Onall 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 that faith, likewise, he addressed himself to the problem which in his day, as before and after, was perplexing 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 the slavery question.
The presidential election of 1848 made a good occasion for men to take account of thequestion, 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 presented itself to that generation, were completely arranged.
In fifteen Southern States and in the District 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 compel 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´, Northlatitude, with 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 acquiescence 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 territory got from Mexico, concerning which, although 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,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 immediately pressing questions were easily phrased; but the intangible element of public 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 definite 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 theslave 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 grouping of men according to their opinions on the general question which already had its effects in politics. Every thoughtful American 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 extend 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 compromises of the Constitution which protectedit 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 obligations. Finally, there were men so constituted 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 theHouse 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 instructed 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 extend over them the Constitution and laws of the United States so far as these should prove applicable; but he also voted for the bill to organize the Territory of Oregon with a clause prohibiting slavery. By his speeches, no less than by his votes, he was committed to the position that the Missouri Compromise was a final settlement so far as the Louisiana Purchase was concerned, and that the compromise line ought to be 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 theabolitionists, 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 grandfather'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 considered purer or better than she who was, or they who are, slaveholders."
He was of those who could be indifferent to the moral quality of slavery. He could favor whatever policy the Constitution required, or precedents favored, or public expediency demanded; if his enemies were to be 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 be taken of the moral character of the institution, or intimate that he believed 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 simple one. It was to leave the people of each Territory, so soon as it should be organized, free to regulate their domestic institutions asthey chose. He favored it for two reasons: first, because Congress had no right to interfere; and second, because the people themselves were the best judges of what institutions 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 Wilmot 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 forbearing 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 Alabama, offered a resolution to the effect that neither Congress nor any territorial legislature had any right to exclude slave property from the Territories. This was a mild statement of the extreme Southern doctrine that slaves were property, so recognized by theConstitution, and that a slaveholder had the right to take his slaves anywhere but into a State where slavery was forbidden.
The doctrine of Cass seemed to accord best with that democratic theory of the government which Douglas had always professed. 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 conditions, 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 preëminent 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 introduced a bill to admit California as a State,leaving the people to settle the slavery question as they pleased. But his first great opportunity 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 slaveholder, but he was elected on a non-committal 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. Immediately, the House, where the free-soilers held a balance of power, fell into a long wrangle 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 beforebeen united on any measure of opposition to slavery, and the South, fearing to lose the fruits of her many victories in statesmanship, in diplomacy, and on Mexican battlefields, 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 destroyed. The portents were all of disagreement, 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 statesmanship of compromise in which he was a master. He made a plan of settlement that covered all the controversies and put it in the form of a series of resolutions. It was to admit California with her free-state constitution; to organize the remainder of the Mexican Cession into Territories, with no restriction as to slavery; to pay Texas a sum of money on condition that she yielded in the dispute over the boundary between her andNew Mexico; to prohibit the slave trade, but 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 consummate skill in oratory, added pathos to his genuine fervor of patriotism as in that profound crisis of our affairs he pleaded with his fellow senators and with his divided countrymen. There followed the most notable series of set speeches in the history of Congress. One after another, the old leaders, 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 settlement. 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 arraignment 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,gave it his support. Then the new men spoke. Jefferson Davis, on whom, as Calhoun was borne away to his grave, the mantle of his leadership seemed visibly to fall, steadfastly asserted the Southern claim that slaveholders had a right to go into any Territory with their slaves, but offered, as the extreme 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 constitutionality 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 country 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 chairman of the Committee on Territories hewrote and introduced two bills: one to admit California, and one to organize the Territories of New Mexico and Utah with no restrictions 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 proposed 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 Douglas's two bills joined together with a wafer: the words, "Mr. Clay, from the Committee of Thirteen," were substituted for the words, "Mr. Douglas, from the Committee on Territories." But there was one important change. Douglas's bill gave the territorial legislatures authority over allrightful 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 probably 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 measures so combined. Late in July, after months of debate and negotiation had wearied Clay out and driven him from the scene, all but the part relating to Utah was stricken out, and with that single passenger the Omnibus went through the Senate. Then separately, one after another, as Douglas had advised, the other measures were passed. The House quickly accepted them, Fillmoresigned them, and the last of the compromises was complete. 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.
In the defense of the settlement he was no less conspicuous. 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 legislatureof 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. At the end of the session, when he returned to his home, he found Chicago wrought up 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 traitors the senators and representatives who had voted for the law, when Douglas walked upon the stand, announced that the next evening he would publicly defend the measures of compromise, and demanded to be heard before he was condemned. A great audience, the greatest ever assembled in the city, listened to his defense. It was bold, skilful, successful. He avowed his authorship of three of the compromise measures, his approval of the others. He took them up oneby one, explained them, called for objections, and answered every objection effectively. At the end, he proposed and carried resolutions 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 forecast the verdict of the country as a whole. An adjourned meeting of a Southern convention which had been called before the settlement 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 toresist the fugitive slave law were sometimes violent 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 bitter controversies. An attack on a law so clearly demanded by the Constitution was, he declared, an attack on the Constitution 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 be regarded as a permanent settlement. In 1852, the Democrats, assembled in national conventions at Baltimore, indorsed them in their platform. So did the Whigs; and Rufus Choate, their convention orator, was excusable for his hyperbole when he described "with what instantaneous and mighty charm they calmed the madness and anxiety of the hour."
Cass, in his seventieth year, was the leading candidate before the Democratic convention; so far as the leadership of parties can be determined in America, he was still the leader of the party. But Douglas, in his fortieth 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 supporters were enthusiastic, aggressive, boisterous. His name in the long list of candidates always 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 Franklin 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-soilopinions. 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. 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 unmindful 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 mostfavorable for original and constructive statesmanship. By virtue of his leadership of the Senate, he was in effect the leader of Congress. 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.
Therewas nothing new in the main proposal. A bill to organize this same Territory had passed the House the year before. It was generally conceded that the region ought to have a territorial government. Vast as it was, it had less than a thousand white inhabitants, but the overland route to the Pacific ran across it, and there was sure to be a rapid immigration into it so soon as it should be thrown open to settlers. What was both new and startling was a clause permitting the inhabitants of the Territory, whenever it should be admitted to statehood, to decide for themselves whether they would have slavery or not. The eighth section of the Compromise Act of 1820 provided that slavery should never exist anywhere in the Louisiana Purchase northof 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, affirmed three propositions: questions relating to slavery in the Territories and in States to be formed out of them should be left to the people thereof; cases involving title to slaves and questions of personal freedom should be left to the local courts, with a right of appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States; the mandate of the Constitution concerning fugitive slaves applied to Territories as well as States. Three days later, these propositions were incorporated in the bill.
January 16, Archibald Dixon, a senator from Kentucky, offered an amendment expressly repealing the eighth section of the Missouri Compromise law. Douglas remonstrated, but in a few days he called on Dixon, the two senators went for a drive, and in the course of it Douglas promised to accept the amendment. He was satisfied, so Dixonreported his conversation, that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional and that it was unfair to the South. "This proceeding," he said, "may end my political career, but, acting under the sense of duty which animates me, I am prepared to make the sacrifice. I will do it." January 22, with several other congressmen, he called on Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War, and was by him conducted to the White House. Contrary to his usage, for it was Sunday, the President granted them an interview. At the end of it, he promised to support the repeal. The next day, Douglas reported a substitute for the Nebraska bill. It provided for two Territories, Kansas and Nebraska, instead of one; and it declared the eighth section of the Missouri Compromise law to be inoperative because it was "superseded by" the principles of the compromise of 1850.
At the report and the bill in its first form the anti-slavery men in Congress took instant alarm. By the time the substitute was presented, the whole country knew thatsomething extraordinary was afoot. Without a sign of any popular demand, without preliminary agitation or debate, Douglas, of Illinois, had set himself to repeal the Missouri Compromise. He had undertaken to throw open to slavery a great region long consecrated to freedom. He had written the bill of his own motion, by himself, in his own house. The South had not asked for the concession, the North had not in any wise consented to it. For a little while, in fact, the Southern leaders seemed to distrust the bill, for they distrusted Douglas; one or two of them, like Sam Houston, of Texas, resisted it to the last, declaring it was sure in the end to do the South more harm than good. But for the most part they came quickly into line behind Douglas, though they never generally accepted his principle of popular sovereignty. As to the North, the challenge of the Kansas-Nebraska bill met there with such a response as no Southern aggression had yet provoked. Through every avenue of expression—through the press and the pulpit, in petitions to Congress,in angry protests of public meetings and solemn resolves of legislatures—a hostile and outraged public opinion broke upon Douglas and his bill. His own party could not be held in line. Scores of Democratic newspapers turned against him. Save the legislature of Illinois, no Northern assembly, representative or other, that could speak with any show of authority, dared to support him. No Southern fire-eater was ever half so reviled. He could have traveled from Boston to Chicago, so he afterwards declared, by the light of his own burning effigies.
But the firmest and clearest protest of all came from the sturdy little band of anti-slavery men in Congress. The day after Douglas proposed his substitute, it came up for debate, and Chase, of Ohio, speaking for the opposition, asked for more time to examine the new provisions. Douglas granted a week, and the next day there appeared in various newspapers an address to the country entitled "An Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress." Chase was the principal author of it; he and Sumner andfour representatives signed it. They denounced the bill as a breach of faith, infringing the historical compact of 1820, and as part of a plot to extend the area of slavery; and they accused Douglas of hazarding the dearest interests of the American people in a presidential game.
That judgment of him and of the bill was probably accepted by a majority of his contemporaries. For lack of Southern support, he had missed the Democratic nomination in 1852. It seemed clear that whatever Northern candidate the South should prefer would be nominated in 1856. His rivals were all, in one way or another, commending themselves to the South. Pierce was hand in glove with Davis and other Southern leaders. Marcy, in the Department of State, and Buchanan, in a foreign mission, were both working for the annexation of Cuba, a favorite Southern measure. It was suspected that Cass, old as he was, had it in mind to move the repeal when Douglas went ahead of him.
The contemporaries of Douglas were under a necessity to judge his motives, for theyhad to pass upon his fitness for high office and great responsibilities, and no other motive than ambition was so natural and obvious an explanation of his course. But it is questionable if any such positive judgment as was necessary, and therefore right, in his contemporaries, is obligatory upon historians. What he did was in accord with a political principle which he had avowed, and it was not in conflict with any moral principle he had ever avowed, for he did not pretend to believe that slavery was wrong. True, he had once thought the Missouri Compromise a sacred compact; but there were signs that he had abandoned that opinion. It is enough to decide that he took a wrong course, and to point out how ambition may very well have led him into it. It is too much to say he knew it was wrong, and took it solely because he was ambitious.
But if he had taken a wrong course he did not fail to do that which will often force us, in spite of ourselves, into admiration for a man in the wrong: he pursued it unwavering to the end. Neither the swelling uproarfrom without nor a resolute and conspicuously able opposition within the Senate daunted him for a moment. He pressed the bill to its passage with furious energy. He set upon Chase savagely, charging him with bad faith in that he had gained time, by a false pretense of ignorance of the bill, to flood the country with slanderous attacks upon it and upon its author. The audacity of the announcement that the Compromise of 1850 repealed the Compromise of 1820 was well-nigh justified by the skill of his contention. It was a principle, he maintained, and no mere temporary expedient, for which Clay and Webster had striven, which both parties had indorsed, which the country had acquiesced in,—the principle of "popular sovereignty." That principle lay at the base of our institutions; it was illustrated in all the achievements of our past; it, and it alone, would enable us in safety to go on and extend our institutions into new regions. Cass, though he made difficulties about details, supported the bill, and the Southerners played their part well. ButDouglas afterwards said, and truly: "I passed the Kansas-Nebraska act myself. I had the authority and power of a dictator throughout the whole controversy in both houses. The speeches were nothing. It was the marshaling and directing of men and guarding from attacks and with ceaseless vigilance preventing surprise."
Chase was the true leader of the opposition, and he was equipped with a most thorough mastery of the slavery question in its historical and constitutional aspects. By shrewd amendments he sought to bring out the division between the Northern and Southern supporters of the bill; for the Southerners held that slave-owners had a constitutional right to go into any Territory with their property,—a right with which neither Congress nor a territorial legislature could interfere. Douglas, however, managed to avoid the danger. He made another change in the important clause. To please Cass and others, he made it declare that the Compromise of 1820 was "inconsistent with" instead of "superseded by" the principlesof the later compromise; and then he added the words, "it being the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the inhabitants thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States." That, as Benton said, was a little stump speech incorporated in the bill; and it proved a very effective stump speech indeed.
Neither the logic and the accurate knowledge of Chase, nor the lofty invective of Sumner, nor the smooth eloquence of Everett, nor Seward's rare combination of political adroitness with an alertness to moral forces, matched, in hand to hand debate, the keen-mindedness, the marvelous readiness, and the headlong force of Douglas. Their set speeches were impressive, but in the quick fire, the question-and-answer, the give-and-take of a free discussion, he was the master of them all. When, half an hour after midnight of the third of March, he rose beforea full Senate and crowded galleries to close the debate, he was at his best. Often interrupted, he welcomed every interruption with courtesy, and never once failed to put his assailant on the defensive. Now Sumner and now Chase was denying that he had come into office by a sacrifice of principle; now Seward was defending his own State of New York against a charge of infidelity to the compact of 1820; now Everett, friend and biographer and successor of Webster, was protesting that he had not meant to misrepresent Webster's views. Always, after these encounters, Douglas knew how to come back, with a graver tone, to the larger issue, as if they, and not he, were trying to obscure it. A spectator might have fancied that these high-minded men were culprits, and he their inquisitor. Now and then, as when he dealt with the abolitionists, there was no questioning the sincerity of his feeling, and it stirred him to a genuine eloquence. He was not surprised that Boston burned him in effigy. Had not Boston closed her Faneuil Hall upon the aged Webster? Did notSumner live there? And he turned upon the senator from Massachusetts: "Sir, you will remember that when you came into the Senate, and sought an opportunity to put forth your abolition incendiarism, you appealed to our sense of justice by the sentiment, 'Strike, but hear me first!' But when Mr. Webster went back in 1850 to speak to his constituents in his own self-defense, to tell the truth and to expose his slanderers, you would not hear him, butyou struck him first." Again and again, as at the end of a paragraph of unadorned but trenchant sentences the small, firm-knit figure quivered with a leonine energy, the great, swart head was thrown backward, and the deep voice swelled into a tone of triumph or defiance, the listeners could not forbear to applaud. Once, even Seward broke forth: "I have never had so much respect for him as I have to-night."
The vote in the Senate was 27 ayes to 14 noes; but in the House the opposition was dangerously strong, and but for the precaution of securing the support of the administrationthe bill might have failed. There was a fierce parliamentary battle. Richardson, Douglas's friend and chief lieutenant, kept the House in continuous session thirty-six hours trying to force through a motion to fix a term for the debate. Feeling rose on both sides. Personal encounters were imminent. Douglas, in constant attendance, watched every move of the opposition and was instant with the counter-move. It was a month before the bill could be brought to a vote, and then it passed, with a slight change, by a majority of thirteen. At the end of May, the President signed it, and Douglas, turning from the work of enacting it into law to the harder task of defending it before the country, beheld the whole field of national politics transformed. The Whig party, crushed to earth in 1852, made no move to take a stand on the new issue; it was dead. His own historical Democratic party was everywhere throughout the North in a turmoil that seemed to forebode dissolution. One new party, sprung swiftly and secretly into life on the old issue of enmityto foreigners and Roman Catholics, seemed to stand for the idea that the best way to meet the slavery issue was to run away from it. Another new party, conceived in the spirit of the appeal of the independent Democrats, was struggling to be born. State after State was falling under the power of the Know-Nothings; and those men, Whigs and Democrats alike, who for years had been awaiting an opportunity to fight slavery outside of its breastworks of compromise, were forming at last under the name of Anti-Nebraska men. Before long, they began to call themselves Republicans.
He did not quail. Invited to pronounce the Independence Day oration at Philadelphia, he made of it the first thoroughgoing denunciation of the Know-Nothings that any eminent public man in the country had the courage to make. Democrats everywhere, bewildered by the mystery in which these new adversaries shrouded their designs, were heartened to an aggressive warfare. Some months later, he took the stump in Virginia, where Henry A. Wise had brought theDemocrats firmly into line against the only rivals they had in the South, now that the Whigs were giving up the fight. The campaign was a crucial one, and the Know-Nothings never recovered from their defeat. Douglas's course had the merit of consistency as well as courage, for he had always championed the rights of the foreign born.
The Independence Day oration was also his first popular defense of the Kansas-Nebraska bill. But so soon as Congress adjourned he hastened home to face his own people of Illinois. Chicago was once more, as in 1850, a centre of hostility, and he announced that he would speak there the evening of September first. When the time came, flags at half mast and the dismal tolling of church bells welcomed him. A vast and ominously silent crowd was gathered, but not to hear him. Hisses and groans broke in upon his opening sentences. Hour after hour, from eight o'clock until midnight, he stood before them; time and again, as the uproar lessened, his voice combated it; but they would not let him speak.Nothing, in fact, but his resolute bearing saved him from violence. On the way home, his carriage was set upon and he was in danger of his life.
Wherever he went in Northern Illinois, similar scenes were enacted. But he got a hearing, and in the central counties and in "Egypt," the southern part of the State, where the people were largely of Virginian and Kentuckian descent, he was cordially received. He kept his hold upon his party in Illinois, and Illinois, alone of all the Northwestern States, would not go over completely to the opposition. The Democratic candidate for state treasurer was elected. The Know-Nothings and Anti-Nebraska men got a majority of the congressmen, and by the defection of certain state senators who held over from a previous election they were enabled to send Lyman Trumbull, Anti-Nebraska Democrat, to be Douglas's colleague at Washington. That, when compared with the results elsewhere in the North, was a striking proof of Douglas's power with his people. Moreover, the Democrats of theNorth who remained in the party had accepted his leadership. In the South, the party organization was soon free of any effective opposition. The two wings, so long as they were united, could still control the Senate and elect presidents. All would still be well, if only all went well on those Western plains whither Douglas declared that the slavery question was now banished forever from the halls of Congress.
But all was not going well there. When the Kansas-Nebraska bill passed, Sumner exultantly exclaimed: "It sets freedom and slavery face to face, and bids them grapple." Nebraska was conceded to freedom, but the day Kansas, the southern Territory, was thrown open to settlement, a long, confused, confusing struggle began. The whole country was drawn into it. Blue lodges in the South, emigrant aid societies in the North, hurried opposing forces into the field. The Southerners, aided by colonized voters from Missouri, got control of the territorial legislature and passed a slave code. The Free-Soilers, ignoring the government thus established,gathered in convention at Topeka, formed a free state constitution, and demanded to be admitted into the Union as a State. When a new Congress assembled in December, 1855, there were two governments in Kansas, and the people were separated into hostile camps. Brawls were frequent, and it was clear that very soon, unless the general government intervened, there would be concerted violence. A force of several thousand pro-slavery men, encamped on the Wakarusa River, were threatening Lawrence, the principal Free-Soil town. The Free-Soil men were in a majority, but their course had been in disregard of law. The pro-slavery men were in a minority, they had resorted to violence and fraud, but they had followed the forms of law.
President Pierce, swayed by Jefferson Davis, took the side of slavery. The House was nearly two months organizing, and then the President sent in a message to Congress denouncing the Free-Soilers for resisting the laws. He followed it up with a proclamation, and placed United States troops at the disposalof the regular territorial government. In March, Douglas, from his Committee on Territories, made a long report on all that had occurred. He, too, laid the blame on the emigrant aid societies. He was against the Topeka constitution, and offered, instead, a bill providing for the admission of Kansas, so soon as her population should reach 93,000, which would entitle her to one representative in Congress, with such constitution as her people might lawfully adopt. The House, with an anti-slavery majority, was for admitting Kansas at once with the Topeka constitution. So was the anti-slavery group in the Senate, now swelled into a strong minority. In the fierce debate that followed, Douglas had to defend the results, as well as the theory, of his law. Sumner was the bitterest of his assailants, and their controversy passed all bounds of parliamentary restraint. In Sumner's famous speech on the crime against Kansas, Butler, of South Carolina, was represented as the Don Quixote of slavery, Douglas as its Sancho Panza, "ready to do all its humiliating offices." The dayafter that speech, Lawrence was sacked, and civil war broke out in Kansas. The next day, Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, assaulted Sumner and beat him down on the floor of the Senate. Ten days later, the Democratic convention met at Cincinnati to name a candidate for the presidency.
Douglas had won a good following from the South, but Pierce was the first choice of the Southerners. They wanted a servant merely, not a leader, in the White House. But it was no longer a question of the South's preference alone: it was a question of holding the two or three Northern States that were still Democratic. Of these, Pennsylvania was the most important. Buchanan was the choice of the Northern delegates because he was a Pennsylvanian and because, abroad on a foreign mission, he had escaped all responsibility for Kansas. On the first ballot, he led with 135 votes, Pierce was second with 122, and Douglas had but 33, but as before he rose as the balloting proceeded. Pierce's vote fell away; after the fourteenth ballot, his name was withdrawn. On thefifteenth, Buchanan had 168, Douglas 118. Richardson, Douglas's manager, thereupon arose and read a dispatch from his chief directing his friends to obey the will of the majority and give Buchanan the necessary two thirds. Once more, the prize escaped him, though he had bid for it with his country's peace.
But the platform proclaimed the principle of his famous law to be "the only sound and safe solution of the slavery question." He was at the head of his party as Clay had for so many years headed the Whigs. He had the substance of power, the reality of leadership, whosesoever the trappings and the title might be. Every move in Congress was made with a view to its effect in the campaign, and it was he who arranged the issues. Toombs, of Georgia, offered an enabling act of admirable fairness, intended to secure the people of Kansas in their right to have such a state constitution as they might prefer, and Douglas adopted it and held the Senate for it against the House bill to admit Kansas with the Topeka constitution.No agreement could be reached, for the Republicans in their platform had declared for the prohibition of slavery in all the Territories. "Bleeding Kansas" was their war-cry, and Douglas charged, not without reason, that they meant to keep Kansas bleeding until the election. The House went so far as to attach a rider to the army appropriation bill forbidding the President to employ United States troops in aid of the territorial authorities, and would not permit the appropriations to pass in their ordinary form until Congress adjourned and the President was forced to call an extra session.
But the Republican party had not yet gathered into its ranks all those who in their hearts favored its policy. The reality of civil war in Kansas brought a sobering sense of danger to the Union which worked contrary to the angry revolt against the slave power, and Buchanan's appeal to the lovers of the Union in both sections was successful. He was elected, and the Democrats, with a majority in both houses of Congress, gotonce more a free hand with Kansas and the slavery question.
They had, too, a majority of the Supreme Court, and now for the first time the court came forward with its view of the question. Two days after the inauguration, the Dred Scott decision was handed down, and the territorial controversy passed into a new phase. All parties were forced to reconsider their positions. Douglas, especially, had need of all his adroitness to bring his doctrine of popular sovereignty into accord with the decision; for so far as it went it accorded completely with that extreme Southern view of Calhoun's and Yancey's and Jefferson Davis's which he had never yet, in his striving after an approachment with the South, ventured far enough to accept. The court decided that the Declaration of Independence did not mean negroes when it declared all men to be equal; that no negro could become a citizen of the United States; that the right of property in slaves was affirmed in the Constitution; and that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery inany Territory. The announcement that the eighth clause of the Missouri Compromise law was unconstitutional was acceptable enough to the man who had accomplished its repeal, but what became of popular sovereignty if the Constitution itself decreed slavery into the Territories? But Douglas, whether he met the difficulty effectively or not, faced it promptly. Speaking at Springfield in June, he indorsed the decision, not merely as authoritative, but as right; and he claimed that it was in accord with his doctrine. For slavery, he pointed out, was dependent for its existence anywhere upon positive legislation. This the inhabitants of a Territory, acting through their territorial legislature, could grant or deny as they chose. The constitutional right of a slaveholder to take his property into a Territory would avail him nothing if he found there no laws and police regulations to protect it.
The decision was, however, universally and rightly considered a great victory for slavery. It condemned the Republican programme as unconstitutional, and it strengthenedthe contention of the Southerners. But the Southern leaders were in little need of heartening: no cause ever had bolder and firmer champions. Under cover of the panic of 1857, which drew men's minds away from politics, a group of them were already planning a most daring last attempt to bring Kansas into the Union as a slave State. In the grappling there, freedom had shown itself stronger than slavery. Robert J. Walker, a slaveholder, whom Buchanan and Douglas had persuaded to accept the governorship, reported that the Free-Soilers outnumbered their adversaries three to one. The legislature had provided for the election of delegates to a constitutional convention, and when the question of submitting the constitution to the people arose, the governor, an upright man, promptly announced that it would be submitted, and the administration sustained him. Many Free-Soilers, however, made the mistake of staying away from the polls on election day. The convention, under control of the pro-slavery leaders, met in October at Lecompton, drew up aconstitution which safeguarded slavery elaborately, and hit upon an extraordinary way to submit it to the people. The electors were permitted to vote either "for the constitution with slavery," or "for the constitution without slavery," but not against the constitution as a whole. Even if "the constitution without slavery" carried, such slaves as were already held in Kansas could continue to be held.
So far had the Democratic party progressed toward the extreme Southern view, and such was the ascendency of the Southerners over Buchanan, that he would not stand up against the outrageous scheme, and it seemed on the point of succeeding. But Douglas was come now to a parting of the ways. Forced to choose between absolute subserviency to the South and what was left of his principle of popular sovereignty, he remonstrated angrily with the President for breaking faith with Walker and the Kansans. At the end of a stormy interview, Buchanan, stirred out of his wonted placidity, threateningly reminded the senator thatno Democrat ever broke with a Democratic administration without being crushed. Douglas scornfully retorted: "Mr. President, I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead." The new Congress was no sooner assembled than the Lecompton programme became the central issue, and Douglas, in flat rebellion against his party's Southern masters, in open defiance of his party's President, was again the man of the hour.
Superb fighter that he was, he had a fighter's best opportunity,—great odds to fight against, and at last a good cause to fight for. The administration proscribed him. The whole South, so lately reciting his praises, rose up against him and reviled him as a traitor. Of his party associates in the Senate, but two or three were brave enough to follow him. Moreover, the panic had swept away his wealth. He was near the end of his term of office, and the trend in Illinois was toward the Republicans. The long tide which had so steadily borne him on to fortune seemed to ebb. Married again but recently, and to the most beautiful womanin Washington, he must have had in mind, as he took up his new rôle, some such thought as that which fortified his favorite hero at Marengo: one battle was lost, but there was time enough to win another.
The Lecompton plotters had reckoned on the opposition of the Republicans. It was Douglas and his handful of followers who confounded them. At once, they accused him of deserting them to make sure of his reëlection to the Senate. But as the debate progressed, and his name kept appearing on the same side with Sumner's and Seward's in the divisions, another notion spread. Horace Greeley and other Republicans began to suggest that he might be the man to lead the new party to victory on a more moderate platform. Throughout the North, people who had abhorred him came first to wonder at him and then to praise him.
But he fought the Lecompton conspiracy from his old base. It was contrary to the principle of the Kansas-Nebraska Act; there had been gross frauds at the election ofdelegates; the form of submission was a mockery of the electors. He would say nothing for slavery or against it. He cared not "whether slavery was voted up or voted down." Give the people a fair and free chance to form and adopt a constitution, and he would accept it. Let them have a fair vote on the Lecompton constitution, and if they ratified it he would accept that. Ratified it was at the absurd election the convention had ordered, for the great majority of the settlers could not vote their opposition, but when the legislature, now Free-Soil, took the authority to submit it as a whole, the majority against it by far exceeded the highest total of votes the pro-slavery men had ever mustered. Nevertheless, the Senate passed it, Douglas and three other Democrats voting in the negative. His following in the House was greater, and the bill was there amended so as to provide for submitting the constitution to the people. There was a conference, and in its final form the bill offered the people of Kansas a bribe of lands if they would accept the constitution,and threatened them with an indefinite delay of statehood if they should reject it. Douglas, however, after some hesitation, refused to vote for the bill as amended, and when the time came the Kansans, by more than five to one, rejected the constitution and the bribe.
So the session brought no settlement, and Kansas was still the burning issue when Douglas went back to Illinois and took the stump in the senatorial campaign. Victor in a stirring parliamentary contest, this time Chicago welcomed him. But there awaited him treason in the ranks of his own party,—for the administration, beaten in Congress, attacked him at home,—and an opposition now completely formed and led by a man whom Douglas himself, in his own heart, dreaded as he had never dreaded the ablest of his rivals at Washington. The Republicans had taken the unusual course of holding a convention to nominate their candidate for the Senate, and the candidate was Abraham Lincoln.
Hamiltonand Jefferson, Clay and Jackson, Douglas and Lincoln,—these are the three great rivalries of American politics. The third was not the least. If it fell short of the others in variety of confrontments, if it was not so long drawn out, or accompanied with so frequent and imposing alignments and realignments of vast contending forces on a broad and national field, it surpassed them in the clearness of the sole and vital issue it involved, in a closer contact and measuring of powers, in the complete and subtle correspondence of the characters of the rivals to the causes for which they fought.
Douglas was the very type of that instant success which waits on ability undistracted by doubt and undeterred by the fear of doing wrong; the best exemplar of that American statesmanship which accepted things asthey were and made the most of them. Facile, keen, effective, he had found life a series of opportunities easily embraced. Precocious in youth, marvelously active in manhood, he had learned without study, resolved without meditation, accomplished without toil. Whatever obstacles he had found in his path, he had either adroitly avoided them or boldly overleaped them, but never laboriously uprooted them. Whatever subject he had taken in hand, he had swiftly compassed it, but rarely probed to the heart of it. With books he dealt as he dealt with men, getting from them quickly what he liked or needed; he was as unlikely to pore over a volume, and dog-ear and annotate it, as he was with correspondence and slow talk and silences to draw out a friendship. Yet he was not cold or mean, but capable of hero-worship, following with ardor the careers of great conquerors like Cæsar 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 mancould, now Clay was dead. His habits were convivial, and the vicious indulgence of his strong and masculine appetites, the only relaxation he craved in the intervals of his fierce activities, had caused him frequent illnesses; but he was still a young man, even by American standards, for the eminence he had attained. At the full of his extraordinary powers, battling for the high place he had and the higher he aspired to, there was nowhere to be seen his equal as a debater or a politician,—nowhere but in the ungainly figure, now once more erected into a posture of rivalry and defiance, of the man whom he had long ago outstripped and left behind him in the home of their common beginnings.
Slower of growth, and devoid altogether of many brilliant qualities which his rival possessed, Lincoln nevertheless outreached him by the measure of the two gifts the other lacked: the twin gifts of humor and of brooding melancholy. Bottomed by the one in homeliness, his character was by the other drawn upward to the height of human nobility and aspiration. His great capacity of pain,which but for his buffoonery would no doubt have made him mad, was the source of his rarest excellencies. Familiar with squalor, and hospitable to vulgarity, his mind was yet tenanted by sorrow, a place of midnight wrestlings. In him, as never before in any other man, were high and low things mated, and awkwardness and ungainliness and uncouthness justified in their uses. At once coarser than his rival and infinitely more refined and gentle, he had mastered lessons which the other had never found the need of learning, or else had learned too readily and then dismissed. He had thoroughness for the other's competence; insight into human nature, and a vast sympathy, for the other's facile handling of men; a deep devotion to the right for the other's loyalty to party platforms. The very core of his nature was truth, and he himself is reported to have said of Douglas that he cared less for the truth, as the truth, than any other man he knew.
Hanging for some years upon the heels of his rival's rapid ascent, Lincoln had enteredthe House as Douglas left it for the Senate, but at the end of the term he retired from politics baffled and discouraged. Tortured with the keen apprehension of a form and grace into which he could never mould his crudeness, tantalized with a sense that there must be a way for him to get a hold on his fellows and make a figure in the history of his times, he had watched the power of Douglas grow and the fame of Douglas spread until it seemed that Douglas's voice was always speaking and Douglas's hand was everywhere. Patiently working out the right and wrong of the fateful question Douglas dealt with so boldly, he came into the impregnable position of such as hated slavery and yet forbore to violate its sanctuary. Suddenly, with the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, Douglas himself had opened a path for him. He went back into politics, and took a leading part in the Anti-Nebraska movement. Whenever opportunity offered, he combated Douglas on the stump. The year Trumbull won the senatorship, Lincoln had first come within a few votes of it. Risen now to theleadership of the Republicans in Illinois, he awaited Douglas at Chicago, listened to his opening speech, answered it the next evening, followed him into the centre of the State, and finally proposed a series of joint debates before the people. Douglas hesitated, but accepted, and named seven meeting-places: Ottawa and Freeport, in the northern stronghold of the Republicans; Galesburg, Quincy, and Charleston, in a region where both parties had a good following; and Jonesboro and Alton, which were in "Egypt." The first meeting was at Ottawa, in August; the last, at Alton, in the middle of October. Meanwhile, both spoke incessantly at other places, Douglas oftener than once a day. First the fame of Douglas, and then Lincoln's unexpected survival of the early meetings, drew the eyes of the whole country upon these two foremost Americans of their generation, face to face there on the Western prairie, fighting out the great question of the times.
Elevated side by side on wooden platforms in the open air, thrown into reliefagainst the low prairie sky line, the two figures take strong hold upon the imagination: the one lean, long-limbed, uncommonly tall; the other scarce five feet high, but compact, manful, instinct with energy, and topped with its massive head. In voice and gesture and manner, Douglas was incomparably the superior, as he was, too, in the ready command of a language never, indeed, ornate or imaginative, and sometimes of the quality of political commonplace, but always forcible and always intelligible to his audience. Lincoln had the sense of words, the imagination, the intensity of feeling, which go to the making of great literature; but for his masterpieces he always needed time. His voice was high and strained, his gestures ungraceful, his manner painful, save in the recital of those passages which he had carefully prepared or when he was freed of his self-consciousness by anger or enthusiasm. Neither of them, in any single speech, could be compared to Webster in the other of the two most famous American debates, but the series was a remarkable exhibition of forensicpower. The interest grew as the struggle lengthened. People traveled great distances to hear them. At every meeting-place, a multitude of farmers and dwellers in country towns, with here and there a sprinkling of city-folk, crowded about the stand where "Old Abe" and the "Little Giant" turned and twisted and fenced for an opening, grappled and drew apart, clinched and strained and staggered,—but neither fell. The wonder grew that Lincoln stood up so well under the onslaughts of Douglas, at once skillful and reckless, held him off with so firm a hand, gripped him so shrewdly. Now, the wonder is that Douglas, wrestling with the man and the cause of a century, kept his feet and held his own.
He was fighting, too, with an enemy in the rear. When he turned to strike at the administration, Lincoln would call out: "Go it, husband! Go it, bear!" Apart from that diversion, however, the debate, long and involved as it was, followed but three general lines. The whole is resolvableinto three elements,—personalities, politics, and principles. There were the attacks which each made upon the other's record; the efforts which each made to weaken the other's position before the people; and the contrary views which were advanced.
Douglas began, indeed, with gracious compliments to his opponent, calling him "an amiable, kindly, and intelligent gentleman." Lincoln, unused to praise from such a source, protested he was like the Hoosier with the gingerbread: "He reckoned he liked it better than any other man, and got less of it." But in a moment Douglas was charging that Lincoln and Trumbull, Whig and Democrat, had made a coalition in 1854 to form the Black Republican party and get for themselves the two senatorships from Illinois, and that Trumbull had broken faith with Lincoln. Lincoln in turn made a charge that Douglas had conspired with Presidents Pierce and Buchanan and Chief Justice Taney to spread slavery and make it universal. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was their first step, the Dred Scott decision thesecond; but one more step, and slavery could be fastened upon States as they had already fastened it upon Territories. Douglas protesting that to bring such a charge, incapable of proof or disproof, was indecent, Lincoln pointed out that Douglas had similarly charged the administration with conspiring to force a slave constitution upon Kansas; and afterwards took up a charge of Trumbull's that Douglas himself had at first conspired with Toombs and other senators to prevent any reference to the people of whatsoever constitution the Kansas convention might adopt. When they moved southward, Douglas charged Lincoln with inconsistency in that he changed his stand to suit the leanings of different communities. Of all these charges and counter-charges, however, none was absolutely proved, and no one now believes those which Douglas brought. But he made them serve, and Lincoln's, though he sustained them with far better evidence, and pressed them home with a wonderful clearness of reasoning,—once, he actually threw his argumentinto a syllogism,—did no great harm to Douglas.
It was Douglas, too, who began the sparring for a political advantage. He knew that Lincoln's following was heterogeneous. "Their principles," he jeered, "in the north are jet black, in the centre they are in color a decent mulatto, and in lower Egypt they are almost white." His aim, therefore, was to fix upon Lincoln such extreme views as would alarm the more moderate of his followers, since the extremists must take him perforce, as a choice of two evils, even though he fell far short of their radical standard. To this end, Douglas produced certain resolutions which purported to have been adopted by an Anti-Nebraska convention at Springfield in 1854, and would have held Lincoln responsible for them. In a series of questions, he asked whether Lincoln were still opposed to a fugitive slave law, to the admission of any more slave States, and to acquiring any more territory unless the Wilmot Proviso were applied to it, and if he were still for prohibiting slavery outright in allthe Territories and in the District of Columbia, and for prohibiting the interstate slave trade. It soon transpired that Lincoln was not present at the Springfield convention, and that the resolutions were not adopted there, but somewhere else, and Douglas had to defend himself against a charge of misrepresentation. Nevertheless, when they met the second time, at Freeport, Lincoln answered the questions. He admitted the right of the South to a fugitive slave law. He would favor abolition in the District only if it were gradual, compensated, and accomplished with the consent of the inhabitants. He was not sure of the right of Congress to prohibit the interstate slave trade. He would oppose the annexation of fresh territory if there were reason to believe it would tend to aggravate the slavery controversy. He could see no way to deny the people of a Territory if slavery were prohibited among them during their territorial life and they nevertheless asked to come into the Union as a slave State. These cautious and hesitating answers displeased the stalwartanti-slavery men. Lincoln would go their lengths in but one particular: he was for prohibiting slavery outright in all the Territories.
Then he brought forward some questions for Douglas to answer. Would Douglas vote to admit Kansas with less than 93,000 inhabitants if she presented a free state constitution? Would he vote to acquire fresh territory without regard to its effect on the slavery dispute? If the Supreme Court should decide against the right of a State to prohibit slavery, would he acquiesce? "Can the people of a United States Territory, in any lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a state constitution?"
Douglas had no great difficulty with the first three questions, and the fourth—the second, as Lincoln read them—he had in fact answered several times already, and in a way to please the Democrats of Illinois. But Lincoln, contrary to the advice of his friends, pressed it on him again with a view to the "all hail hereafter," for it was meantto bring out the inconsistency of the principle of popular sovereignty with the Dred Scott decision, and the difference between the Northern and the Southern Democrats. Douglas answered it as he had before. The people of a Territory, through their legislature, could by unfriendly laws, or merely by denying legislative protection, make it impossible for a slave-owner to hold his slaves among them, no matter what rights he might have under the Constitution. Lincoln declared that the answer was historically false, for slaves had been held in Territories in spite of unfriendly legislation, and pointed out that if the Dred Scott decision was right the members of a territorial legislature, when they took an oath to support the Constitution, bound themselves to grant slavery protection. Later, in a fifth and last question, he asked whether, in case the slave-owners of a Territory demanded of Congress protection for their property, Douglas would vote to give it to them. But Douglas fell back upon his old position that Congress had no right to intervene. He would not break with hissupporters in Illinois, but by his "Freeport Doctrine" of unfriendly legislation he had broken forever with the men who were now in control of his party in the Southern States.
It was Lincoln who took the aggressive on principles. A famous paragraph of his speech before the convention which nominated him began with the words: "'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free." That was a direct challenge to Douglas and his whole plan with slavery, and throughout the debate, at every meeting, the doctrine of the divided house was attacked and defended. Douglas declared that Lincoln was inciting half his countrymen to make war upon the other half; that he went for uniformity of domestic institutions everywhere, instead of letting different communities manage their domestic affairs as they chose. But no, Lincoln protested, he was merely for resisting the spread of slavery and putting it in such a state that the public mind would rest in the hope of its ultimate extinction. "But why," criedDouglas, "cannot this government go on as the fathers left it, as it has gone on for more than a century?" Lincoln met him on that ground, and had the better of him in discussing what the fathers meant concerning slavery. They did not mean, he argued, to leave it alone to grow and spread, for they prohibited it in the Northwest Territory, they left the word "slave" out of the Constitution in the hope of a time when there should be no slaves under the flag. Over the true meaning of the Declaration of Independence, however, Douglas had a certain advantage, for Lincoln found the difficulty which candid minds still find in applying the principle of equality to races of unequal strength. Douglas plainly declared that ours is a white man's government. Lincoln admitted such an inferiority in negroes as would forever prevent the two races from living together on terms of perfect social and political equality, and if there must be inequality he was in favor of his own race having the superior place. He could only contend, therefore, for the negro's equality in those rights which areset 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.