William Garrott Brown

“ 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. ”

“ 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 details of such legislation. He reported the bills by which Utah, New Mexico, Washington, Kansas, Nebraska, Oregon, and Minnesota became Territories, and those by which Texas, Iowa, Florida, California, Wisconsin, Oregon, and Minnesota became States. ”

“ The sin of his ambition is forgiven him for the good end he made. But for all his splendid energy and his [Pg 141] brilliant parts, for all the charm of his bold assault on fortune and his dauntless bearing in adversity, we cannot turn from him to his rival but with changed and softened eyes. For Lincoln, indeed, is one of the few men eminent in politics whom we admit into the hidden places of our thought; and there, released from that coarse clay which prisoned him, we companion him forever with the gentle and heroic of older lands. Douglas abides without. ”

“ When the Kansas-Nebraska bill passed, Sumner exultantly exclaimed: "It sets freedom and slavery face to face, and bids them grapple." Nebraska was conceded to freedom, but the day Kansas, the southern Territory, was thrown open to settlement, a long, confused, confusing struggle began. The whole country was drawn into it. Blue lodges in the South, emigrant aid societies in the North, hurried opposing forces into the field. The Southerners, aided by colonized voters from Missouri, got control of the territorial legislature and passed a slave code. ”

“ 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. ”

“ These cautious and hesitating answers displeased the stalwart [Pg 124] anti-slavery men. Lincoln would go their lengths in but one particular: he was for prohibiting slavery outright in all the Territories.
Then he brought forward some questions for Douglas to answer. Would Douglas vote to admit Kansas with less than 93,000 inhabitants if she presented a free state constitution? Would he vote to acquire fresh territory without regard to its effect on the slavery dispute? If the Supreme Court should decide against the right of a State to prohibit slavery, would he acquiesce? ”

“ On all these questions, alike of domestic and of foreign policy, Douglas took an eminently hopeful, an eminently confident and resolute stand. His opinions were such as befitted a strong, competent, successful man. They were characteristic of the West. They were based on a positive faith in democracy, in our constitution of government, in the American people. ”

“ In the life of another man, these boyish performances might be set down merely as signs of promise; but Douglas was so soon immersed in real politics, and rose 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. ”

“ Later, in a debate with John J. Hardin, his rival in Congress as in the Illinois legislature, he contrasted the Whig and Democratic positions 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 rapidity to positive views. ”

“ At the full of his extraordinary powers, battling for the high place he had and the higher he aspired to, there was nowhere to be seen his equal as a debater or a politician,—nowhere but in the ungainly figure, now once more erected into a posture of rivalry and defiance, of the man whom he had long ago outstripped and left behind him in the home of their common beginnings. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Jefferson Davis had opposed it, and had often been pitted against Douglas in debate, for they were champions of contrary theories, but at the end he declared: "If any man has a right to be proud of the success of these measures, it is the senator from Illinois." The enterprise, indeed, was Clay's; his was the idea, the initiative, the general plan. It is rightly called Clay's compromise. But the execution of the plan was quite as much Douglas's work as his. When Clay died, no one had a better right than Douglas to inherit his place as the statesman and orator of compromise and conciliation. ”

“ Speaking at Springfield in June, he indorsed the decision, not merely as authoritative, but as right; and he claimed that it was in accord with his doctrine. For slavery, he pointed out, was dependent for its existence anywhere upon positive legislation. This the inhabitants of a Territory, acting through their territorial legislature, could grant or deny as they chose. The constitutional right of a slaveholder to take his property into a Territory would avail him nothing if he found there no laws and police regulations to protect it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He had the power of initiative. He was at the age when men are ripest for enterprises of pith and moment. Unhesitatingly, he advanced to the front and centre of the stage. When the session ended, his name was forever associated with a law that upset precedents and traditions, divided old parties and summoned up new ones, made—and unmade—history.
January 4, 1854, Mr. Douglas, from the Committee on Territories, reported a bill to form the Territory of Nebraska out of that part of the Louisiana Purchase which lay west and north of Missouri. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The great constructive measures of the first administration 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 history. But in Jackson's time the Senate profited by its comparative immunity from sudden political changes, by its veto on appointments, and by the greater freedom of debate which its limited membership permitted. ”

“ The court decided that the Declaration of Independence did not mean negroes when it declared all men to be equal; that no negro could become a citizen of the United States; that the right of property in slaves was affirmed in the Constitution; and that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in [Pg 105] any Territory. The announcement that the eighth clause of the Missouri Compromise law was unconstitutional was acceptable enough to the man who had accomplished its repeal, but what became of popular sovereignty if the Constitution itself decreed slavery into the Territories? ”

“ 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 [Pg 132] in reason could go in denouncing John Brown and those who were thought to have set him on; and he supported a new plan for getting Cuba. But Davis, on the very eve of the Democratic convention at Charleston, was pressing upon the Senate a series of resolutions setting forth the extreme demand of the South concerning the Territories. He was as bitter toward Douglas as he was toward the Republicans. ”

“ 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 fighting spirit or any abandonment of his democratic manners and principles. ”

“ Against Douglas there was the presumption, which every 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. ”

“ He had overmatched Sumner and Seward in the Senate, and beaten the administration, and held his own with Lincoln, but the unbending and relentless Southerners he could neither beat nor placate. It was men like Jefferson Davis in the Senate, and Yancey at Southern barbecues and conventions, who stood now between him and his ambition. ”

“ Though in the South such extremists as Yancey and Quitman declared that the so-called compromise was in fact a surrender of Southern rights and a sufficient reason for abandoning the Union, there were Northern men quite as violently exercised over what seemed to them a base truckling to the slave power. The legislature [Pg 76] of Illinois had formally instructed her senators to support the Wilmot Proviso, and Douglas had thus been compelled, all through the session, to vote for motion after motion to prohibit slavery outright in the Territories. ”

“ But the Southerners would not yield a hair's breadth. Yancey, their orator, upbraided Douglas and his followers with cowardice because they did not dare to tell the North that slavery was right. In that strange way the question of right and wrong was forced again upon the man who strove to ignore it. Senator Pugh, of Ohio, spokesman for Douglas, answered the fire-eaters. "Gentlemen of the South," he cried, "you mistake us! You mistake us! We will not do it." The Douglas platform was adopted, and the men of the cotton States withdrew. ”

“ The next day, Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, assaulted Sumner and beat him down on the floor of the Senate. Ten days later, the Democratic convention met at Cincinnati to name a candidate for the presidency.
Douglas had won a good following from the South, but Pierce was the first choice of the Southerners. They wanted a servant merely, not a leader, in the White House. But it was no longer a question of the South's preference alone: it was a question of holding the two or three Northern States that were still Democratic. Of these, Pennsylvania was the most important. ”

“ 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 boarding-school or a small college. ”

“ Pennsylvania was again the pivotal State, and at an election in October the Republicans carried it over all their opponents combined. Douglas was in Iowa when he heard the news. He said calmly to his companions: "Lincoln is the next President. [Pg 136] I have no hope and no destiny before me but to do my best to save the Union from overthrow. Now let us turn our course to the South"—and he proceeded through the border States straight to the heart of the kingdom of slavery and cotton. The day before the election, he spoke at Montgomery, Yancey's home ”

“ Moreover, the country 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He had thoroughness for the other's competence; insight into human nature, and a vast sympathy, for the other's facile handling of men; a deep devotion to the right for the other's loyalty to party platforms. The very core of his nature was truth, and he himself is reported to have said of Douglas that he cared less for the truth, as the truth, than any other man he knew.
Hanging for some years upon the heels of his rival's rapid ascent, Lincoln had entered [Pg 116] the House as Douglas left it for the Senate, but at the end of the term he retired from politics baffled and discouraged. ”

“ It was Lincoln who took the aggressive on principles. A famous paragraph of his speech before the convention which nominated him began with the words: "'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free." That was a direct challenge to Douglas and his whole plan with slavery, and throughout the debate, at every meeting, the doctrine of the divided house was attacked and defended. Douglas declared that Lincoln was inciting half his countrymen to make war upon the other half ”

“ The Democrats, more thoroughly united, swept the country, and the new administration came into power with a great majority in both houses of Congress.
In neither branch of that Democratic Congress was there another man so fit to take the lead as Douglas. A new senator, coming to Washington in 1852, found him already risen to the first importance there. "His power as a debater," said this observer, "seemed to me unequaled in the Senate. He was industrious, energetic, bold, and skillful in the management of the affairs of his party. ”

“ But Douglas was come now to a parting of the ways. Forced to choose between absolute subserviency to the South and what was left of his principle of popular sovereignty, he remonstrated angrily with the President for breaking faith with Walker and the Kansans. At the end of a stormy interview, Buchanan, stirred out of his wonted placidity, threateningly reminded the senator that [Pg 108] no Democrat ever broke with a Democratic administration without being crushed. Douglas scornfully retorted: "Mr. President, I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead." ”

“ 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-making. He invested boldly in the lands over which Chicago was now spreading in its rapid growth and made the young city his home. ”