Almost President

by Scott Farris

  As Douglas saw it, popular sovereignty not only rested on the bedrock American principle of democratic self-rule, but it also met each region’s needs. He thought it would appeal to what was then called the West (what we would now call the Midwest) because most of the emigrants to the Nebraska Territory would come from that region and desire as much local autonomy as possible. Douglas thought (incorrectly) that popular sovereignty met the South’s needs because it treated those favoring slavery as moral equals with the same rights as those who opposed it and because it removed the issue from Congress, where the South’s political power was diminishing in relation to free states. Finally, the North should see wisdom in popular sovereignty because it was a practical means of limiting slavery expansion. It was clear to Douglas that the arid lands of the West would not be conducive to growing cotton or the other agricultural staples that were grown and harvested by slaves. So, while the “theoretical right” to extend slavery into the territories would exist, in practice most of the territories would most certainly be free.

  When he introduced it in January 1854, Douglas predicted his legislation, which essentially repealed both the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, would “raise a hell of a storm,” but he still underestimated the fury it caused. Ignoring his arguments that slavery would be impractical in the West, Northerners believed Douglas had now opened territories previously expected to be free to the possibility of slavery. So numerous were the protests against the measure in the North that Douglas lamented, “I could travel from Boston to Chicago by the light of my own effigy.”

  The South provided tepid support initially, with a few applauding Douglas for removing “an unjust and odious discrimination against her domestic institutions,” but the South soon understood that popular sovereignty would not truly protect the right to own slaves in the territories. The more rapidly increasing population of the North would provide more emigrants to the territories than the South, and they would vote to make the territories free and those territories would later become free states. The slave states would soon be an overwhelmed minority, inviting congressional action to eliminate slavery even in the Southern states. So while many in the North believed Douglas was a pawn of the “slave power,” many Southerners concluded that he was a closet abolitionist.

  Despite the outcry, the Kansas-Nebraska Act actually passed the Senate, 37-14, and the House by a much smaller 113-100 margin. Southern Whigs had supported the legislation, while Northern Whigs had not. The political effect of it all was an irrevocable split in the Whig Party on the greatest issue of the day. Disaffected Whigs would now join with members of the Free Soil Party and anti-Nebraska Democrats to create the new Republican Party. The Whigs were no longer a viable national political party.

  An “old-line Henry Clay Whig” in Illinois named Lincoln said he was “thunderstruck and stunned” when he heard the Senate had approved the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Having served only one undistinguished term in Congress, Lincoln himself said had it not been for the ruckus caused by Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act he would likely have been through with politics and would have remained, in the words of one chronicler, “merely a good trial lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, known locally for his droll sense of humor, bad jokes, and slightly nutty wife.” Lincoln now ended his four-year absence from politics and began following Douglas around Illinois, trying unsuccessfully to provoke a debate on the merits of Kansas-Nebraska, and also plotting a run for the U.S. Senate against Douglas four years hence, in 1858, when the two would engage in their famous debates.

  The period leading up to 1858 was unkind to Douglas and his principles. Democrats who supported Kansas-Nebraska suffered tremendous defeats in the 1854 elections. The situation worsened in 1855 when pro- and anti-slavery emigrants flooded into Kansas. If Douglas had envisioned popular sovereignty entailing peaceful debate and elections, he badly misread the times. Kansas exploded into such an orgy of violence that it became known as “Bleeding Kansas,” each side seeking to intimidate the other into forming either a free territory or a slave territory.

  Despite these debacles, Douglas remained the dominant figure in the Democratic Party and was a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1856. But the party decided its nominee should be someone untainted by Kansas-Nebraska and so gave its nomination to James Buchanan, whose main qualification was that he had been out of the country as ambassador to Great Britain during the entire controversy. Douglas graciously withdrew in favor of Buchanan, again thinking he was young enough that his time would yet come. In 1857, however, Douglas broke with both Buchanan and the South, which effectively ended his chance to become president.

  Kansas caused the rupture. Free-soil settlers outnumbered pro-slavery settlers by a margin of at least two-to-one, but the territory had produced two competing legislatures, one in Topeka advocating free status and another in Lecompton advocating slavery. The pro-slavery legislature in Lecompton organized a constitutional convention that developed a pro-slavery constitution, which they decided to send to Congress and President Buchanan for approval without a citizens’ referendum.

  Buchanan, a self-described “Northern man with Southern principles,” was willing to accept the Lecompton constitution for fear that the South would secede if he did not, but Douglas furiously objected to the Lecompton charade. It was, he insisted, a blatant transgression of the principle of popular sovereignty that had been at the heart of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In a showdown at the White House, Buchanan warned Douglas that he would politically destroy him for his disloyalty to the administration, reminding him of how Jackson had dealt with disloyal senators. Much as vice presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen advised Dan Quayle during the 1988 campaign that he was “no Jack Kennedy,” Douglas testily advised Buchanan, “Mr. President, I wish to remind you that General Jackson is dead, sir.” When Kansas settlers were finally allowed to vote on the Lecompton pro-slavery constitution in a fair election in 1858, they defeated it by a five-to-one margin.

  For his apostasy, Douglas lost his chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Territories. For good measure, Buchanan also vetoed a Douglas-sponsored bill to provide free homesteads for settlers in the Western territories, legislation that would eventually be approved during the Lincoln administration. Douglas’s break with Buchanan shocked North and South alike, and fueled the Republicans’ fantasy that Douglas might bolt the Democratic Party.

  But Douglas, who began in politics while a lad of fifteen, campaigning for Andrew Jackson in 1828, would never leave the Democratic Party. Northern Democrats praised Douglas for saving their party, for had he backed Lecompton, the Democrats would have been decimated in the North. The South, meanwhile, felt further betrayed by a statesman they had thought of as a sympathetic friend. “Douglas was with us until the time of trial came, then he deceived and betrayed us,” said a Georgian in one of the milder rebukes. Others fretted over his “treachery,” his “detestable heresies,” and (in contrast to the intellectually feeble political invective of today) the “filth of his defiant recreancy.”

  The furor over Kansas, however, was only the second most important development of 1857 that shoved the nation toward dissolution. In March of that year, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in the Dred Scott case with its infamous dictum, authored by former Jackson crony Chief Justice Roger Taney, that African Americans have “no rights which a white man was bound to respect.” Nominally, the case was about whether a slave who lived two years in free territory was no longer a slave, but the court’s majority opinion went far beyond answering that question. The court concluded that no black person, slave or free, was a citizen of the United States, and that neither Congress nor any entity designated by Congress, such as a territorial legislature, had the power to keep slaves out of the territories.

  The decision seemed to make the whole doctrine of popular sovereignty moot. A discomfited Douglas scrambled to reconcile the Dred
Scott decision with the principle on which he had staked his political career. The court decision was the law of the land and must be obeyed, Douglas reasoned, but citizens could still keep slavery out of the territories in which they lived because the right of property in slaves was “worthless . . . unless sustained, protected, and enforced by appropriate police regulations and local legislation.” This interpretation, intended to hold Northern and Southern Democrats together, seemed ingenious, but Douglas only further alienated Southerners and convinced them that what was really needed was a federal slave code that would supersede local regulation.

  Meanwhile, Republicans, including Lincoln, argued that the Supreme Court seemed but one more decision away from decreeing that no state had the power to ban slavery within its borders. In accepting the Republican nomination to run against Douglas for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, Lincoln, quoting the Gospel of St. Matthew, warned that “a house divided against itself cannot stand” and predicted America was reaching a point where it would need to become either all slave or all free to survive as one nation.

  Douglas found Lincoln’s stance absurd. The founders had designed the federal system to allow different states to adopt different policies that best suited their unique situations, histories, and traditions, and the Court would never interfere with this basic precept. Diversity was a strength not a weakness, Douglas said, and if only the extremists on both sides would shut up, the issue could be resolved amicably.

  When Lincoln and Douglas met for their storied series of seven debates in the late summer and fall of 1858, each man insisted the other was the extremist. Lincoln firmly insisted he was no abolitionist and emphasized he did not advocate equality for African Americans (as few Americans of the time, North or South, would have). “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people,” Lincoln said, adding, “I believe there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.” Conversely, Douglas insisted he was no apologist for slavery, despite Lincoln’s summation of popular sovereignty as the belief that “if one man chooses to enslave another, no third man has a right to object.”

  Posterity has judged that Lincoln won the debates, which is why they are famous. Even though he lost the election, by performing so well against the nation’s leading Democrat, Lincoln was now mentioned as a potential presidential candidate. More importantly, Lincoln was on the right side of history in condemning slavery in moral terms. Even though he did not favor full civil equality for blacks, Lincoln believed every human being had the right to be free and reap the benefits of his own labor. His debates with Douglas, Lincoln said, were over “the eternal struggle between these two principles. . . . The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.”

  Where Lincoln was articulating the rights of the minority in a free society, Douglas focused on democracy’s faith in majority rule. “I care more for the great principle of self-government, the right of the people to rule, than I do for all the negroes in Christendom,” he said, summarizing why the other great impact of the debates was to cement a very negative image of Douglas in the modern mind.

  Douglas so frequently used the word “nigger” that William Seward once taunted, “Douglas, no man will ever be president of the United States who spells ‘negro’ with two ‘g’s.” Lincoln complained that Douglas was “the most dangerous enemy of liberty, because the most insidious one,” and agreed with the runaway slave turned abolitionist Frederick Douglass (whom he would one day host at the White House) that Stephen Douglas’s insistence that the Declaration of Independence’s creed that “all men are created equal” did not apply to African Americans was “debauching” public opinion and causing people to consider blacks “brutes.”

  Douglas’s race baiting was unseemly and disturbing, but his views on race and slavery were more complicated than he let on publicly. During the furor over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, in a private conversation recorded by the son of a friend, Douglas insisted, “I am not pro-slavery. I think it a curse beyond computation to both white and black.” He added that he both believed and hoped that “sometime, without a doubt, slavery will be destroyed.” In a Senate speech, Douglas noted, “The cause of freedom has steadily and firmly advanced, while slavery has receded in the same ratio.” There could no longer be, contrary to Southern demands, a perfect balance between free and slave states. Further, Douglas said he hoped the states of the Upper South—Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee—and border states where slavery was not essential to the economy would soon adopt a policy of gradual emancipation.

  Douglas professed to have no special animus toward African Americans. In a statement he issued in response to the Dred Scott decision, he said the supposed inferior racial status of African Americans did not require that they should be enslaved. While blacks might not be entitled to rights, Douglas said, they could be granted “privileges.” “Humanity [and] . . . Christianity requires that we should extend those privileges to them”—provided, Douglas said, that these privileges were granted by the approval of a majority of the voting population and were “consistent with the safety of society.”

  Douglas’s squeamishness regarding slavery, or perhaps only his concern for political appearances, was demonstrated by his refusal of a twenty-five-hundred-acre Mississippi plantation with more than one hundred slaves as a wedding gift in 1847, offered by the father of his first wife, a North Carolina woman named Martha Martin. When Martha’s father died a year later, he left the plantation to his daughter in his will, naming Douglas as the plantation’s administrator, earning a 20 percent commission per year. Douglas retained ownership of the plantation after Martha died during childbirth in 1853.

  Like Henry Clay, Douglas believed nothing could be done to outlaw slavery legislatively because the Constitution explicitly protected slavery where it already existed. “I am not willing to violate the Constitution to put an end to slavery . . . to violate it for one purpose will lead to violating it for other purposes,” Douglas said, sounding an early note of constitutional originalism. Douglas felt self-pity that others could not see the wisdom of his practical approach to the issue, confiding to the son of a friend:

  Never go into politics! If you do, no matter how sincere and earnest you may be, . . . no matter how clear it may be to you that the present is an inheritance from the past, that your hands are tied, and that you are bound to do only what you can do with loyalty to institutions fixed for you by the past, rather than what you might prefer to do if free to choose; no matter for all this or more you will be misinterpreted, vilified, traduced, and finally sacrificed to some local interest or unreasoning passion!

  For Lincoln, Douglas’s position was more easily explained by the fact that he “has no very vivid impression that the Negro is human; and consequently has no idea that there can be any moral question in legislating about him.” Douglas acknowledged this was true. “I do not know of any tribunal on earth that can decide the question of the morality of slavery or any other institution. I deal with slavery as a political question involving questions of public policy.”

  Douglas was a pragmatist to the core who, like Clay, always favored compromise and understood that once an issue was defined in moral terms, compromise was nearly impossible. He hated to mix religion with politics. “No man loves his country better than I do. I know she is not faultless. I see as clearly as they that she is afflicted with a dangerous tumor. But I believe she will slough it off in time, and I am not willing to risk the life of the patient by the illegal and unscientific surgery they demand.” Douglas despaired at what civil war would mean to American democracy and what a loss a debilitated American democracy would be to the world.

  Lincoln’s election as the first Republican president in 1860 is often seen as the fina
l event that triggered secession, but secession was likely inevitable from the time Douglas won the Democratic nomination for president in 1860. With the Fire-Eaters’ determination to destroy the Democratic Party, several Southern delegations, including Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas, had instructions to walk out of the Democratic National Convention if Douglas’s nomination could not be stopped, which it nearly was, for the event was held in Charleston, South Carolina, the center of secessionist sentiment.

  Douglas had delusions that the party might unite around his popular sovereignty platform, but a platform fight broke out over whether to accede to the South’s demand for a federal slave code. Egged on by the Fire-Eaters, eight Southern state delegations walked out. Convention rules required that Douglas secure support from two-thirds of all credentialed delegates to win the nomination, but with so many delegates now absent Douglas could not reach the required threshold. His supporters moved the convention be adjourned and reconvened in Baltimore six weeks later.

  Things were such a mess that Douglas offered to withdraw in favor of a compromise candidate, but his supporters refused even to let the offer be made public. It was “Douglas or nobody,” one supporter said. “Unless he is nominated, our party is gone for all time to come.” Secessionists bolted the Baltimore convention, too, but this time Douglas had arranged for enough alternate delegations that he had the votes to be nominated.