
 might cease to be a barrier : when our “ in- 
 terests, duty, and even safety ” might impel 
 us onward to the islands of the sea. He 
 would make no pledges for the future. 
 Agreements not to annex territory might 
 be reasonable in treaties between European 
 powers, but they were contrary to the spirit 
 of American civilization. “ Europe,” he said, 
 
 “ is antiquated, decrepit, tottering on the 
 verge of dissolution. When you visit her, 
 the objects which excite your admiration are 
 
56 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 the relics of past greatness : the broken col- 
 umns erected to departed power. Here 
 everything is fresh, blooming, expanding, 
 and advancing. We wish a wise, practical 
 policy adapted to our condition and posi- 
 tion.” 
 
 A more ardent and thoroughgoing expan- 
 sionist is not to be found among eminent 
 Americans of that time, or even of later 
 times. While he was denouncing General 
 Walker’s lawless invasion of Central Amer- 
 ica in 1858, he took pains to make it plain 
 that it was the filibusters’ method, and not 
 their object, which he condemned. In fact, 
 he condemned their method chiefly because 
 its tendency was to defeat their object. 
 
 He believed that England, notwithstand- 
 ing the kinship of the two peoples and the 
 similarity of their civilizations, was our rival 
 by necessity, our ill-wisher because of the 
 past. The idea that we were bound to the 
 mother country by ties of gratitude or affec- 
 tion he always combated. He denied her 
 motherhood as a historical proposition, and 
 demanded to know of Senator Butler, of 
 
THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE 57 
 
 South Carolina, who was moved to eloquence 
 over America’s debt to England for a lan- 
 guage and a literature, whether he was duly 
 grateful also for English criticism of our 
 institutions, and particularly for the publi- 
 cations of English abolitionists. As to the 
 British claim of a right to search American 
 vessels for slaves, he was for bringing the 
 matter at once to an issue ; for denying the 
 right in toto ; and if Great Britain chose 
 to treat our resistance as a cause of war, he 
 would be for prolonging the war until the 
 British flag should disappear forever from 
 the American continent and the adjacent 
 islands. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE GREAT QUESTION 
 
 On all these questions, alike of domestic 
 and of foreign policy, Douglas took an emi- 
 nently hopeful, an eminently confident and 
 resolute stand. His opinions were such as 
 befitted a strong, competent, successful man. 
 They were characteristic of the West. They 
 were based on a pos itive faith in democracy, 
 in our constitution of government, in the 
 American people. In that faith, likewise, 
 he addressed himself to the problem which 
 in his day, as before and after, was perplex- 
 ing the champions of democracy and giving 
 pause to the well-wishers of the Republic. 
 A later generation has learned to think of 
 that problem as the negro question, a race 
 question ; Douglas’s generation thought of it 
 merely as th e slavery questio n. 
 
 The presidential election of 1848 made a 
 good occasion for men to take account of the 
 
THE GREAT QUESTION 59 
 
 question, and of their own minds concerning 
 it. In February, 1848, by the Treaty of 
 Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded to the 
 United States the territory out of which 
 California, New Mexico, and Utah have been 
 formed. With the signing of the treaty the 
 material elements of the problem, as it pre- 
 sented itself to. that generation, were com- 
 pletely arranged. 
 
 In fifteen Southern States and in the Dis- 
 trict of Columbia slavery was sanctioned 
 and protected by law. In fifteen Northern 
 States slavery was prohibited by law. The 
 foreign slave trade was long since prohibited 
 altogether, though from time to time, in a 
 small way, it was surreptitiously revived. 
 The domestic slave trade, among the slave 
 States and in the District, was still permitted. 
 There was a law on the statute book to com- 
 pel the return of slaves fleeing into the 
 free States, but certain of its provisions had 
 been pronounced unconstitutional, and it 
 was ineffective. Of the territory acquired 
 from France in 1803, all that part which 
 lay south of the line of 36° 30', North lati- 
 
CO STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 tude, witli Missouri, which lay north of the 
 line, was either organized into slave States 
 or set apart for the Indians ; in all that 
 part which lay north of the line of 36° 30', 
 except Missouri, slavery was forbidden by a 
 law of Congress passed in 1820. It was 
 competent for Congress to repeal the law at 
 any time, but from the country’s long ac- 
 quiescence in it, and from the circumstances 
 of its passage, which were such that a 
 stigma of bad faith would be fixed upon 
 whichever section should move for its repeal, 
 it seemed to have a force and stability more 
 like the Constitution’s itself than that of 
 ordinary laws. There remained the terri- 
 tory got from Mexico, concerning which, al- 
 though from the beginning of the war the 
 question of slavery in any territory that 
 might come to us at the end of it had been 
 constantly in agitation, Congress had as yet 
 passed no law. What law Congress should 
 make about slavery in California, New 
 Mexico, and Utah was the main question. 
 But there was also a question of the right 
 boundary between New Mexico and Texas, 
 
THE GREAT QUESTION 61 
 
 which had been admitted in 1845 as a slave 
 State, with an agreement that she might at 
 any time divide herself up into four States. 
 
 The material elements of the problem, 
 then, were comparatively simple, and the im- 
 mediately pressing questions were easily 
 phrased ; but the intangible element of pub- 
 lic opinion was uncommonly hard to estimate. 
 So far as the great parties were concerned, 
 it was impossible to fix upon either of them 
 any general theory about slavery or any defi- 
 nite policy with it. Up to this time, both 
 had apparently gone on the understanding 
 that it was not a proper issue in political 
 contests. A small group of unpractical men 
 had, in fact, tried to build up a party on the 
 issue of opposition to it, but they had no 
 prospect of carrying a single electoral vote. 
 The adherents of the old parties were agreed 
 on one thing : that there was no lawful way 
 for Congress or the people of the free States 
 to interfere with slavery in the slave States. 
 They were divided among themselves, inside 
 of party lines, on the fugitive slave law, on 
 the interstate slave trade, on slavery and the 
 
62 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 slave trade in the District of Columbia, and 
 on slavery in the Territories. 
 
 But if party lines did not yet accurately 
 represent the divisions of opinion on these 
 questions, there was, nevertheless, a group- 
 ing of men according to their opinions on 
 the general question which already had its 
 effects in politics. Every thoughtful Amer- 
 ican of that day belonged to one or another 
 of several groups according to the view he 
 took of two things : slavery itself, and the 
 body of law and usage that had grown up 
 about it. There were the abolitionists, who 
 believed slavery to be so utterly wrong that 
 they were ready to go all lengths to get rid 
 of it, violating the Constitution, breaking the 
 compromises, endangering the Union. There 
 were the Southern fire-eaters, who not only 
 believed slavery right but were similarly 
 willing to go all lengths to defend and ex- 
 tend it. There were the moderate men 
 who made up the bulk of the two great 
 parties in the North, who believed slavery 
 wrong but felt themselves bound by the com- 
 promises of the Constitution which protected 
 
THE GREAT QUESTION 63 
 
 it where it already existed and debarred 
 from any method of attacking it which might 
 bring the Union into danger. There were 
 the moderate men of the South, Whigs and 
 Democrats alike, who believed either that 
 slavery was right or at least that there was 
 no better state possible for the mass of the 
 blacks, but who were yet devoted to the 
 Union and respected their constitutional ob- 
 ligations. Finally, there were men so con- 
 stituted that they could decline to take any 
 thought whether slavery were right or 
 wrong, and could deal with every question 
 that arose concerning it as a question of 
 expediency merely, or of law and precedent. 
 
 To which of these groups should Douglas 
 join himself? Up to this time, his public 
 record was too meagre to show clearly where 
 he stood. In 1845, when the bill to annex 
 Texas was before the House, he had offered 
 an amendment extending the compromise 
 line of 1820 through the new State, so that 
 if Texas were ever divided slavery would be 
 prohibited in such State or States as should 
 be formed north of that line. Both in the 
 
64 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 House and in the Senate he had voted against 
 the famous resolution of Mr. David Wilmot 
 to exclude slavery from any territory that 
 we might get from Mexico, and he continued 
 to oppose that motion, in whatever form it 
 appeared, until the legislature of Illinois in- 
 structed him to favor it. In 1848, he voted 
 for the so-called Clayton Compromise, which 
 proposed to organize California, Oregon, and 
 New Mexico into Territories and merely ex- 
 tend over them the Constitution and laws of 
 the United States so far as these should prove 
 applicable ; hut he also voted for the hill to 
 organize the Territory of Oregon with a 
 clause prohibiting slavery. By his speeches, 
 no less than hy his votes, he was committed 
 to the position that the Missouri Compromise 
 was a final settlement so far as the Louisi- 
 ana Purchase was concerned, and that the 
 compromise line ought to he extended 
 through the Mexican Cession to the Pacific. 
 He was not clearly committed on any other 
 of the points at issue between the friends 
 and the opponents of slavery. 
 
 But he had roundly denounced the aho- 
 
THE GREAT QUESTION 
 
 65 
 
 litionists, and he had married the daughter 
 of a slaveholder. The day after his wedding 
 his father-in-law presented him a deed to a 
 plantation in Mississippi and a number of 
 slaves. He gave it back, not, so he declared, 
 because he thought it wrong to hold slaves, 
 but because he did not know how to govern 
 them or to manage a plantation. His wife 
 soon fell heir to the land and negroes, and 
 at her death they passed to her children under 
 a will which requested that the blacks be not 
 sold but kept and cared for by the testator’s 
 descendants. Douglas, as the guardian of 
 his infant children, respected their grand- 
 father’s wishes. For that reason he was 
 called a slaveholder, and a fellow senator 
 once openly accused him of shaping his course 
 as a public man to accord with his private 
 interests. He denied and disproved the 
 charge, but proudly added : “ I implore my 
 enemies, who so ruthlessly invade the private 
 sanctuary, to do me the favor to believe that 
 I have no wish, no aspiration, to be consid- 
 ered purer or better than she who was, or 
 they who are, slaveholders.” 
 
66 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 He was of those who could he indifferent 
 to the moral quality of slavery. He could 
 favor whatever policy the Constitution re- 
 quired, or precedents favored, or public ex- 
 pediency demanded ; if his enemies were 
 to he believed, he could take whatever course 
 ambition and self-interest impelled him to. 
 Never once during his long wrestling with 
 the slavery question did he concede that any 
 account should he taken of the moral charac- 
 ter of the institution, or intimate that he be- 
 lieved it wrong for one man to hold another 
 man in bondage. 
 
 The Democratic National Convention of 
 1848, though its platform was as vague as it 
 could be made, nominated a candidate who 
 was committed to a particular plan with 
 slavery in the Territories. The candidate 
 was Lewis Cass, of Michigan, and his plan 
 was set forth in a letter to one Nicholson, of 
 Nashville, Tennessee, of date December 24, 
 1847. The plan appeared to be a very sim- 
 ple one. It was to leave the people of each 
 Territory, so soon as it should be organized, 
 free to regulate their domestic institutions as 
 
THE GREAT QUESTION 67 
 
 they chose. He favored it for two reasons : 
 first, because Congress had no right to inter- 
 fere ; and second, because the people them- 
 selves were the best judges of what institu- 
 tions they ought to have. That was the barest 
 form of the doctrine which its opponents in 
 derision named “ squatter sovereignty.” It 
 was contrary to the doctrine of the Wil- 
 mot Proviso, which invoked the authority of 
 Congress to exclude slavery from all the 
 Territories, and contrary, also, to whatever 
 doctrine or no doctrine was implied in the 
 motion to extend the compromise line to the 
 Pacific, exercising the authority of Congress 
 to exclude slavery north of the line and for- 
 bearing to exercise it south of the line. It 
 was equally contrary to a third doctrine 
 which was brought before the convention. 
 William L. Yancey, a delegate from Ala- 
 bama, offered a resolution to the effect that 
 neither Congress nor any territorial legisla- 
 ture had any right to exclude slave property 
 from the Territories. This was a mild state- 
 ment of the extreme Southern doctrine that 
 slaves were property, so recognized by the 
 
 V 
 
68 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 Constitution, and that a slaveholder had the 
 right to take his slaves anywhere hut into a 
 State where slavery was forbidden. 
 
 The doctrine of Cass seemed to accord 
 best with that democratic theory of the gov- 
 ernment which Douglas had always pro- 
 fessed. It accorded well with his faith in 
 the builders of the West. It alone, of all 
 the doctrines advanced, accorded fully with 
 his attitude of indifference to the moral 
 quality of slavery. He soon embraced it, 
 therefore, and for the rest of his life he was 
 oftenest occupied embodying it in legislation, 
 defending it, restating it to suit new condi- 
 tions, modifying it to meet fresh exigencies. 
 Cass, though his authorship of the doctrine 
 is disputed, was at first held responsible for 
 it, and he advocated it with great ability. 
 But in the end men well-nigh forgot who the 
 author of the principle was, so preeminent 
 was Douglas as its defender. He made it 
 his, whosesoever it was at first, and his it will 
 always be in history. 
 
 During the session of 1848-49, he intro- 
 duced a bill to admit California as a State, 
 
THE GEEAT QUESTION 
 
 69 
 
 leaving the people to settle the slavery ques- 
 tion as they pleased. But his first great 
 oppoi’tunity came in the session of 1849-50. 
 
 Cass had been beaten in the election. 
 Zachary Taylor, the successful candidate of 
 the Whigs, was a Southerner and a slave- 
 holder, but he was elected on a non-commit- 
 tal platform, and he had never declared, if 
 indeed he had ever formed, any opinions on 
 the questions in dispute. His first message 
 merely notified Congress that California, 
 whither people were rushing from all parts 
 of the country in search of gold, had of her 
 own motion made ready for statehood ; he 
 expressed a hope that New Mexico would 
 shortly follow her example, and recommended 
 that both be admitted into the Union with 
 such constitutions as they might present. Im- 
 mediately, the House, where the free-soilers 
 held a balance of power, fell into a long wran- 
 gle over the speakership ; and the Senate was 
 soon in fierce debate over certain anti-slavery 
 resolutions presented from the legislature of 
 Vermont. The North seemed to be united 
 on the Wilmot Proviso as it had never before 
 
70 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 been united on any measure of opposition to 
 slavery, and the South, fearing to lose the 
 fruits of her many victories in statesman- 
 ship, in diplomacy, and on Mexican battle- 
 fields, was threatening disunion if, by the 
 admission of California as a free State with 
 no slave State to balance, her equality of 
 representation in the Senate should be de- 
 stroyed. The portents were all of disagree- 
 ment, struggle, disaster. 
 
 But at the end of January, Henry Clay, 
 though he had come back to the scene of his 
 many stirring conflicts in the past minded 
 to be “ a calm and quiet looker-on,” roused 
 himself to one more essay of that statesman- 
 ship of compromise in which he was a mas- 
 ter. He made a plan of settlement that cov- 
 ered all the controversies and put it in the 
 form of a series of resolutions. It was to 
 admit California with her free-state constitu- 
 tion ; to oi’ganize the remainder of the Mex- 
 ican Cession into Territories, with no restric- 
 tion as to slavery ; to pay Texas a sum of 
 money on condition that she yielded in the 
 dispute over the boundary between her and 
 
THE GREAT QUESTION 71 
 
 New Mexico ; to prohibit the slave trade, 
 hut not slavery, in the District of Columbia ; 
 to leave the interstate slave trade alone ; and 
 to pass an effective fugitive slave law. 
 
 For two days, Clay spoke for his plan. 
 Age, though it had not bereft him of his con- 
 summate skill in oratory, added pathos to 
 his genuine fervor of patriotism as in that 
 profoimd crisis of our affairs he pleaded with 
 his fellow senators and with his divided 
 countrymen. There followed the most not- 
 able series of set speeches in the history of 
 Congress. One after another, the old lead- 
 ers, Calhoun, Webster, Benton, Cass, and 
 the rest, — for all were still there, — rose 
 and solemnly addressed themselves to the 
 state of the country and the plan of settle- 
 ment. All but Calhoun : now very near his 
 end, he was too weak to stand or speak, and 
 Mason, of Virginia, read for him, while he 
 sat gloomily silent, his last bitter arraign- 
 ment of the North. He was against the 
 plan. Benton, though on opposite grounds, 
 also found fault with it. Webster, to the 
 rage and sorrow of his own New England, 
 
72 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 gave it liis support. Then the new men 
 spoke. Jefferson Davis, on whom, as Cal- 
 houn was borne away to his grave, the man- 
 tle of his leadership seemed visibly to fall, 
 steadfastly asserted the Southern claim that 
 slaveholders had a right to go into any Terri- 
 tory with their slaves, but offered, as the ex- 
 treme concession of the South, to extend the 
 Missouri line to the Pacific if property in 
 slaves were protected below the line. Chase, 
 of Ohio, impressive in appearance but stiff 
 in manner, argued weightily for the consti- 
 tutionality and rightfulness of the Wilmot 
 Proviso. Seward, of New York, though the 
 shrewdest politician of the anti-slavery forces, 
 enraged the Southerners and startled the 
 coimtry with the announcement that “ a 
 higher law than the Constitution ” enjoined 
 upon Congress to guard these fresh lands 
 for freedom. 
 
 But none of the new men, and none of 
 the old leaders but Clay himself, had such a 
 part as Douglas in the actual settlement. 
 He supported the resolutions, and as chair- 
 man of the Committee on Territories he 
 
THE GREAT QUESTION 73 
 
 wrote and introduced two bills : one to admit 
 California, and one to organize the Territo- 
 ries of New Mexico and Utah with no restric- 
 tions as to slavery and to adjust the dispute 
 with Texas. When Clay was put at the head 
 of a Committee of Thirteen, to which all the 
 subjects of dispute were referred, he was 
 often in consultation with the chairman of 
 the Committee on Territories. Douglas was 
 of opinion that the various measures pro- 
 posed would have a better chance of passing 
 separately than all in one, but Clay decided 
 to deal with California, the Territories, and 
 the Texas boundary in a single measure. 
 This, with separate bills on the fugitive slave 
 law and the slave trade in the District, he 
 reported early in May. The Omnibus, as 
 the first bill was called, was simply Doug- 
 las’s two bills joined together with a wafer : 
 the words, “ Mr. Clay, from the Commit- 
 tee of Thirteen,” were substituted for the 
 words, “Mr. Douglas, from the Committee 
 on Territories.” But there was one im- 
 portant change. Douglas’s bill gave the 
 territorial legislatures authority over all 
 
74 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 rightful subjects of legislation, subject to the 
 Constitution, save that they could pass no 
 law interfering’ with the primary disposal 
 of the soil. Clay’s committee, contrary to 
 his wish, added the clause, “ nor in respect to 
 African slavery.” Douglas moved to strike 
 out the exception. He was voted down, but 
 bided his time, persuaded another senator to 
 renew the motion at a favorable moment, and 
 it passed. 
 
 But the Omnibus could not pass. The 
 death of President Taylor, who would prob- 
 ably have vetoed it, brought Fillmore, a 
 friend of the compromise, into the White 
 House ; but there were only a handful of 
 senators who favored every one of the mea- 
 sures so combined. Late in July, after 
 months of debate and negotiation had wea- 
 ried Clay out and driven him from the scene, 
 all but the part relating to Utah was stricken 
 out, and with that single passenger the Om- 
 nibus went through the Senate. Then sep- 
 arately, one after another, as Douglas had 
 advised, the other measures were passed. 
 The House quickly accepted them, Fillmore 
 
THE GREAT QUESTION 75 
 
 signed tliem, and the last of the compromises 
 was complete. Jefferson Davis had opposed 
 it, and had often been pitted against Doug- 
 las in debate, for they were champions of 
 contrary theories, but at the end he declared : 
 “ If any man has a right to be proud of the 
 success of these measures, it is the senator 
 from Illinois.” The enterprise, indeed, was 
 Clay’s ; his was the idea, the initiative, the 
 general plan. It is rightly called Clay’s 
 compromise. But the execution of the plan 
 was quite as much Douglas’s work as his. 
 When Clay died, no one had a better right 
 than Douglas to inherit his place as the 
 statesman and orator of compromise and con- 
 ciliation. 
 
 In the defense of the settlement he was 
 no less conspicuous. Though in the South 
 such extremists as Yancey and Quitman de- 
 clared that the so-called compromise was in 
 fact a surrender of Southern rights and a 
 sufficient reason for abandoning the Union, 
 there were Northern men quite as violently 
 exercised over what seemed to them a base 
 truckling to the slave power. The legisla- 
 
76 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 ture of Illinois had formally instructed her 
 senators to support the Wihnot Proviso, 
 and Douglas had thus been compelled, all 
 through the session, to vote for motion after 
 motion to prohibit slavery outright in the 
 Territories. At the end of the session, when 
 he returned to his home, he found Chicago 
 wrought lip to a furor of protest. The city 
 council actually voted to release officials 
 from all obligation to enforce the fugitive 
 slave law and citizens from all obligation 
 to respect it. A mass meeting was about to 
 pass resolutions approving this extraordinary 
 action of the council and denouncing as trai- 
 tors the senators and representatives who 
 had voted for the law, when Douglas walked 
 upon the stand, announced that the next even- 
 ing he would publicly defend the measures of 
 compromise, and demanded to be heard be- 
 fore he was condemned. A great audience, 
 the greatest ever assembled in the city, lis- 
 tened to his defense. It was bold, skilful, 
 successful. He avowed his authorship of 
 three of the compromise measures, his ap- 
 proval of the others. He took them up one 
 
THE GREAT QUESTION 77 
 
 by one, explained them, called for objections, 
 and answered every objection effectively. 
 At the end, he proposed and carried resolu- 
 tions pledging the meeting to stand by the 
 Constitution and the laws, and the meeting 
 voted further, with but eight or ten nays, to 
 repudiate the resolutions of the council. 
 The next night, the council met and repealed 
 them. 
 
 It seemed, in fact, that in planting himself 
 on the compromise Douglas had rightly fore- 
 cast the verdict of the country as a whole. 
 An adjourned meeting of a Southern conven- 
 tion which had been called before the settle- 
 ment with a view to some united and vigorous 
 action took now a tone so mild that it allayed, 
 instead of exciting, the fears of patriots. 
 Jefferson Davis, an opponent, and Foote, a 
 supporter of the settlement, went before the 
 people of Mississippi as rival candidates for 
 the governorship, and Davis was beaten. 
 Yancey in Alabama was overthrown in his 
 own party. Only South Carolina would not 
 be reconciled. Throughout the North, and 
 particularly in New England, attempts to re- 
 
78 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 sist the fugitive slave law were sometimes vio- 
 lent and occasionally successful, and Charles 
 Sumner, from Massachusetts, and Wade, 
 from Ohio, were sent to join Seward and 
 Chase and Hale, the aggressive anti-slavery 
 men in the Senate. With Sumner, whose 
 first important speech was an attack upon the 
 law, Douglas instantly engaged in the first of 
 many hitter controversies. An attack on a 
 law so clearly demanded by the Constitution 
 was, he declared, an attack on the Constitu- 
 tion itself, such as no senator could make 
 without breaking his oath of office. But in 
 little more than a year the lower House of 
 Congress voted by a good majority that the 
 compromise measures should he regarded as 
 a permanent settlement. In 1852, the 
 Democrats, assembled in national conven- 
 tions at Baltimore, indorsed them in their 
 platform. So did the Whigs ; and Rufus 
 Choate, their convention orator, was excusa- 
 ble for his hyperbole when he described 
 “ with what instantaneous and mighty charm 
 they calmed the madness and anxiety of the 
 hour.” 
 
THE GREAT QUESTION 
 
 79 
 
 Cass, in liis seventieth year, was the lead- 
 ing candidate before the Democratic conven- 
 tion ; so far as the leadership of parties can 
 be determined in America, he was still the 
 leader of the party. But Douglas, in his for- 
 tieth year, was pressing to the front. In the 
 preliminary campaign he was put forward 
 as the candidate of young America, and 
 other State conventions than that of Illinois 
 commended him. At Baltimore, his support- 
 ers were enthusiastic, aggressive, boisterous. 
 His name in the long list of candidates al- 
 ways aroused an applause which showed that 
 he was classed with Cass and Buchanan in 
 the popular estimation, and not with the 
 lesser men. Beginning with twenty votes 
 on the first ballot, he rose steadily until on 
 the thirty-first he led with ninety-two. But 
 neither he nor Cass had a good following 
 from the South. An expediency candidate, 
 acceptable to the South, was found in Frank- 
 lin Pierce, who had fought in the war with 
 Mexico. Against him the Whigs pitted the 
 commander-in-chief in the war. But Scott 
 was thought to be tainted with free -soil 
 
80 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 opinions. The Democrats, more thoroughly 
 united, swept the country, and the new ad- 
 ministration came into power with a great 
 majority in both houses of Congress. 
 
 In neither branch of that Democratic 
 Congress was there another man so fit to 
 take the lead as Douglas. A new senator, 
 coming to Washington in 1852, found him 
 already risen to the first importance there. 
 “ His power as a debater,” said this observer, 
 “ seemed to me unequaled in the Senate. 
 He was industrious, energetic, bold, and skill- 
 ful in the management of the affairs of his 
 party. He was the acknowledged leader of 
 the Democratic party in the Senate.” It 
 should be added that he never lost touch 
 with the lower House. Neither was he un- 
 mindful of the President’s part in making- 
 laws, but no President could be less disposed 
 than Pierce was to set up his will against 
 any measure which might come to him 
 stamped with the party stamp. Douglas’s 
 wife died early in 1853, and in the summer 
 he made his journey to Europe. When he 
 returned, he was in a position the most 
 
THE GREAT QUESTION 81 
 
 favorable for original and constructive states- 
 manship. By virtue of his leadership of the 
 Senate, he was in effect the leader of Con- 
 gress. He had the power of initiative. He 
 was at the age when men are ripest for en- 
 terprises of pith and moment. Unhesitat- 
 ingly, he advanced to the front and centre of 
 the stage. When the session ended, his name 
 was forever associated with a law that upset 
 precedents and traditions, divided old parties 
 and summoned up new ones, made — and 
 unmade — history. 
 
 January 4, 1854, Mr. Douglas, from the 
 Committee on Territories, reported a hill to 
 form the Territory of Nebraska out of that 
 part of the Louisiana Purchase which lay 
 west and north of Missouri. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 LEADERSHIP 
 
 There was nothing new in the main pro- 
 posal. A hill to organize this same Ter- 
 ritory had passed the House the year before. 
 It was generally conceded that the region 
 ought to have a territorial government. 
 Vast as it was, it had less than a thou- 
 sand white inhabitants, but the overland 
 route to the Pacific ran across it, and there 
 was sure to be a rapid immigration into it 
 so soon as it should be thrown open to set- 
 tlers. What was both new and startling was 
 a clause permitting the inhabitants of the 
 Territory, whenever it should be admitted to 
 statehood, to decide for themselves whether 
 they would have slavery or not. The eighth 
 section of the Compromise Act of 1820 
 provided that slavery should never exist 
 anywhere in the Louisiana Purchase north 
 
LEADERSHIP 
 
 83 
 
 of 36° 30', North latitude, save in the State 
 of Missouri. 
 
 In the report which accompanied the bill, 
 Douglas declared that it was based on the 
 principles of the compromise measures of 
 1850. Those measures, he maintained, af- 
 firmed three propositions : questions relating 
 to slavery in the Territories and in States to 
 be formed out of them should be left to the 
 people thereof ; cases involving title to slaves 
 and questions of personal freedom should be 
 left to the local courts, with a right of appeal 
 to the Supreme Court of the United States; 
 the mandate of the Constitution concerning 
 fugitive slaves applied to Territories as well 
 as States. Three days later, these proposi- 
 tions were incorporated in the bill. 
 
 January 16, Archibald Dixon, a senator 
 from Kentucky, offered an amendment ex- 
 pressly repealing the eighth section of the 
 Missouri Compromise law. Douglas remon- 
 strated, but in a few days he called on Dixon, 
 the two senators went for a drive, and in 
 the course of it Douglas promised to accept 
 the amendment. He was satisfied, so Dixon 
 
84 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 reported his conversation, that the Missouri 
 Compromise was unconstitutional and that 
 it was unfair to the South. “ This proceed- 
 ing,” he said, “ may end my political career, 
 but, acting under the sense of duty which 
 animates me, I am prepared to make the 
 sacrifice. I will do it.” January 22, with 
 several other congressmen, he called on 
 Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War, and was 
 by him conducted to the White House. 
 Contrary to his usage, for it was Sunday, 
 the President granted them an interview. At 
 the end of it, he promised to support the 
 repeal. The next day, Douglas reported a 
 substitute for the Nebraska bill. It pro- 
 vided for two Territories, Kansas and Ne- 
 braska, instead of one ; and it declared the 
 eighth section of the Missouri Compromise 
 law to be inoperative because it was “ super- 
 seded by ” the principles of the compromise 
 of 1850. 
 
 At the report and the bill in its first form 
 the anti-slavery men in Congress took in- 
 stant alarm. By the time the substitute 
 was presented, the whole country knew that 
 
LEADERSHIP 
 
 85 
 
 something extraordinary was afoot. With- 
 out a sign of any popular demand, without 
 preliminary agitation or debate, Douglas, of 
 Illinois, had set himself to repeal the Missouri 
 Compromise. He had undertaken to throw 
 open to slavery a great region long conse- 
 crated to freedom. He had written the bill 
 of his own motion, by himself, in his own 
 house. The South had not asked for the 
 concession, the North had not in any wise 
 consented to it. For a little while, in 
 fact, the Southern leaders seemed to dis- 
 trust the bill, for they distrusted Douglas ; 
 one or two of them, like Sam Houston, of 
 Texas, resisted it to the last, declaring it was 
 sure in the end to do the South more harm 
 than good. But for the most part they came 
 quickly into line behind Douglas, though 
 they never generally accepted his principle 
 of popular sovereignty. As to the North, 
 the challenge of the Kansas-Nebraska bill 
 net there with such a response as no South- 
 ern aggression had yet provoked. Through 
 every avenue of expression — through the 
 press and the pulpit, in petitions to Congress, 
 
86 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 in angry protests of public meetings and sol- 
 emn resolves of legislatures — a hostile and 
 outraged public opinion broke upon Doug- 
 las and his bill. His own party could not 
 be held in line. Scores of Democratic news- 
 papers turned against him. Save the legis- 
 lature of Illinois, no Northern assembly, re- 
 presentative or other, that could speak with 
 any show of authority, dared to support him. 
 No Southern fire-eater was ever half so re- 
 viled. He could have traveled from Boston 
 to Chicago, so he afterwards declared, by 
 the light of his own burning effigies. 
 
 But the firmest and clearest protest of all 
 came from the sturdy little band of anti- 
 slavery men in Congress. The day after 
 Douglas proposed his substitute, it came up 
 for debate, and Chase, of Ohio, speaking for 
 the opposition, asked for more time to ex- 
 amine the new provisions. Douglas granted 
 a week, and the next day there appeared in 
 various newspapers an address to the coun- 
 try entitled “ An Appeal of the Independent 
 Democrats in Congress.” Chase was the 
 principal author of it ; he and Sumner and 
 
LEADERSHIP 
 
 87 
 
 four representatives signed it. They de- 
 nounced the bill as a breach of faith, infring- 
 ing the historical compact of 1820, and as 
 part of a plot to extend the area of slavery ; 
 and they accused Douglas of hazarding the 
 dearest interests of the American people in 
 a presidential game. 
 
 That judgment of him and of the bill was 
 probably accepted by a majority of his con- 
 temporaries. For lack of Southern support, 
 he had missed the Democratic nomination in 
 1852. It seemed clear that whatever North- 
 ern candidate the South should prefer would 
 be nominated in 1856. His rivals were all, in 
 one way or another, commending themselves 
 to the South. Pierce was hand in glove with 
 Davis and other Southern leaders. Marcy, 
 in the Department of State, and Buchanan, 
 in a foreign mission, were both working for 
 the annexation of Cuba, a favorite Southern 
 measure. It was suspected that Cass, old 
 as he was, had it in mind to move the repeal 
 when Douglas went ahead of him. 
 
 The contemporaries of Douglas were un- 
 der a necessity to judge his motives, for they 
 
88 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 had to pass upon liis fitness for high office 
 and great responsibilities, and no other mo- 
 tive than ambition was so natural and obvi- 
 ous an explanation of his course. But it is 
 questionable if any such positive judgment 
 as was necessary, and therefore right, in his 
 contemporaries, is obligatory upon histo- 
 rians. What he did was in accord with a 
 political principle wliich he had avowed, and 
 it was not in conflict with any moral prin- 
 ciple he had ever avowed, for he did not 
 pretend to believe that slavery was wrong. 
 True, he had once thought the Missouri 
 Compromise a sacred compact ; but there 
 were signs that he had abandoned that opin- 
 ion. It is enough to decide that he took a 
 wrong course, and to point out how ambition 
 may very well have led him into it. It is 
 too much to say he knew it was wrong, and 
 took it solely because he was ambitious. 
 
 But if he had taken a wrong course he 
 did not fail to do that which will often force 
 us, in spite of ourselves, into admiration for a 
 man in the wrong : he pursued it unwaver- 
 ing to the end. Neither the swelling uproar 
 
LEADERSHIP 
 
 89 
 
 from without nor a resolute ancl conspic- 
 uously able opposition within the Senate 
 daunted him for a moment. He pressed the 
 bill to its passage with furious energy. He 
 set upon Chase savagely, charging him with 
 bad faith in that he had gained tune, by a 
 false pretense of ignorance of the bill, to 
 flood the couutiy with slanderous attacks 
 upon it and upon its author. The audacity 
 of the announcement that the Compromise 
 of 1850 repealed the Compromise of 1820 
 w r as well-nigh justified by the skill of his 
 contention. It was a principle, he main- 
 tained, and no mere temporary expedient, 
 for which Clay and Webster had striven, 
 which both parties had indorsed, which the 
 country had acquiesced in, — the principle of 
 “ popular sovereignty.” That principle lay 
 at the base of our institutions ; it was illus- 
 trated in all the achievements of our past ; 
 it, and it alone, would enable us in safety to 
 go on and extend our institutions into new 
 regions. Cass, though he made difficulties 
 about details, supported the bill, and the 
 Southerners played their part well. But 
 
90 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 Douglas afterwards said, and truly : “ I 
 passed the Kansas-Nebraska act myself. I 
 had the authority and power of a dictator 
 throughout the whole controversy in both 
 houses. The speeches were nothing. It was 
 the marshaling and directing of men and 
 guarding from attacks and with ceaseless 
 vigilance preventing surprise.” 
 
 Chase was the true leader of the opposi- 
 tion, and he was equipped with a most thor- 
 ough mastery of the slavery question in its 
 historical and constitutional aspects. By 
 shrewd amendments he sought to bring 
 out the division between the Northern and 
 Southern supporters of the bill ; for the 
 Southerners held that slave-owners had a 
 constitutional right to go into any Territory 
 with their property, — a right with which 
 neither Congress nor a territorial legislature 
 could interfere. Douglas, however, managed 
 to avoid the danger. He made another 
 change in the important clause. To please 
 Cass and others, he made it declare that the 
 Compromise of 1820 was “ inconsistent with ” 
 instead of “ superseded by ” the principles 
 
LEADERSHIP 
 
 91 
 
 of the later compromise ; and then he added 
 the words, “ it being the true intent and 
 meaning of this act not to legislate slavery 
 into any Territory or State, nor to exclude 
 it therefrom, but to leave the inhabitants 
 thereof perfectly free to form and regulate 
 their domestic institutions in their own way, 
 subject only to the Constitution of the 
 United States.” That, as Benton said, was 
 a little stump speech incorporated in the 
 bill ; and it proved a very effective stump 
 speech indeed. 
 
 Neither the logic and the accurate know- 
 ledge of Chase, nor the lofty invective of 
 Sumner, nor the smooth eloquence of Everett, 
 nor Seward’s rare combination of political 
 adroitness with an alertness to moral forces, 
 matched, in hand to hand debate, the keen- 
 mindedness, the marvelous readiness, and 
 the headlong force of Douglas. Their set 
 speeches were impressive, but in the quick 
 fire, the question-and-answer, the give-and- 
 take of a free discussion, he was the master 
 of them all. When, half an hour after mid- 
 night of the third of March, he rose before 
 
92 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 a full Senate and crowded galleries to close 
 the debate, he was at his best. Often inter- 
 rupted, he welcomed every interruption with 
 courtesy, and never once failed to put his 
 assailant on the defensive. Now Sumner and 
 now Chase was denying that he had come 
 into office by a saci’ifice of principle ; now 
 Seward was defending his own State of New 
 York against a charge of infidelity to the 
 compact of 1820 ; now Everett, friend and 
 biographer and successor of Webster, was 
 protesting that he had not meant to mis- 
 represent Webster’s views. Always, after 
 these encounters, Douglas knew how to come 
 back, with a graver tone, to the larger issue, 
 as if they, and not he, were trying to obscure 
 it. A spectator might have fancied that 
 these high-minded men were culprits, and he 
 their inquisitor. Now and then, as when he 
 dealt with the abolitionists, there was no 
 questioning the sincerity of his feeling, and 
 it stirred him to a genuine eloquence. He 
 was not surprised that Boston burned him 
 in effigy. Had not Boston closed her Fan- 
 euil Hall upon the aged W ebster ? Did not 
 
LEADERSHIP 
 
 93 
 
 Sumner live there ? And lie turned upon 
 the senator from Massachusetts : “ Sir, you 
 will remember that when you came into the 
 Senate, and sought an opportunity to put 
 forth your abolition incendiarism, you ap- 
 pealed to our sense of justice by the senti- 
 ment, ‘ Strike, but hear me first ! ’ But 
 when Mr. Webster went back in 1850 to 
 speak to his constituents in his own self- 
 defense, to tell the truth and to expose his 
 slanderers, you would not hear him, but you 
 struck him first." Again and again, as at 
 the end of a paragraph of unadorned but 
 trenchant sentences the small, firm-knit fig- 
 ure quivered with a leonine energy, the great, 
 swart head was thrown backward, and the 
 deep voice swelled into a tone of triumph 
 or defiance, the listeners could not forbear 
 to applaud. Once, even Seward broke 
 forth : “ I have never had so much respect 
 for him as I have to-night.” 
 
 The vote in the Senate was 27 ayes to 14 
 noes ; but in the House the opposition was 
 dangerously strong, and but for the precau- 
 tion of securing the support of the adminis- 
 
94 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 tration the bill might have failed. There 
 was a fierce parliamentary battle. Richard- 
 son, Douglas’s friend and chief lieutenant, 
 kept the House in continuous session thirty- 
 six hours trying to force through a motion 
 to fix a term for the debate. Feeling rose 
 on both sides. Personal encounters were 
 imminent. Douglas, in constant attendance, 
 watched every move of the opposition and 
 was instant with the counter-move. It was 
 a month before the hill could he brought 
 to a vote, and then it passed, with a slight 
 change, by a majority of thirteen. At the 
 end of May, the President signed it, and 
 Douglas, turning from the work of enacting 
 it into law to the harder task of defending 
 it before the country, beheld the whole field 
 of national politics transformed. The Whig 
 party, crushed to earth in 1852, made no 
 move to take a stand on the new issue ; 
 it was dead. His own historical Democratic 
 party was everywhere throughout the North 
 in a turmoil that seemed to forebode dissolu- 
 tion. One new party, sprung swiftly and 
 secretly into life on the old issue of enmity 
 
LEADERSHIP 
 
 95 
 
 to foreigners and Roman Catholics, seemed 
 to stand for the idea that the best way to 
 meet the slavery issue was to run away from 
 it. Another new party, conceived in the 
 spirit of the appeal of the independent De- 
 mocrats, was struggling to he horn. State 
 after State was falling under the power of 
 the Know-Nothings; and those men, Whigs 
 and Democrats alike, who for years had been 
 awaiting an opportunity to fight slavery out- 
 side of its breastworks of compromise, were 
 forming at last under the name of Anti- 
 Nebraska men. Before long, they began to 
 call themselves Republicans. 
 
 He did not quail. Invited to pronounce 
 the Independence Day oration at Philadel- 
 phia, he made of it the first thoroughgoing 
 denunciation of the Know-Nothings that any 
 eminent public man in the country had the 
 courage to make. Democrats everywhere, 
 bewildered by the mystery in which these 
 new adversaries shrouded their designs, were 
 heartened to an aggressive warfare. Some 
 months later, he took the stump in Virginia, 
 where Henry A. Wise had brought the 
 
96 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 Democrats firmly into line against tlie' only 
 rivals they had in the South, now that the 
 Whigs were giving up the fight. The cam- 
 paign was a crucial one, and the Know- 
 Nothings never recovered from their defeat. 
 Douglas’s course had the merit of consistency 
 as well as courage, for he had always cham- 
 pioned the rights of the foreign horn. 
 
 The Independence Day oration was also 
 his first popular defense of the Ivansas-Ne- 
 braska bill. But so soon as Congress ad- 
 journed he hastened home to face his own 
 people of Illinois. Chicago was once more, 
 as in 1850, a centre of hostility, and he an- 
 nounced that he would speak there the even- 
 ing of September first. When the time 
 came, flags at half mast and the dismal 
 tolling of church bells welcomed him. A 
 vast and ominously silent crowd was gath- 
 ered, but not to hear him. Hisses and 
 groans broke in upon his opening sentences. 
 Hour after hour, from eight o’clock until 
 midnight, he stood before them ; time and 
 again, as the uproar lessened, his voice com- 
 bated it : but they would not let him speak. 
 
LEADERSHIP 
 
 97 
 
 Nothing’, in fact, but his resolute bearing 
 saved him from violence. On the way home, 
 his carriage was set upon and he was in dan- 
 ger of his life. 
 
 Wherever he went in Northern Illinois, 
 similar scenes were enacted. But he got a 
 hearing, and in the central counties and in 
 “ Egypt,” the southern part of the State, 
 where the people were largely of Virginian 
 and Kentuckian descent, he was cordially re- 
 ceived. He kept his hold upon his party in 
 Illinois, and Illinois, alone of all the North- 
 western States, would not go over completely 
 to the opposition. The Democratic candidate 
 for state treasurer was elected. The Know- 
 Nothings and Anti-Nebraska men got a ma- 
 jority of the congressmen, and by the defec- 
 tion of certain state senators who held over 
 from a previous election they were enabled 
 to send Lyman Trumbull, Anti-Nebraska 
 Democrat, to be Douglas’s colleague at 
 Washington. That, when compared with 
 the results elsewhere in the North, was a 
 striking proof of Douglas’s power with his 
 people. Moreover, the Democrats of the 
 
98 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 Nortli who remained in the party had ac- 
 cepted his leadership. In the South, the 
 party organization was soon free of any ef- 
 fective opposition. The two wings, so long 
 as they were united, could still control the 
 Senate and elect presidents. All would still 
 be well, if only all went well on those W est- 
 ern plains whither Douglas declared that the 
 slavery question was now banished forever 
 from the halls of Congress. 
 
 But all was not going well there. When 
 the Kansas-Nebraska bill passed, Sumner 
 exultantly exclaimed : “ It sets freedom and 
 slavery face to face, and bids them grapple.” 
 Nebraska was conceded to freedom, but the 
 day Kansas, the southern Territory, was 
 thrown open to settlement, a long, confused, 
 confusing struggle began. The whole coun- 
 try was drawn into it. Blue lodges in the 
 South, emigrant aid societies in the North, 
 hurried opposing forces into the field. The 
 Southerners, aided by colonized voters from 
 Missouri, got control of the territorial legisla- 
 ture and passed a slave code. The Free-Soil- 
 ers, ignoring the government thus established, 
 
LEADERSHIP 
 
 99 
 
 gathered in convention at Topeka, formed a 
 free state constitution, and demanded to be 
 admitted into the Union as a State. When 
 a new Congress assembled in December, 
 1855, there were two governments in Kan- 
 sas, and the people were separated into hos- 
 tile camps. Brawls were frequent, and it 
 was clear that very soon, unless the general 
 government intervened, there would be con- 
 certed violence. A force of several thousand 
 pro-slavery men, encamped on the Wakarusa 
 Kiver, were threatening Lawrence, the prin- 
 cipal Free-Soil town. The Free-Soil men 
 were in a majority, but their course had been 
 in disregard of law. The pro-slavery men 
 were in a minority, they had resorted to vio- 
 lence and fraud, but they had followed the 
 forms of law. 
 
 President Pierce, swayed by Jefferson 
 Davis, took the side of slavery. The House 
 was nearly two months organizing, and then 
 the President sent in a message to Congress 
 denouncing the Free-Soilers for resisting the 
 laws. He followed it up with a proclamation, 
 and placed United States troops at the dis- 
 
100 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 posal of the regular territorial government. 
 In March, Douglas, from his Committee on 
 Territories, made a long report on all that 
 had occurred. He, too, laid the blame on 
 the emigrant aid societies. He was against 
 the Topeka constitution, and offered, instead, 
 a hill providing for the admission of Kan- 
 sas, so soon as her population should reach 
 93,000, which would entitle her to one re- 
 presentative in Congress, with such constitu- 
 tion as her people might lawfully adopt. The 
 House, with an anti-slavery majority, was for 
 admitting Kansas at once with the Topeka 
 constitution. So was the anti-slavery group 
 in the Senate, now swelled into a strong mi- 
 nority. In the fierce debate that followed, 
 Douglas had to defend the results, as well as 
 the theory, of his law. Sumner was the bit- 
 terest of his assailants, and their controversy 
 passed all bounds of parliamentary restraint. 
 In Sumner’s famous speech on the crime 
 against Kansas, Butler, of South Carolina, 
 was represented as the Don Quixote of slav- 
 ery, Douglas as its Sancho Panza, “ ready 
 to do all its humiliating offices.” The day 
 
LEADERSHIP 
 
 101 
 
 after that speech, Lawrence was sacked, and 
 civil war broke out in Kansas. The next 
 day, Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, as- 
 saulted Sumner and beat him down on the 
 floor of the Senate. Ten days later, the 
 Democratic convention met at Cincinnati to 
 name a candidate for the presidency. 
 
 Douglas had won a good following from 
 the South, but Pierce was the first choice 
 of the Southerners. They wanted a servant 
 merely, not a leader, in the White House. 
 But it was no longer a question of the South’s 
 preference alone : it was a question of hold- 
 ing the two or three Northern States that 
 were still Democratic. Of these, Pennsyl- 
 vania was the most important. Buchanan 
 was the choice of the Northern delegates be- 
 cause he was a Pennsylvanian and because, 
 abroad on a foreign mission, he had escaped 
 all responsibility for Kansas. On the first 
 ballot, he led with 135 votes, Pierce was sec- 
 ond with 122, and Douglas had but 33, but 
 as before he rose as the balloting proceeded. 
 Pierce’s vote fell away ; after the fourteenth 
 ballot, his name was withdrawn. On the 
 
102 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 fifteenth, Buchanan had 168, Douglas 118. 
 Richardson, Douglas’s manager, thereupon 
 arose and read a dispatch from his chief di- 
 recting his friends to obey the will of the 
 majority and give Buchanan the necessary 
 two thirds. Once more, the prize escaped 
 him, though he had hid for it with his coun- 
 try’s peace. / - j 
 
 But the platform proclaimed the princi- 
 ple of his famous law to he “ the only sound 
 and safe solution of the slavery question.” 
 He was at the head of his party as Clay 
 had for so many years headed the Whigs. 
 He had the substance of power, the reality 
 of leadership, whosesoever the trappings and 
 the title might he. Every move in Con- 
 gress was made with a view to its effect in 
 the campaign, and it was he who arranged 
 the issues. Toombs, of Georgia, offered an 
 enabling act of admirable fairness, intended 
 to secure the people of Kansas in their right 
 to have such a state constitution as they 
 might prefer, and Douglas adopted it and 
 held the Senate for it against the House bill 
 to admit Kansas with the Topeka constitu- 
 
LEADERSHIP 
 
 103 
 
 tion. No agreement could be reached, for 
 the Republicans in their platform had de- 
 clared for the prohibition of slavery in all 
 the Territories. “ Bleeding Kansas ” was 
 their war-cry, and Douglas charged, not with- 
 out reason, that they meant to keep Kansas 
 bleeding until the election. The House 
 went so far as to attach a rider to the army 
 appropriation bill forbidding the President 
 to employ United States troops in aid of the 
 territorial authorities, and would not per- 
 mit the appropriations to pass in their or- 
 dinary form until Congress adjourned and 
 the President was forced to call an extra 
 session. 
 
 But the Republican party had not yet 
 gathered into its ranks all those who in their 
 hearts favored its policy. The reality of 
 civil war in Kansas brought a sobering sense 
 of danger to the Union which worked con- 
 trary to the angry revolt against the slave 
 power, and Buchanan’s appeal to the lovers 
 of the Union in both sections was successful. 
 He was elected, and the Democrats, with 
 a majority in both houses of Congress, got 
 
104 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 once more a free hand with Kansas and the 
 slavery question. 
 
 They had, too, a majority of the Supreme 
 Court, and now for the first time the court 
 came forward with its view of the question. 
 Two days after the inauguration, the Dred 
 Scott decision was handed down, and the 
 territorial controversy passed into a new 
 phase. All parties were forced to reconsider 
 their positions. Douglas, especially, had 
 need of all his adroitness to bring his doc- 
 trine of popular sovereignty into accord with 
 the decision ; for so far as it went it ac- 
 corded completely with that extreme South- 
 ern view of Calhoun’s and Yancey’s and 
 Jefferson Davis’s which he had never yet, in 
 his striving after an approachment with the 
 South, ventured far enough to accept. The 
 court decided that the Declaration of In- 
 dependence did not mean negroes when it 
 declared all men to be equal ; that no negro 
 could become a citizen of the United States ; 
 that the right of property in slaves was af- 
 firmed in the Constitution ; and that Con- 
 gress had no power to prohibit slavery in 
 
LEADERSHIP 
 
 105 
 
 any Territory. Tlie announcement that the 
 eighth clause of the Missouri Compromise 
 law was unconstitutional was acceptable 
 enough to the man who had accomplished 
 its repeal, hut what became of popular sov- 
 ereignty if the Constitution itself decreed 
 slavery into the Territories ? But Douglas, 
 whether he met the difficulty effectively or 
 not, faced it promptly. Speaking at Spring- 
 field in June, he indorsed the decision, not 
 merely as authoritative, but as right ; and 
 he claimed that it was in accord with his 
 doctrine. For slavery, he pointed out, was 
 dependent for its existence anywhere upon 
 positive legislation. This the inhabitants of 
 a Territory, acting through their territorial 
 legislature, could grant or deny as they 
 chose. The constitutional right of a slave- 
 holder to take his property into a Territory 
 would avail him nothing if he found there 
 no laws and police regulations to protect it. 
 
 The decision was, however, universally 
 and rightly considered a great victory for 
 slavery. It condemned the Republican pro- 
 gramme as unconstitutional, and it strength- 
 
106 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 enecl the contention of the Southerners. 
 But the Southern leaders were in little need 
 of heartening : no cause ever had bolder 
 and firmer champions. Under cover of the 
 panic of 1857, which drew men’s minds 
 away from politics, a group of them were 
 already planning a most daring last attempt 
 to bring Kansas into the Union as a slave 
 State. In the grappling there, freedom had 
 shown itself stronger than slavery. Robert 
 J. Walker, a slaveholder, whom Buchanan 
 and Douglas had persuaded to accept the 
 governorship, reported that the Free-Soilers 
 outnumbered their adversaries three to one. 
 The legislature had provided for the election 
 of delegates to a constitutional convention, 
 and when the question of submitting the 
 constitution to the people arose, the gov- 
 ernor, an upright man, promptly announced 
 that it would be submitted, and the admin- 
 istration sustained him. Many Free-Soilers, 
 however, made the mistake of staying away 
 from the polls on election day. The conven- 
 tion, under control of the pro-slavery leaders, 
 met in October at Lecompton, drew up a 
 
LEADERSHIP 
 
 107 
 
 constitution wliieli safeguarded slavery elab- 
 orately, and hit upon an extraordinary way 
 to submit it to the people. The electors 
 were permitted to vote either “ for the consti- 
 tution with slavery,” or “ for the constitu- 
 tion without slavery,” but not against the 
 constitution as a whole. Even if “ the con- 
 stitution without slavery ” carried, such 
 slaves as were already held in Kansas could 
 continue to he held. 
 
 So far had the Democratic party pro- 
 gressed toward the extreme Southern view, 
 and such was the ascendency of the South- 
 erners over Buchanan, that he would not 
 stand up against the outrageous scheme, and 
 it seemed on the point of succeeding. But 
 Douglas was come now to a parting of the 
 ways. Forced to choose between absolute 
 subserviency to the South and what was left 
 of his principle of popular sovereignty, he 
 remonstrated angrily with the President for 
 breaking faith with Walker and the Kan- 
 sans. At the end of a stormy interview, 
 Buchanan, stirred out of his wonted placid- 
 ity, threateningly reminded the senator that 
 
108 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 no Democrat ever broke with a Democratic 
 administration without being crushed. Doug- 
 las scornfully retorted : u Mr. President, I 
 wish you to remember that General Jackson 
 is dead.” The new Congress was no sooner 
 assembled than the Lecompton programme 
 became the central issue, and Douglas, in 
 flat rebellion against his party’s Southern 
 masters, in open defiance of his party’s Pre- 
 sident, was again the man of the hour. 
 
 Superb fighter that he was, he had a 
 fighter’s best opportunity, — great odds to 
 fight against, and at last a good cause to 
 fight for. The administration proscribed 
 him. The whole South, so lately reciting 
 his praises, rose up against him and reviled 
 him as a traitor. Of his party associates in 
 the Senate, but two or three were brave 
 enough to follow him. Moreover, the panic 
 had swept away his wealth. He was near 
 the end of his term of office, and the trend 
 in Illinois was toward the Republicans. The 
 long tide which had so steadily borne him on 
 to fortune seemed to ebb. Married again 
 but recently, and to the most beautiful wo- 
 
LEADERSHIP 
 
 109 
 
 man in Washington, he must have had in 
 mind, as he took up his new role, some such 
 thought as that which fortified his favorite 
 hero at Marengo : one battle was lost, but 
 there was time enough to win another. 
 
 The Lecompton plotters had reckoned on 
 the opposition of the Republicans. It was 
 Douglas and his handfid of followers who 
 confoimded them. At once, they accused 
 him of deserting them to make sure of his 
 reelection to the Senate. But as the de- 
 bate progressed, and his name kept appear- 
 ing on the same side with Sumner’s and 
 Seward's in the divisions, another notion 
 spread. Horace Greeley and other Republi- 
 cans began to suggest that he might be the 
 man to lead the new party to victory on a 
 more moderate platform. Throughout the 
 North, people who had abhorred him came 
 first to wonder at him and then to praise 
 him. 
 
 But he fought the Lecompton conspiracy 
 from his old base. It was contrary to the 
 principle of the Ivansas-Nebraska Act ; there 
 had been gross frauds at the election of del- 
 
110 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 egates ; the form of submission was a mock- 
 ery of the electors. He would say nothing 
 for slavery or against it. He cared not 
 “ whether slavery was voted up or voted 
 down.” Give the people a fair and free 
 chance to form and adopt a constitution, and 
 he would accept it. Let them have a fair 
 vote on the Lecompton constitution, and if 
 they ratified it he would accept that. Rat- 
 ified it was at the absurd election the con- 
 vention had ordered, for the great majority 
 of the settlers could not vote their opposition, 
 hut when the legislature, now Free-Soil, 
 took the authority to submit it as a whole, 
 the majority against it by far exceeded the 
 highest total of votes the pro-slavery men 
 had ever mustered. Nevertheless, the Sen- 
 ate passed it, Douglas and three other Demo- 
 crats voting in the negative. His following 
 in the House was greater, and the bill was 
 there amended so as to provide for submit- 
 ting the constitution to the people. There 
 was a conference, and in its final form the 
 bill offered the people of Kansas a bribe of 
 lands if they would accept the constitution, 
 
LEADERSHIP 
 
 111 
 
 and threatened them with an indefinite de- 
 lay of statehood if they should reject it. 
 Douglas, however, after some hesitation, re- 
 fused to vote for the hill as amended, and 
 when the time came the Kansans, by more 
 than five to one, rejected the constitution 
 and the bribe. 
 
 So the session brought no settlement, and 
 Kansas was still the burning issue when 
 Douglas went back to Illinois and took the 
 stump in the senatorial campaign. Victor 
 in a stirring parliamentary contest, this time 
 Chicago welcomed him. But there awaited 
 him treason in the ranks of his own party, 
 — for the administration, beaten in Con- 
 gress, attacked him at home, — and an op- 
 position now completely formed and led by 
 a man whom Douglas himself, in his own 
 heart, dreaded as he had never dreaded the 
 ablest of his rivals at Washington. The 
 Republicans had taken the unusual course 
 of holding a convention to nominate their 
 candidate for the Senate, and the candidate 
 was Abraham Lincoln. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE RIVALS 
 
 Hamilton and Jefferson, Clay and Jack- 
 son, Douglas and Lincoln, — these are the 
 three great rivalries of American politics. 
 The third was not the least. If it fell short 
 of the others pn variety of confrontments, if 
 it was not so long drawn out, or accompanied 
 with so frequent and imposing alignments 
 and realignments of vast contending forces on 
 a broad and national field, it surpassed them 
 in the clearness of the sole and vital issue it 
 involved, in a closer contact and measuring 
 of powers, in the complete and subtle corre- 
 spondence of the characters of the rivals to 
 the causes for which they fought. 
 
 Douglas was the very type of that instant 
 success which waits on ability undistracted 
 by doubt and undeterred by the fear of do- 
 ing wrong ; the best exemplar of that Amer- 
 ican statesmanship which accepted things as 
 
THE RIVALS 
 
 113 
 
 they were and made the most of them. 
 Facile, keen, effective, he had found life a 
 series of opportunities easily embraced. 
 Precocious in youth, marvelously active in 
 manhood, he had learned without study, re- 
 solved without meditation, accomplished with- 
 out toil. Whatever obstacles he had found 
 in his path, he had either adroitly avoided 
 them or boldly overleaped them, but never 
 laboriously uprooted them. Whatever sub- 
 ject he had taken in hand, he had swiftly 
 compassed it, but rarely probed to the heart 
 of it. With books he dealt as he dealt with 
 men, getting from them quickly what he 
 liked or needed ; he was as unlikely to pore 
 over a volume, and dog-ear and annotate it, 
 as he was with correspondence and slow talk 
 and silences to draw out a friendship. Yet 
 he was not cold or mean, but capable of 
 hero-worship, following with ardor the ca- 
 reers of great conquerors like Caesar and 
 Napoleon, and capable, too, of loyalty to 
 party and to men. He had great personal 
 magnetism : young men, especially, he 
 charmed and held as no other public man 
 
114 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 could, now Clay was dead. His habits were 
 convivial, and the vicious indulgence of his 
 strong and masculine appetites, the only re- 
 laxation he craved in the intervals of his fierce 
 activities, had caused him frequent illnesses ; 
 hut he was still a young man, even by Amer- 
 ican standards, for the eminence he had at- 
 tained. At the full of his extraordinary 
 powers, battling for the high place he had 
 and the higher he aspired to, there was no- 
 where to be seen his equal as a debater or a 
 politician, — nowhere but in the ungainly 
 figure, now once more erected into a posture 
 of rivalry and defiance, of the man whom he 
 had long ago outstripped and left behind him 
 in the home of their common beginnings. 
 
 Slower of growth, and devoid altogether 
 of many brilliant qualities which his rival 
 possessed, Lincoln nevertheless outreached 
 him by the measure of the two gifts the other 
 lacked : the ’twin gifts of h umo r and of brood- 
 ing mela ncholy. Bottomed by the one in 
 homeliness, his character was by the other 
 drawn upward to the height of human nobility 
 and aspiration. His great capacity of pain, 
 
THE RIVALS 
 
 115 
 
 which hut for his buffoonery would no doubt 
 have made him mad, was the source of his 
 rarest excellencies. Familiar with squalor, 
 and hospitable to vulgarity, his mind was 
 yet tenanted by sorrow, a place of midnight 
 wrestlings. In him, as never before in any 
 other man, were high and low things mated, 
 and awkwardness and ungainliness and un- 
 couthness justified in their uses. At once 
 coarser than his rival and infinitely more re- 
 fined and gentle, he had mastered lessons 
 which the other had never found the need 
 of learning, or else had learned too readily 
 and then dismissed. He had thoroughness 
 for the other’s competence ; insight into hu- 
 man nature, and a vast sympathy, for the 
 other’s facile handling of men ; a deep devo- 
 tion to the right for the other’s loyalty to 
 party platforms. The very core of his na- 
 ture was truth, and he himself is reported to 
 have said of Douglas that he cared less for 
 the truth, as the truth, than any other man 
 he knew. 
 
 Hanging for some years upon the heels of 
 his rival’s rapid ascent, Lincoln had entered 
 
116 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 the House as Douglas left it for the Senate, 
 but at the end of the term he retired from 
 polities baffled and discouraged. Tortured 
 with the keen apprehension of a form and 
 grace into which he could never monld his 
 crudeness, tantalized with a sense that there 
 must be a way for him to get a hold on 
 his fellows and make a figure in the history 
 of his times, he had watched the power of 
 Douglas grow and the fame of Douglas 
 spread until it seemed that Douglas’s voice 
 was always speaking and Douglas’s hand was 
 everywhere. Patiently working out the right 
 and wrong of the fateful question Douglas 
 dealt with so boldly, he came into the impreg- 
 nable position of such as hated slavery and yet 
 forbore to violate its sanctuary. Suddenly, 
 with the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, 
 Douglas himself had opened a path for him. 
 He went back into politics, and took a lead- 
 ing part in the Anti-Nebraska movement. 
 Whenever opportunity offered, he combated 
 Douglas on the stump. The year Trumbull 
 won the senatorship, Lincoln had first come 
 within a few votes of it. Risen now to the 
 
THE RIVALS 
 
 117 
 
 leadership of the Republicans in Illinois, he 
 awaited Douglas at Chicago, listened to his 
 opening speech, answered it the next even- 
 ing, followed him into the centre of the 
 State, and finally proposed a series of joint 
 debates before the people. Douglas hesi- 
 tated, but accepted, and named seven meet- 
 ing-places : Ottawa and Freeport, in the 
 northern stronghold of the Republicans ; 
 Galesburg, Quincy, and Charleston, in a re- 
 gion where both parties had a good follow- 
 ing ; and Jonesboro and Alton, which were 
 in “ Egypt.” The first meeting was at Ot- 
 tawa, in August ; the last, at Alton, in the 
 middle of October. Meanwhile, both spoke 
 incessantly at other places, Douglas oftener 
 than once a day. First the fame of Doug- 
 las, and then Lincoln’s unexpected survival 
 of the early meetings, drew the eyes of the 
 whole country upon these two foremost 
 Americans of their generation, face to face 
 there on the Western prairie, fighting out 
 the great question of the times. 
 
 Elevated side by side on wooden plat- 
 forms in the open air, thrown into relief 
 
118 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 against the low prairie sky line, the two 
 figures take strong hold upon the im igina- 
 tion : the one lean, long-limbed, uncommonly 
 tall; the other scarce five feet high, but 
 compact, manful, instinct with energy, and 
 topped with its massive head. In voice and 
 gesture and manner, Douglas was incom- 
 parably the superior, as he was, too, in the 
 ready command of a language never, indeed, 
 ornate or imaginative, and sometimes of the 
 quality of political commonplace, but always 
 forcible and always intelligible to his audi- 
 ence. Lincoln had the sense of words, the 
 imagination, the intensity of feeling, which 
 go to the making of great literature ; but 
 for his masterpieces he always needed time. 
 His voice was high and strained, his gestures 
 ungraceful, his manner painful, save in the 
 recital of those passages which he had care- 
 fully prepared or when he was freed of his 
 self-consciousness by anger or enthusiasm. 
 Neither of them, in any single speech, could 
 be compared to Webster in the other of the 
 two most famous American debates, but the 
 series was a remarkable exhibition of foren- 
 
THE RIVALS 
 
 119 
 
 sic power. The interest grew as the strug- 
 gle lengthened. People traveled great 
 distances to hear them. At every meeting- 
 place, a multitude of farmers and dwellers 
 in country towns, with, liere and tliere a 
 sprinkling of city-folk, crowded about the 
 stand where “ Old Abe ” and the “ Little 
 Giant ” turned and twisted and fenced for 
 an opening, grappled and drew apart, 
 clinched and strained aud staggered, — but 
 neither fell. The wonder grew that Lincohi 
 stood up so well under the onslaughts of 
 Douglas, at once skillful and reckless, held 
 him off with so firm a hand, gripped him so 
 shrewdly. Now, the wonder is that Doug- 
 las, wrestling with the man and the cause 
 of a century, kept his feet and held his 
 own. 
 
 He was fighting, too, with an enemy in 
 the rear. When he turned to strike at the 
 administration, Lincoln would call out : 
 “ Go it, husband ! Go it, bear ! ” Apart 
 from that diversion, however, the debate, 
 long and involved as it was, followed but 
 three general lines. The whole is resolvable 
 
120 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 into three elements, — personalities , politics. 
 and principles. There were the attacks which 
 each made upon the other’s record ; the ef- 
 forts which each made to weaken the other’s 
 position before the people ; and the con- 
 trary views which were advanced. 
 
 Douglas began, indeed, with gracious com- 
 pliments to his opponent, calling him “ an 
 amiable, kindly, and intelligent gentleman.” 
 Lincoln, unused to praise from such a source, 
 protested he was like the Hoosier with the 
 gingerbread : “ He reckoned he liked it bet- 
 ter than any other man, and got less of it.” 
 But in a moment Douglas was charging that 
 Lincoln and Trumbull, Whig and Demo- 
 crat, had made a coalition in 1854 to form 
 the Black Republican party and get for 
 themselves the two senatorships from Illi- 
 nois, and that Trumbull had broken faith 
 with Lincoln. Lincoln in turn made a 
 charge that Douglas had conspired with 
 Presidents Pierce and Buchanan and Chief 
 Justice Taney to spread slavei’y and make it 
 universal. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was 
 their first step, the Dred Scott decision the 
 
THE RIVALS 
 
 121 
 
 second ; but one more step, and slavery 
 could be fastened upon States as they had al- 
 ready fastened it upon Territories. Douglas 
 protesting that to bring such a charge, in- 
 capable of proof or disproof, was indecent, 
 Lincoln pointed out that Douglas had sim- 
 ilarly charged the administration with con- 
 spiring to force a slave constitution upon 
 Kansas ; and afterwards took up a charge 
 of Trumbull’s that Douglas himself had at 
 first conspired with Toombs and other sen- 
 ators to prevent any reference to the people 
 of whatsoever constitution the Kansas con- 
 vention might adopt. When they moved 
 southward, Douglas charged Lincoln with 
 inconsistency in that he changed his stand 
 to suit the leanings of different communi- 
 ties. Of all these charges and counter- 
 charges, however, none was absolutely 
 proved, and no one now believes those which 
 Douglas brought. But he made them serve, 
 and Lincoln’s, though he sustained them 
 with far better evidence, and pressed them 
 home with a wonderful clearness of reason- 
 ing, — once, he actually threw his argument 
 
122 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 into a syllogism, — did no great harm to 
 Douglas. 
 
 It was Douglas, too, who began the spar- 
 ring for a political advantage. He knew 
 that Lincoln’s following was heterogeneous. 
 “ Their principles,” he jeered, “ in the north 
 are jet black, in the centre they are in color 
 a decent mulatto, and in lower Egypt they 
 are almost white.” His aim, therefore, was 
 to fix upon Lincoln such extreme views as 
 would alarm the more moderate of his fol- 
 lowers, since the extremists must take him 
 perforce, as a choice of two evils, even though 
 he fell far short of their radical standard. 
 To this end, Douglas produced certain reso- 
 lutions which purported to have been adopted 
 by an Anti-Nebraska convention at Spring- 
 field in 1854, and would have held Lincoln 
 responsible for them. In a series of ques- 
 tions, he asked whether Lincoln were still 
 opposed to a fugitive slave law, to the ad- 
 mission of a,ny more slave States, and to ac- 
 quiring any more territory unless the Wilmot 
 Proviso were applied to it, and if he were 
 still for prohibiting slavery outright in all 
 
THE RIVALS 
 
 123 
 
 the Territories and in the District of Co- 
 lumbia, and for prohibiting the interstate 
 slave trade. It soon transpired that Lincoln 
 was not present at the Springfield convention, 
 and that the resolutions were not adopted 
 there, but somewhere else, and Douglas had 
 to defend himself against a charge of mis- 
 representation. Nevertheless, when they met 
 the second time, at Freeport, Lincoln an- 
 swered the questions. He admitted the right 
 of the South to a fugitive slave law. He 
 would favor abolition in the District only 
 if it were gradual, compensated, and accom- 
 plished with the consent of the inhabitants. 
 He was not sure of the right of Congress to 
 prohibit the interstate slave trade. He would 
 oppose the annexation of fresh territory if 
 there were reason to believe it would tend 
 to aggravate the slavery controversy. He 
 could see no way to deny the people of a 
 Territory if slavery were prohibited among 
 them during their territorial life and they 
 nevertheless asked to come into the Union 
 as a slave State. These cautious and hesi- 
 tating answers displeased the stalwart anti- 
 
124 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 slavery men. Lincoln would go their lengths 
 in but one particular : he was for prohibit- 
 ing slavery outright in all the Territories. 
 
 Then he brought forward some questions 
 for Douglas to answer. Would Douglas vote 
 to admit Kansas with less than 93,000 in- 
 habitants if she presented a free state consti- 
 tution? Would he vote to acquire fresh 
 territory without regard to its effect on the 
 slavery dispute ? If the Supreme Court 
 should decide against the right of a State 
 to prohibit slavery, would he acquiesce? 
 “Can the people of a United States Terri- 
 tory, in any lawful way, against the wish of 
 any citizen of the United States, exclude 
 slavery from its limits prior to the formation 
 of a state constitution ? ” 
 
 Douglas had no great difficulty with the 
 first three questions, and the fourth — the 
 second, as Lincoln read them — he had in 
 fact answered several times already, and in 
 a way to please the Democrats of Illinois. 
 But Lincoln, contrary to the advice of his 
 friends, pressed it on him again with a view 
 to the “ all hail hereafter,” for it was meant 
 
THE EIVALS 
 
 125 
 
 to bring out the inconsistency of tlie princi- 
 ple of popular sovereignty with the Drecl 
 Scott decision, and the difference between 
 the Northern and the Southern Democrats. 
 Douglas answered it as he had before. The 
 people of a Territory, through their legisla- 
 ture, could by unfriendly laws, or merely by 
 denying legislative protection, make it impos- 
 sible for a slave-owner to hold his slaves 
 among them, no matter what rights he might 
 have under the Constitution. Lincoln de- 
 clared that the answer was historically false, 
 for slaves had been held in Territories in 
 spite of unfriendly legislation, and pointed 
 out that if the Dred Scott decision was right 
 the members of a territorial legislature, when 
 they took an oath to support the Constitu- 
 tion, bound themselves to grant slavery pro- 
 tection. Later, in a fifth and last question, 
 he asked whether, in case the slave-owners of 
 a Territory demanded of Congress protection 
 for their property, Douglas would vote to 
 give it to them. But Douglas fell back upon 
 his old position that Congress had no right 
 to intervene. He would not break with his 
 
126 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 supporters in Illinois, but by liis “ Freeport 
 Doctrine ” of unfriendly legislation be bad 
 broken forever with the men wlio were now 
 in control of bis party in tlie Southern States. 
 
 It was Lincoln who took the aggressive 
 on principles. A famous paragraph of bis 
 speech before the convention which nomi- 
 nated him began with the words : A house 
 divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe 
 this government cannot endure permanently 
 half slave and half free.” That was a direct 
 challenge to Douglas and his whole plan with 
 slavery, and throughout the debate, at every 
 meeting, the doctrine of the divided house 
 was attacked and defended. Douglas de- 
 clared that Lincoln was inciting half his 
 countrymen to make war upon the other half ; 
 that he went for uniformity of domestic in- 
 stitutions everywhere, instead of letting dif- 
 ferent communities manage their domestic 
 affairs as they chose. But no, Lincoln pro- 
 tested, he was merely for resisting the spread 
 of slavery and putting it in such a state that 
 the public mind would rest in the hope of 
 its ultimate extinction. “ But why,” cried 
 
THE RIVALS 
 
 127 
 
 Douglas, “ cannot this government go on as 
 the fathers left it, as it has gone on for more 
 than a century ? ” Lincoln met him on that 
 ground, and had the better of him in discuss- 
 ing what the fathers meant concerning slav- 
 ery. They did not mean, he argued, to leave 
 it alone to grow and spread, for they prohib- 
 ited it in the Northwest Territory, they left 
 the word “ slave ” out of the Constitution in 
 the hope of a time when there should be no 
 slaves under the flag. Over the true mean- 
 ing of the Declaration of Independence, how- 
 ever, Douglas had a certain advantage, for 
 Lincoln found the difficulty which candid 
 minds still find in applying the principle of 
 equality to races of unequal strength. Doug- 
 las plainly declared that ours is a white man's 
 government. Lincoln admitted such an in- 
 feriority in negroes as would forever prevent 
 the two races from living together on terms 
 of perfect social and political equality, and 
 if there must be inequality he was in favor 
 of his own race having the superior place. 
 He could only contend, therefore, for the 
 negro’s equality in those rights which are 
 
128 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 set forth in the Declaration. Douglas made 
 the most of this, and of Lincoln’s failure, 
 through a neglect to study the economic 
 character of slavery, to show clearly how 
 the mere restriction of it would lead to its 
 extinction. 
 
 But Douglas did not, and perhaps he 
 could not, follow Lincoln when he passed 
 from the Declaration and the Constitution 
 to the “ higher law,” from the question of 
 rights to the question of light and wrong ; 
 for there Lincoln rose not merely above 
 Douglas, but above all that sort of politics 
 which both he and Douglas came out of. 
 There, indeed, was the true difference be- 
 tween these men and their causes. Douglas 
 seems to shrink backward into the past, and 
 Lincoln to come nearer and grow larger as 
 he proclaims it : “ That is the real issue. 
 That is the issue which will continue in this 
 country when these poor tongues of Judge 
 Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is 
 the eternal struggle between these two prin- 
 ciples — right and wrong — throughout the 
 world.” 
 
THE RIVALS 
 
 129 
 
 Nevertheless, Douglas won the senator- 
 ship and kept his hold on the Northern De- 
 mocrats. Immediately, he made a visit to 
 the South. He got a hearing there, and so 
 made good his boast that lie could proclaim 
 his principles anywhere in the Union ; but 
 when he returned to Washington he found 
 that the party caucus, controlled by Buchanan 
 and the Southerners, had deposed him from 
 the chairmanship of the Committee on Ter- 
 ritories, which he had held so many years, and 
 from this time he was constantly engaged 
 with the enemies he had made by his course 
 onLecompton and by his Freeport Doctrine. 
 His Northern opponents were no longer in 
 his way. He had overmatched Sumner and 
 Seward in the Senate, and beaten the ad- 
 ministration, and held his own with Lincoln, 
 but the unbending and relentless Southern- 
 ers he could neither beat nor placate. It 
 was men like Jefferson Davis in the Senate, 
 and Yancey at Southern barbecues and con- 
 ventions, who stood now between him and 
 his ambition. That very slave power which 
 he had served so well was upreared to crush 
 
130 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 him because he hacl come to the limit of his 
 subserviency. His plan of squatter sover- 
 eignty had not got the Southerners Kansas, 
 or any other slave State, to balance Califor- 
 nia and Minnesota and Oregon. They de- 
 manded of Congress positive protection for 
 slavery in the Territories. The most signifi- 
 cant debate of the session was between 
 Douglas on the one side and a group of 
 Southern senators, led by Jefferson Davis, 
 on the other. He stood up against them 
 manfully, and told them frankly that not a 
 single Northern State would vote for any 
 candidate on their platform, and they as 
 flatly informed him that he could not carry 
 a single Southern State on his. 
 
 He was too good a politician to yield, even 
 if there had been no other reason to stand 
 firm, but continued to defend the only doc- 
 trine on which there was the slightest chance 
 of beating the Republicans in the approach- 
 ing election. One method he took to defend 
 it was novel, but he has had many imitators 
 among public men of a later day. He wrote 
 out his argument for “ Harper’s,” the most 
 
THE RIVALS 
 
 131 
 
 popular magazine of tlie day. The article 
 is not nearly so good reading as liis speeches, 
 but it was widely read. Judge Jeremiah 
 Black, the Attorney-General of Buchanan’s 
 cabinet, made a reply to it, and Douglas re- 
 joined ; but little of value was added to the 
 discussions in Congress and on the stump. 
 The Southerners, however, would not take 
 warning. As they saw their long ascend- 
 ency in the government coming to an end, 
 their demands rose higher. Some of them 
 actually began to agitate for a revival of the 
 African slave trade ; and this also Douglas 
 had to oppose. His following in the Sen- 
 ate was now reduced to two or three, and 
 one of these, Broderick, of California, a 
 hrave and steadfast man, was first defeated 
 by the Southern interest, and then slain in 
 a duel. John Brown's invasion of Virginia 
 somewhat offset the aggressions of the 
 South ; but that, too, might have gone for 
 a warning. The elections in the autumn 
 of 1859 were enough to show that the North 
 was no longer disposed to forbearance with 
 slavery. Douglas went as far as any man 
 
132 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 ill reason could go in denouncing John 
 Brown and those who were thought to have 
 set him on ; and he supported a new plan 
 for getting Cuba. But Davis, on the very 
 eve of the Democratic convention at Charles- 
 ton, was pressing upon the Senate a series 
 of resolutions setting forth the extreme de- 
 mand of the South concerning the Terri- 
 tories. He was as bitter toward Douglas 
 as he was toward the Republicans. At 
 Charleston, Yancey took the same tone with 
 the convention. 
 
 Practically the whole mass of the Northern 
 Democrats were for Douglas now, and the 
 mass of Southern Democrats were against 
 him. The party was divided, as the whole 
 country was, by a line that ran from East 
 to West. Yet it was felt that nothing but 
 the success of that party would avert the 
 danger of disunion, and the best judges 
 were of opinion that it could not succeed 
 with any other candidate than Douglas or 
 any other platform than popular sovereignty. 
 His managers at Charleston offered the Cin- 
 cinnati platform of 1856, with the addition 
 
THE RIVALS 
 
 133 
 
 of a demand for Cuba and an indorsement 
 of the Dred Scott decision and of any future 
 decisions of the Supreme Court on slavery 
 in the Territories. But the Southerners 
 would not yield a hair’s breadth. Yancey, 
 their orator, upbraided Douglas and his fol- 
 lowers with cowardice because they did not 
 dare to tell the North that slavery was right. 
 In that strange way the question of right and 
 wrong was forced again upon the man who 
 strove to ignore it. Senator Pugh, of Ohio, 
 spokesman for Douglas, answered the fire- 
 eaters. “ Gentlemen of the South,” he cried, 
 “ you mistake us ! You mistake us ! We 
 will not do it.” The Douglas platform was 
 adopted, and the men of the cotton States 
 withdrew. On ballot after ballot, a ma- 
 jority of those who remained, and a ma- 
 jority of the whole convention, stood firm 
 for Douglas, but it was decided that two 
 thirds of the whole convention was required 
 to nominate. Men who had followed his 
 fortunes until his ambition was become 
 their hope in life, wearied out with the long- 
 deferment, broke down and wept. Finally, 
 
134 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 it was voted to adjourn to Baltimore. In 
 the interval, Davis and Douglas fell once 
 more into their hitter controversy in the 
 Senate. 
 
 At Baltimore, a new set of delegates from 
 the cotton States appeared in place of the 
 seceders, hut they were no sooner admitted 
 than another group withdrew, and even 
 Cushing, the chairman, left his seat and fol- 
 lowed them. Douglas telegraphed his friends 
 to sacrifice him if it were necessary to save 
 his platform, but the rump convention 
 adopted the platform and nominated him. 
 The two groups of seceders united on the 
 Yancey platform and on Breckinridge, of 
 Kentucky, for a candidate. A new party of 
 sincere hut unpractical Union-savers took 
 the field with John Bell, an old Whig, for a 
 candidate, and a platform of patriotic plat- 
 itudes. The Republicans, guided in ways 
 they themselves did not under stand, had put 
 aside Seward and taken Lincoln to he their 
 leader. 
 
 The rivals were again confronted, hut on 
 cruelly unequal terms. From the first, it 
 
THE RIVALS 
 
 135 
 
 was clear that nearly the whole North was 
 going Republican, and that the cotton States 
 were for Breckinridge or disunion. What- 
 ever chance Douglas had in the border 
 States and in the Democratic States of the 
 North was destroyed by the new party. But 
 he knew he was at the head of the true party 
 of Jefferson, he felt that the old Union 
 would not stand if he was beaten. He was 
 the leader of a forlorn hope, but he led it 
 superbly well. He undertook a canvass of 
 the country the like of which no candidate 
 had ever made before. At the very outset 
 of it he was called upon to show his colors 
 in the greater strife that was to follow. At 
 Norfolk, in Virginia, it was demanded of 
 him to say whether the election of a Black 
 Republican President would justify the 
 Southern States in seceding. He answered, 
 no. Pennsylvania was again the pivotal 
 State, and at an election in October the Re- 
 publicans carried it over all their opponents 
 combined. Douglas was in Iowa when he 
 heard the news. He said calmly to his com- 
 panions : “ Lincoln is the next President. 
 
136 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 I have no hope and no destiny before me 
 but to do my best to save the Union from 
 overthrow. Now let ns turn our course to 
 the South ” — and he proceeded through the 
 border States straight to the heart of the 
 kingdom of slavery and cotton. The day 
 before the election, he spoke at Montgomery, 
 Yancey’s home ; that night, he slept at Mo- 
 bile. If in 1858 he was like Napoleon the 
 afternoon of Marengo, now he was like 
 Napoleon struggling backward in the dark- 
 ness toward the lost field of Waterloo. 
 There was a true dignity and a true patriot- 
 ism in his appeal to his maddened country- 
 men not to lift their hands against the Union 
 their fathers made : — 
 
 “ Woodman, spare that tree ! 
 
 Touch not a single hough.” 
 
 An old soldier of the Confederacy, scarred 
 with the wounds he took at Bull Run, look- 
 ing back over a wasted life to the youth he 
 sacrificed in that ill-starred cause, remembers 
 now as he remembers nothing else of the 
 whole year of revolution the last plea of 
 Douglas for the old party, the old Constitu- 
 tion, the old Union. 
 
THE RIVALS 
 
 137 
 
 He carried but one State outright, and 
 got but twelve votes iu the electoral college. 
 Lincoln swept the North, Breckinridge the 
 South, and Bell the border States. Never- 
 theless, in the popular vote, hopeless candi- 
 date that he was, he stood next to Lincohi, 
 and none of his competitors had a following 
 so evenly distributed throughout the whole 
 country. 
 
 When all was over, he could not rest, for 
 he was still the first man in Congress, but 
 hurried back to Washington and joined in 
 the anxious conferences of such as were 
 striving for a peaceable settlement. When 
 South Carolina seceded, he announced 
 plainly enough that he did not believe in the 
 right of secession or consider that there was 
 any grievance sufficient to justify the act. 
 But he was for concessions if they would 
 save the country from civil war. Crittenden, 
 of Kentucky, coming forward after the man- 
 ner of Clay with a series of amendments to 
 the Constitution, and another Committee of 
 Thirteen being named, Douglas was ready to 
 play the same part he had played in 1850. 
 
138 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 But the plan could not pass the Senate, and 
 one after another the cotton States followed 
 South Carolina. Then he labored with the 
 men of the border States, and broke his last 
 lance with Breckinridge, who, when he 
 ceased to be Vice-President, came down for 
 a little while upon the floor as a senator to 
 defend the men whom he was about to join 
 in arms against their country. Douglas en- 
 gaged him with all the old fire and force, 
 and worsted him in the debate. 
 
 His bearing toward Lincoln was generous 
 and manly. When Lincoln, rising to pro- 
 nounce his first inaugural address, looked 
 awkwardly about him for a place to bestow 
 his hat that he might adjust his glasses to 
 read those noble paragraphs, Douglas came 
 forward and took it from his hand. The 
 gracefid courtesy won him praise ; and that 
 was his attitude toward the new administra- 
 tion. The day Sumter was fired on, he went 
 to the President to offer his help and coun- 
 sel. There is reason to believe that during 
 those fearful early days of power and trial 
 Lincoln came into a better opinion of his 
 rival. 
 
THE RIVALS 
 
 139 
 
 The help of Douglas was of moment, for 
 he had the right to speak for the Democrats 
 of the North. On his way homeward, he 
 was everywhere besought to speak. Once, 
 he was aroused from sleep to address an 
 Ohio regiment marching to the front, and 
 his great voice rolled down upon them, 
 aligned beneath him in the darkness, a word 
 of loyalty and courage. At Chicago he 
 spoke firmly and finally, for himself and for 
 his party. While the hope of compromise 
 lingered, he had gone to the extreme of mag- 
 nanimity, but the time for conciliation was 
 past. “ There can be no neutrals in this 
 war,” he said : “ only patriots and traitors.” 
 They were the best words he could have 
 spoken. They were the last he ever spoke 
 to his countrymen, for at once he was stricken 
 down with a swift and mortal illness and 
 hurried to his end. A little while before 
 the end, his wife bent over him for a message 
 to his sons. He roused himself, and said : 
 “ Tell them to obey the laws and support 
 the Constitution of the United States.” 
 He died on June 11, 1861, in the forty- 
 ninth year of his age. 
 
140 STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS 
 
 It was a hard time to die. War was at 
 hand, and his strong nature stirred at the 
 call. Plunged in his youth into affairs, and 
 wonted all his life to action, he had played 
 a man’s part in great events, and greater 
 were impending. He had taken many 
 blows of men and circumstance, and stormy 
 times might bring redress. He was a leader, 
 and for want of him a great party must go 
 leaderless and stumbling to a long series of 
 defeats. He was a true American, and his 
 country was in danger. He was ambitious, 
 and his career was not rightly finished. He 
 was the second man in the Republic, and he 
 might yet be the first. 
 
 But first he never could have been while 
 Lincoln lived, nor ever could have got a hold 
 like Lincoln’s on his kind. His place i s se- 
 cure amo ng t he ve nturesome, strong, self-re- 
 liant men who in various ages and countries 
 have for a time hastened, or stayed, or di- 
 verted from its natural channel the great 
 stream of affairs. The sin of his ambition 
 is forgiven him for the good end he made. 
 But for all his splendid energy and his 
 
THE RIVALS 
 
 141 
 
 brilliant parts, for all the charm of his bold 
 
 assault on fortune and his dauntless bearing: 
 
 — 1 • 
 
 in adversity, we cannot turn from him to his 
 
 rival but with changed and softened eyes. 
 
 For Lincoln, indeed, is one of the few men 
 eminent in politics whom we admit into the 
 
 hidden place s of our thoug ht ; and there, 
 released from that coarse clay which pris- 
 
 oned him, we companion him forever with 
 the gentle and heroic of older lands. Doug- 
 las abides without. 
 
(ffibe fitoer-sibe 
 
 Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton Co, 
 Cambridge , Mass., U. S. A.