The Life of Stephen A. Douglas Part 7

A little before seven the short figure of Douglas was observed at the door and he was greeted with loud applause from the galleries.

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

Foreseeing the personal consequences of his act, he opened his speech with an elaborate review of his course in Congress in relation to slavery in the Territories, showing that from the beginning he had favored leaving the whole question fairly to the inhabitants. He stood on the principle of the Compromise of 1850 as approved and interpreted by the legislature of Illinois in 1851. That body had declared that the people of a Territory had a right to form such government as they chose. But was the Lecompton Const.i.tution the act and deed of the people of Kansas? Did it embody their will?

If not, Congress had no right to impose it on them. Where was the evidence that it did embody their will? By a fraudulent vote on December 12th it was adopted by 5,500 majority. By a fair vote on January 4th it was defeated by 10,000 majority. The election on December 21st was ordered by the Lecompton Convention, deriving its authority from the territorial legislature. The legislature itself ordered the election on January 4th. Granting the argument that the organic act was in effect an enabling act, then the territorial legislature had power to authorize the Lecompton Convention and also to order it work submitted to a vote. The legislature either had the full power of Congress over the subject or it had none.

But, it was claimed, the Const.i.tution would have been voted down if submitted. What right had Congress to force it upon the people?

It was a mockery to call it an embodiment of their will and a crime to attempt to enforce it. If it ever became the Const.i.tution of Kansas it would be the act of Congress that made it so and not the decision of the people. That it could be changed thereafter was no apology for this outrage. It was as much a violation of fundamental principle, a violation of popular sovereignty, to force a Const.i.tution on an unwilling people for a day as for a year or for a longer time.

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

He paused to comment on certain diatribes in the Washington Union which had denounced him as a renegade, traitor and deserter, and read from its columns an article presenting the extreme claims of the South, arguing that all laws and Const.i.tutions of the free States forbidding slavery were violations of the Federal Const.i.tution, and that the emanc.i.p.ation of slaves in the Northern States was a gross outrage on the rights of property. But this article, he said, was in harmony with the Lecompton Const.i.tution, which declared the right of property in a slave to be higher than Const.i.tutions.

This meant that the Const.i.tutions of the free States forbidding slavery were in conflict with the Const.i.tution of the United States and of no validity. Hence slavery had right to exist in all the States. But this was not the authentic Democratic faith, which left the whole question to the option of the several States. If each one took care of its own affairs, minded its own business and let its neighbors alone, there would be peace in the country.

Seward had proclaimed a higher law which forbade slavery everywhere.

this instrument and the Administration paper proclaimed a higher law which established it in all the States. It was time to quit this folly and yield obedience to the Const.i.tution and laws of the land.

It was the most arrant presumption for the Administration to attempt to make this a party measure. By what right did these accidental and temporary holders of office prescribe party politics? There had been no Convention, not even a caucus, since this question arose.

The party was not committed. The President had no right to tell a Senator his duty and command his allegiance. He had no power to prescribe tests. A Senator's first duty was to his State. "If the will of my State is one way and the will of the President is the other, am I to be told that I must obey the Executive and betray my State, or else be branded as a traitor to the party and hunted down by all the newspapers that share the patronage of the Government?

And every man who holds a petty office in any part of my State to have the question put to him, 'Are you Douglas' enemy? If not, your head comes off.'"

What despotism on earth could equal this? The obedience of Senators was demanded on this question only. On all else they were free.

The President was evidently guided by the old adage that a man needs no friends when he knows he is right and only want his friends to stand by him when he is wrong.

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

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

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

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

The Administration now declared war on him. The patronage was unsparingly used against his friends and it was better for an applicant for Federal appointment to be accused of any crime than suspected of friendship with Douglas. This separation from his party touched his feelings more deeply than any other event of his life, and we find surprising evidence of his being shaken by deep emotions that seem out of harmony with his robust and unsentimental nature. But when we remember that all his life had been spent in the activities of politics, that his thoughts, sentiments and pa.s.sions had all been political for twenty years, that the Democratic platform was at once his creed and his philosophy, we can understand something of the choking emotion that threatened to overpower him as he announced that he was thenceforth a rebel and a heretic.

After December 9th, the Administration press attacked him bitterly and he found himself everywhere proclaimed a traitor and deserter.

He told the Senate that he knew the knife would be put to the throats of his followers. The Administration Senators a.s.sailed him. But he was equal to all emergencies and his new position as the recognized leader of the anti-Lecompton revolt gave him the enthusiastic applause of the Northwest.

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

On April 1st, while the House had the bill under consideration, Montgomery of Pennsylvania offered a subst.i.tute which had been offered by Crittenden in the Senate and there rejected, providing that the Const.i.tution should be submitted to a vote, and, if adopted, the President should at once proclaim the admission of the State; if rejected, the inhabitants should hold a new Const.i.tutional Convention. This subst.i.tute pa.s.sed the House but was rejected by the Senate. A conference Committee was appointed, which reported the notorious English bill, providing that a generous grant of land should be offered to Kansas, and the people at a special election vote to accept it. If they so voted, they were to be admitted as a State with the Lecompton Const.i.tution. If they rejected the grant, they could not be admitted until they numbered 93,000, which meant indefinite postponement. The bill was merely an offer of a bribe to the people to accept a Const.i.tution which they abhorred.

Its form was such that men who still believe it well to maintain the guise of decency could vote for it on the pretence that it was a land grant.

Douglas, who had now tried the th.o.r.n.y path of rebellion, faltered.

He was tempted to support the bill and seek reconciliation, but decided to vote against it. It pa.s.sed the Senate by a majority of nine and the House by a majority of eight. In the following August the proposition was submitted and rejected so decisively that the maddest fanatic must have seen that all hope of making Kansas a slave State was gone forever.

Chapter XIII. The Illinois Campaign.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He then addressed himself to Lincoln's Springfield speech. He attacked his extreme doctrines with characteristic adroitness.

Lincoln's speech was of doubtful prudence as a campaign argument.

It really foreboded civil war or a peaceful dissolution of the Union. While this alternative was, perhaps, inevitable, political expediency forbade its avowal. Douglas declared the necessary result of his philosophy to be a war of sections, a war of the North against the South, of the free States against the slave States, to be continued relentlessly until the one or the other should be subdued and all should either become free States or all become slave States. But this was not the true theory of the American Union. The States differed widely in soil, climate, resources, tastes and habits. Their laws and inst.i.tutions were utterly unlike.

New Hampshire's laws were unfit for South Carolina; those of New York were not suited to the Pacific Coast. Uniformity in local and domestic affairs would be destructive of State rights, State sovereignty and personal liberty. Uniformity was the parent of despotism the world over. The only way of attaining Lincoln's proposed uniformity would be to abolish State legislatures, blot out State sovereignty and merge the States into one consolidated empire. But diversity, dissimilarity, variety in all their local and domestic inst.i.tutions was the great safeguard of their liberties.

He insisted on reverently bowing to the Supreme Court as the authoritative expounder of the Const.i.tution, rather than appealing from it to a tumultuous town meeting where const.i.tutional questions arose. The Federal Government was founded on the white basis.

It was made by white men, for the benefits of white men, to be administered by white men in such manner as they should determine.

Let each State decide for itself how it would treat the negroes and let its neighbors alone.

"The issues between Mr. Lincoln and myself," he said, "are made up, * * * *. He goes for uniformity in our domestic inst.i.tutions, for a war of sections, until one or the other shall be subdued. I go for * * * the right of the people to decide for themselves. On the other hand Mr. Lincoln goes for a warfare on the Supreme Court.

* * * * I yield obedience to the decisions of that Court. * * *

* I am opposed to negro equality. I repeat that this nation is a white people, * * * * a people that have established this Government for themselves and their posterity. * * * * I am opposed to taking any step that recognizes the negro man * * * as the equal of the white man. I am opposed to giving him a voice in the administration of the Government."

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

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

"I have known Lincoln well," he said, "for a quarter of a century.

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

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

"How is Lincoln, if elected Senator, going to carry out that principle which he says is essential to the existence of this Union; that slavery must be abolished in all the States, or must be established in all? * * * * He invites, by his proposition, a war between Illinois and Kentucky, a war between the free States and the slave States, a war between the North and the South, for the purpose of either exterminating slavery in every Southern State, or planting it in every Northern State. * * * * * What man in Illinois would not lose the last drop if his heart's blood before he would submit to the inst.i.tution of slavery being forced upon us by the other States against our will? * * * What Southern man would not shed the last drop of his heart's blood to prevent Illinois or any other Northern State from interfering to abolish slavery in his State? *

* * * I am opposed to organizing a sectional party which appeals to Northern pride and Northern pa.s.sion and prejudice against Southern inst.i.tutions, thus stirring up ill feeling and hot blood between brethren of the same Republic. * * * * How is he to carry out his principles when he gets to the Senate? Does he intend to introduce a bill to abolish slavery in Kentucky? Does he intend to introduce a bill to interfere with slavery in Virginia? How is he to accomplish what he professes must be done to save the Union?

"There would be but one way to carry out his ideas. That would be to establish a consolidated empire as destructive to the liberties of the people and the rights of the citizen as that of Austria or Russia or any other despotism that rests upon the necks of the people * * * *. Who among you expects to live or have his children live until slavery shall be established in Illinois or abolished in South Carolina? * * * * There is but one possible way in which slavery can be abolished and that is by leaving a State * * *

* perfectly free to form and regulate its inst.i.tutions in its own way. That was the principle upon which this Republic was founded.

* * * * Under its operation slavery disappeared from New Hampshire, from Rhode Island, from Connecticut, from New York, from New Jersey, from Pennsylvania, from six of the twelve original slave holding States; and this gradual emanc.i.p.ation went on so long as we in the free states minded our own business and left our neighbors alone, * * * * so long as the free States were content with managing their own affairs and leaving the South perfectly free to do as they pleased. But the moment the North said, 'We are powerful enough to control you of the South,' * * * * that moment the South combined to resist the attack and thus sectional parties were formed and gradual emanc.i.p.ation ceased in all the Northern slave holding States * * *.

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

Yet, he said, Lincoln wants to be elected Senator in order to reverse the Dred Scott decision by pa.s.sing another unconst.i.tutional statute. He can not get rid of the Judges now on the bench until they die. He must first elect a Republican President by Northern votes bound by pledges to appoint none but Republicans to the bench.

He must then persuade the Judges to die. The President must pledge his new Judges in advance to decide this slavery question according to the wishes of his party, regardless of the Const.i.tution. What confidence would the people have in a Court thus const.i.tuted?--a Court composed of partisan Judges, appointed on political grounds, catechized in advance and pledged in regard to a decision before the argument and without reference to the state of facts? Would such a Court command the respect of the country? Without regard to the Dred Scott decision slavery will go just where the people want it and not one inch further.

"I tell you, my friends, it is impossible under our inst.i.tutions to force slavery on an unwilling people. If this principle of popular sovereignty * * * be fairly carried out by letting the people decide the question for themselves by a fair vote at a fair election and with honest returns, slavery will never exist one day or one hour in any Territory against the unfriendly legislation of an unfriendly people. I care not how the Dred Scott decision may have settled the abstract question so far as the practical results are concerned. *

* * If the people of the Territory want slavery they will encourage it by pa.s.sing affirmatory laws and the necessary police regulations, patrol laws and slave code; if they do not want it they will withhold that legislation and by withholding it slavery is a dead as if prohibited by a const.i.tutional provision. * * * * * They could pa.s.s such local laws as would drive slavery out in one day or one hour, if they were opposed to it; and therefore, so far as the question of slavery in the Territory is concerned, so far as the principle of popular sovereignty is concerned in its practical operation, it matters not how the Dred Scott case may be decided.