Stephen A. Douglas: A Study in American Politics Part 16

[Footnote 350: _Globe_, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., App., p. 371. I have italicized one phrase because of its interesting relation to the Kansas-Nebraska Act.]

[Footnote 351: _Globe_, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., App., p. 373.]

[Footnote 352: Stephens, Const. View of the War between the States, II, pp. 178 ff.]

[Footnote 353: For an account of this interesting episode, see Stephens, War Between the States, II, pp. 202-204. Boyd, not McClernand, was chairman of the House Committee, but the latter introduced the bills by agreement with Richardson.]

[Footnote 354: _Globe_, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., pp. 662, 757.]

[Footnote 355: See Sheahan, Douglas, pp. 132-134. See also Douglas's speech in the Senate, Dec. 23, 1851, and the testimony of Jefferson Davis, _Globe_, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., p. 1830.]

[Footnote 356: _Globe_, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., p. 1115.]

[Footnote 357: _Ibid._, p. 1116.]

[Footnote 358: _Globe_, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., pp. 1134-1135.]

[Footnote 359: _Ibid._, p. 1135.]

[Footnote 360: _Ibid._, p. 1134.]

[Footnote 361: _Ibid._, pp. 1143-1144.]

[Footnote 362: _Globe_, 36 Cong., 1 Sess., App., pp. 305-306; also Cutts, Const.i.tutional and Party Questions, pp. 80-81.]

[Footnote 363: _Globe_, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., App., pp. 1480-1481.

Rhodes, History of the United States, I, p. 181.]

[Footnote 364: Rhodes, History of the United States, I, pp. 182-183.]

[Footnote 365: _Globe_, 32 Cong., 1 Sess., App., p. 66.]

[Footnote 366: _Globe_, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., pp. 1829-1830.]

[Footnote 367: _Ibid._, p. 1830.]

[Footnote 368: See his speech in Chicago; Sheahan, Douglas, p. 169.]

[Footnote 369: When Douglas reported the bills, he announced that there was a difference of opinion in the committee on some points, in regard to which each member reserved the right of stating his own opinion and of acting in accordance therewith. See _Globe_, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., p. 592.]

CHAPTER X

YOUNG AMERICA

When Douglas reached Chicago, immediately after the adjournment of Congress, he found the city in an uproar. The strong anti-slavery sentiment of the community had been outraged by the Fugitive Slave Law. Reflecting the popular indignation, the Common Council had adopted resolutions condemning the act as a violation of the Const.i.tution and a transgression of the laws of G.o.d. Those senators and representatives who voted for the bill, or "who basely sneaked away from their seats and thereby evaded the question," were stigmatized as "fit only to be ranked with the traitors, Benedict Arnold and Judas Iscariot." This was indeed a sorry home-coming for one who believed himself ent.i.tled to honors.

Learning that a ma.s.s-meeting was about to indorse the action of the city fathers, Douglas determined to face his detractors and meet their charges. Entering the hall while the meeting was in progress, he mounted the platform, and announced that on the following evening he would publicly defend all the measures of adjustment. He was greeted with hisses and jeers for his pains; but in the end he had the satisfaction of securing an adjournment until his defense had been heard.

It was infinitely to his credit that when he confronted a hostile audience on the next evening, he stooped to no cheap devices to divert resentment, but sought to approve his course to the sober intelligence of his hearers.[370] It is doubtful if the Fugitive Slave Law ever found a more skillful defender. The spirit in which he met his critics was admirably calculated to disarm prejudice. Come and let us reason together, was his plea. Without any attempt to ignore the most obnoxious parts of the act, he pa.s.sed directly to the discussion of the clauses which apparently denied the writ of _habeas corpus_ and trial by jury to the fugitive from service. He reminded his hearers that this act was supplementary to the Act of 1793. No one had found fault with the earlier act because it had denied these rights. Both acts, in fact, were silent on these points; yet in neither case was silence to be construed as a denial of const.i.tutional obligations. On the contrary, they must be a.s.sumed to continue in full force under the act. Misapprehension arose in these matters, because the recovery of the fugitive slave was not viewed as a process of extradition. The act provided for the return of the alleged slave to the State from which he had fled. Trial of the facts by jury would then follow under the laws of the State, just as the fugitive from justice would be tried in the State where the alleged crime had been committed. The testimony before the original court making the requisition, would necessarily be _ex parte_, as in the case of the escaped criminal; but this did not prevent a fair trial on return of the fugitive. Regarding the question of establis.h.i.+ng the ident.i.ty of the apprehended person with the fugitive described in the record, Douglas a.s.serted that the terms of the act required proof satisfactory to the judge or commissioner, and not merely the presentment of the record. "Other and further evidence"

might be insisted upon.

At various times Douglas was interrupted by questions which were obviously contrived to embarra.s.s him. To all such he replied courteously and with engaging frankness. "Why was it," asked one of these troublesome questioners, "that the law provided for a fee of ten dollars if the commissioner decided in favor of the claimant, and for a fee of only five dollars if he decided otherwise? Was this not in the nature of an inducement, a bribe?" "I presume," said Douglas, "that the reason was that he would have more labor to perform. If, after hearing the testimony, the commissioner decided in favor of the claimant, the law made it his duty to prepare and authenticate the necessary papers to authorize him to carry the fugitive home; but if he decided against him, he had no such labor to perform."

After all, as Douglas said good-naturedly, all these objections were predicated on a reluctance to return a slave to his master under any circ.u.mstances. Did his hearers realize, he insisted, that refusal to do so was a violation of the Const.i.tution? And were they willing to shatter the Union because of this feeling? At this point he was again interrupted by an individual, who wished to know if the provisions of the Const.i.tution were not in violation of the law of G.o.d. "The divine law," responded Douglas, "does not prescribe the form of government under which we shall live, and the character of our political and civil inst.i.tutions. Revelation has not furnished us with a const.i.tution--a code of international law--and a system of civil and munic.i.p.al jurisprudence." If this Const.i.tution were to be repudiated, he begged to know, "who is to be the prophet to reveal the will of G.o.d, and establish a theocracy for us?"

At the conclusion of his speech, Douglas offered a series of resolutions expressing the obligation of all good citizens to maintain the Const.i.tution and all laws duly enacted by Congress in pursuance of the Const.i.tution. With a remarkable revulsion of feeling, the audience indorsed these sentiments without a dissenting voice, and subsequently repudiated in express terms the resolutions of the Common Council.[371] The triumph of Douglas was complete. It was one of those rare instances where the current of popular resentment is not only deflected, but actually reversed, by the determination and eloquence of one man.

There were two groups of irreconcilables to whom such appeals were unavailing--radical Abolitionists at the North and Southern Rights advocates. Not even the eloquence of Webster could make willing slave-catchers of the anti-slavery folk of Ma.s.sachusetts. The rescue of the negro Shadrach, an alleged fugitive slave, provoked intense excitement, not only in New England but in Was.h.i.+ngton. The incident was deemed sufficiently ominous to warrant a proclamation by the President, counseling all good citizens to uphold the law. Southern statesmen of the radical type saw abundant evidence in this episode of a deliberate purpose at the North not to enforce the essential features of the compromise. Both Whig and Democratic leaders, with few exceptions, roundly denounced all attempts to nullify the Fugitive Slave Law.[372] None was more vehement than Douglas. He could not regard this Boston rescue as a trivial incident. He believed that there was an organization in many States to evade the law. It was in the nature of a conspiracy against the government. The ring-leaders were Abolitionists, who were exciting the negroes to excesses. He was utterly at a loss to understand how senators, who had sworn to obey and defend the Const.i.tution, could countenance these palpable violations of law.[373]

In spite of similar untoward incidents, the vast majority of people in the country North and South were acquiescing little by little in the settlement reached by the compromise measures. There was an evident disposition on the part of both Whig and Democratic leaders to drop the slavery issue. When Senator Sumner proposed a repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act, Douglas deprecated any attempt to "fan the flames of discord that have so recently divided this great people,"[374]

intimating that Sumner's speech was intended to "operate upon the presidential election." It ill became the Senator from Illinois to indulge in such taunts, for no one, it may safely be said, was calculating his own political chances more intently. "Things look well," he had written to a friend, referring to his chances of securing the nomination, "and the prospect is brightening every day.

All that is necessary now to insure success is that the northwest should unite and speak out."[375]

When the Democrats of Illinois proposed Douglas's name for the presidency in 1848, no one was disposed to take the suggestion seriously, outside the immediate circle of his friends. To graybeards there was something almost humorous in the suggestion that five years of service in Congress gave a young man of thirty-five a claim to consideration! Within three short years, however, the situation had changed materially. Older aspirants for the chief magistracy were forced, with no little alarm, to acknowledge the rise of a really formidable rival. By midsummer of 1851, competent observers thought that Douglas had the best chance of winning the Democratic nomination.

In the judgment of certain Whig editors, he was the strongest man. It was significant of his growing favor, that certain Democrats of the city and county of New York tendered him a banquet, in honor of his distinguished services to the party and his devotion to the Union during the past two years.

Politicians of both parties shared the conviction that unless the Whigs could get together,--which was unlikely,--a nomination at the hands of a national Democratic convention was equivalent to an election. Consequently there were many candidates in the field. The preliminary canva.s.s promised to be eager. It was indeed well under way long before Congress a.s.sembled in December, and it continued actively during the session. "The business of the session," wrote one observer in a cynical frame of mind, "will consist mainly in the manoeuvres, intrigues, and compet.i.tions for the next Presidency." Events justified the prediction. "A politician does not sneeze without reference to the Presidency," observed the same writer, some weeks after the beginning of the session. "Congress does little else but intrigue for the respective candidates."[376]

Prospective candidates who sat in Congress had at least this advantage, over their outside compet.i.tors,--they could keep themselves in the public eye by making themselves conspicuous in debate. But the wisdom of such devices was questionable. Those who could not point with confident pride to their record, wisely chose to remain non-committal on matters of personal history. Douglas was one of those who courted publicity. Perhaps as a young man pitted against older rivals, he felt that he had everything to gain thereby and not much to lose. The irrepressible Foote of Mississippi gave all his colleagues a chance to mar their reputations, by injecting into the deliberations of the Senate a discussion of the finality of the compromise measures.[377] It speedily appeared that fidelity to the settlement of 1850, from the Southern point of view, consisted in strict adherence to the Fugitive Slave Act.[378] This was the touchstone by which Southern statesmen proposed to test their Northern colleagues.

Prudence whispered silence into many an ear; but Douglas for one refused to heed her admonitions. Within three weeks after the session began, he was on his feet defending the consistency of his course, with an apparent ingenuousness which carried conviction to the larger audience who read, but did not hear, his declaration of political faith.

Two features of this speech commended it to Democrats: its recognition of the finality of the compromise, and its insistence upon the necessity of banis.h.i.+ng the slavery question from politics. "The Democratic party," he a.s.severated, "is as good a Union party as I want, and I wish to preserve its principles and its organization, and to triumph upon its old issues. I desire no new tests--no interpolations into the old creed."[379] For his part, he was resolved never to speak again upon the slavery question in the halls of Congress.

But this was after all a negative programme. Could a campaign be successfully fought without other weapons than the well-worn blunderbusses in the Democratic a.r.s.enal? This was a do-nothing policy, difficult to reconcile with the enthusiastic liberalism which Young America was supposed to cherish. Yet Douglas gauged the situation accurately. The bulk of the party wished a return to power more than anything else. To this end, they were willing to toot for old issues and preserve the old party alignment. For four years, the Democratic office-hunters had not tasted of the loaves and fishes within the gift of the executive. They expected liberality in conduct, if not liberalism in creed, from their next President. Douglas shared this political hunger. He had always been a believer in rotation in office, and an exponent of that unhappy, American practice of using public office as the spoil of party victory. In this very session, he put himself on record against permanence in office for the clerks of the Senate, holding that such positions should fall vacant at stated intervals.[380]

But had Douglas no policy peculiarly his own, to qualify him for the leaders.h.i.+p of his party? Distrustful Whigs accused him of being willing to offer Cuba for the support of the South.[381] Indeed, he made no secret of his desire to acquire the Pearl of the Antilles.

Still, this was not the sort of issue which it was well to drag into a presidential campaign. Like all the other aspirants for the presidency, Douglas made what capital he could out of the visit of Kossuth and the question of intervention in behalf of Hungary. When the matter fell under discussion in the Senate, Douglas formulated what he considered should be the policy of the government:

"I hold that the principle laid down by Governor Kossuth as the basis of his action--that each State has a right to dispose of her own destiny, and regulate her internal affairs in her own way, without the intervention of any foreign power--is an axiom in the laws of nations which every State ought to recognize and respect.... It is equally clear to my mind, that any violation of this principle by one nation, intervening for the purpose of destroying the liberties of another, is such an infraction of the international code as would authorize any State to interpose, which should conceive that it had sufficient interest in the question to become the vindicator of the laws of nations."[382]

Ca.s.s had said much the same thing, but with less virility. Douglas scored on his rival in this speech: first, when he declared with a bit of Chauvinism, "I do not deem it material whether the reception of Governor Kossuth give offence to the crowned heads of Europe, provided it does not violate the law of nations, and give just _cause_ of offence"; and again, scorning the suggestion of an alliance with England, "The peculiar position of our country requires that we should have an _American policy_ in our foreign relations, based upon the principles of our own government, and adapted to the spirit of the age."[383] There was a stalwart conviction in these utterances which gave promise of confident, masterful leaders.h.i.+p. These are qualities which the people of this great democracy have always prized, but rarely discovered, in their Presidents.

It was at this moment in the canva.s.s that the promoters of Douglas's candidacy made a false move. Taking advantage of the popular demonstration over Kossuth and the momentary diversion of public attention from the slavery question to foreign politics, they sought to thrust Douglas upon the Democratic party as the exponent of a progressive foreign policy. They presumed to speak in behalf of "Young America," as against "Old Fogyism." Seizing upon the _Democratic Review_ as their organ, these progressives launched their boom by a sensational article in the January number, ent.i.tled "Eighteen-Fifty-Two and the Presidency." Beginning with an arraignment of "Webster's un-American foreign policy, the writer,--or writers,--called upon honest men to put an end to this "Quaker policy." "The time has come for strong, st.u.r.dy, clear-headed and honest men to act; and the Republic must have them, should it be compelled, as the colonies were in 1776, to drag the hero of the time out of a hole in a wild forest, [_sic_] whether in Virginia or the illimitable West." To inaugurate such an era, the presidential chair must be filled by a man, not of the last generation, but of this. He must not be "trammeled with ideas belonging to an anterior era, or a man of merely local fame and local affections, but a statesman who can bring young blood, young ideas, and young hearts to the councils of the Republic. He must not be a mere general, a mere lawyer, a mere wire-puller. "Your beaten horse, whether he ran for a previous presidential cup as first or second," will not do. He must be 'a tried civilian, not a second and third rate general.'

"Withal, a practical statesman, not to be discomfited in argument, or led wild by theory, but one who has already, in the councils and tribunals of the nation, reared his front to the dismay of the shallow conservative, to the exposure of the humanitarian incendiary, and the discomfiture of the antiquated rhetorician."

If anyone was so dense as not to recognize the portrait here painted, he had only to turn to an article ent.i.tled "Intervention," to find the name of the hero who was to usher in the new era. The author of this paper finds his sentiments so nearly identical with those of Stephen A. Douglas, that he resorts to copious extracts from his speech delivered in the Senate on the welcome of Kossuth, "entertaining no doubt that the American people, the _democracy_ of the country will endorse these doctrines by an overwhelming majority." Still another article in this formidable broadside from the editors of the _Democratic Review_, deprecated Foote's efforts to thrust the slavery issue again upon Congress, and expressed the pious wish that Southern delegates might join with Northern in the Baltimore convention, to nominate a candidate who would in future "evince the most profound ignorance as to the topographical bearing of that line of discord known as 'Mason and Dixon's.'"

If all this was really the work of Douglas's friends,--and it is more than likely,--he had reason to pray to be delivered from them. At best the whole manoeuvre was clumsily planned and wretchedly executed; it probably did him irreparable harm. His strength was not sufficient to confront all his rivals; yet the almost inevitable consequence of the odious comparisons in the _Review_ was combinations against him. The leading article gave mortal offense in quarters where he stood most in need of support.[384] Douglas was quick to detect the blunder and appreciate its dangers to his prospects. His friends now began sedulously to spread the report that the article was a ruse of the enemy, for the especial purpose of spoiling his chances at Baltimore.

It was alleged that proof sheets had been found in the possession of a gentleman in Was.h.i.+ngton, who was known to be hostile to Douglas.[385]

Few believed this story: the explanation was too far-fetched.

Nevertheless, one of Douglas's intimates subsequently declared, on the floor of the House, that the Judge was not responsible for anything that appeared in the _Review_, that he had no interest in or control over the magazine, and that he knew nothing about the January number until he saw it in print.[386]

In spite of this untoward incident, Douglas made a formidable showing.[387] He was himself well pleased at the outlook. He wrote to a friend, "Prospects look well and are improving every day. If two or three western States will speak out in my favor the battle is over.

Can anything be done in Iowa and Missouri? That is very important. If some one could go to Iowa, I think the convention in that State would instruct for me. In regard to our own State, I will say a word. Other States are appointing a large number of delegates to the convention, ... ought not our State to do the same thing so as to ensure the attendance of most of our leading politicians at Baltimore?... This large number would exert a great moral influence on the other delegates."[388]