In his assault to capture the Democratic presidential nomination in 1852 he inflicted damage on himself that never healed. His campaign systematically insulted almost every major figure within the party. The name-calling was vicious, childish, and, worst of all, often deadly accurate. Douglas’s offense against the party’s elders, the “old fogies,” as he called them, remained vivid as a forewarning of the ever-present threat of his still radiant political promise, his vibrant youth, boundless energy, legislative skill, stunning accumulation of power through his linkage to far-flung financial and industrial interests, and astounding feats of oratorical bombast, bellowed in floor performances of name-calling, illogic, flying spit and sweat, accompanied by shouting in a drumbeat, and flinging about the word “nigger.” Imposing and intimidating, the Little Giant’s heights of demagogy highlighted his underlying anxiety.
Even before Pierce’s inauguration Douglas began planning his campaign to seize the 1856 Democratic presidential nomination. His scramble was already frantic. Douglas’s previously unmarred confidence was tinged with desperation. Seeking to recover his untarnished glimmer he burned with an ever more intense nervous energy. The death of his wife, Martha, in January 1853, shortly after Pierce’s election, brought home to Douglas his mortality. He was always driven and uncontrollable, but now he was compelled and haunted. His drinking got worse and appearance shabby as it would during his cycles of stress.
Then Douglas conceived an even more stupendous feat to transport his ambition to the White House, the construction of a transcontinental Pacific railroad. He had strategically invested in real estate to profit from both potential central and northern routes, dealing in his fellow legislators North and South, and was the beneficiary of his close relationships with bankers from Washington to Wall Street to Chicago. But there was an obstacle. The railroad must cross land that stretched a thousand miles from the western border of Missouri to the continental divide of the Rocky Mountains. In order to lay track across the Great Plains, which was federal territory, an act of Congress was required. Lining the pockets of Douglas’s fellow politicians was only one part in lining up the politics.
The Kansas and Nebraska territories, commonly referred to solely as Nebraska, were north of the line established in the Compromise of 1820—the Missouri Compromise—that had permitted admission of Missouri as a slave state but no other above that demarcation. The territory north of the line was a vast land containing what would ultimately become not only the states of Kansas and Nebraska, but also South Dakota, North Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. If admitted as states under the terms of the Missouri Compromise their representatives and senators would decisively tilt the balance of power against the South, and almost inevitably a large Northern majority in the Congress would pass legislation against the expansion of slavery.
When Douglas as chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories originally filed his bill to organize the Nebraska territories he triggered a bidding war. Singlehandedly he broke the dam of the Compromise of 1850 that had been constructed to quarantine slavery from national politics. From the moment Douglas introduced his bill, he lost control to Southerners who seized the opening to repeal the Missouri Compromise. While the notion that the federal government could not interfere with slavery as a “local” institution in the Southern states was a nearly universal consensus except among a tiny fringe of abolitionists, the Southern Rightists insisted that their “liberty” could not be restricted anywhere. They used Douglas’s bill to erase the line prohibiting slavery in the North as only a preliminary step to nationalizing it.
Douglas hailed his Nebraska Act (as it was often called) as a glorious new dawn of democracy, which he marketed under the phrase “popular sovereignty,” a watery concept he raised to a high principle and waved as his banner. Whether or not a new territory would be slave or free, he argued, would be determined by the vote of its citizens. But just who those hypothetical people might be and what legal conditions might govern their decisions he could and would not say. Indeed, that lack of definition on the most important matters was at the heart of his doctrine. His ill-defined means were contrived to achieve his political ends. Both Southern Rightists and antislavery Northerners considered “popular sovereignty” to be little more than Douglas’s expedient gambit to advance his ambition. But a number of the most influential Southerners, even if they privately acknowledged his cynicism, grabbed Douglas’s Nebraska Act as a convenient mechanism for the conquest of Kansas, which would be secured when Missourians swooped across the state line to claim it for slavery. His concept was regarded as vacant as the territory of Kansas itself (the tribe of Wyandotte Native Americans who inhabited it conveniently overlooked). “Border Ruffians” rushed in to fill Douglas’s theoretical vacuum.
* * *
The first territorial governor, Andrew Horatio Reeder, a Democratic railroad lawyer from Pennsylvania, had no objection to slavery and even jocularly suggested he might bring his own slave to the territory, though he didn’t happen to own one. A dignified, portly figure with well-tended side-whiskers, upon his arrival in Kansas delivered a windy oration worthy of Polonius, hailing “our glorious Union” and the “vox populi” of popular sovereignty. He saw the New England Emigrant Aid Society, which funded antislavery settlers to travel to Kansas, as the only potential source of friction and that could be easily handled.
The first election in the territory, for a Kansas delegate to the Congress, on November 29, 1854, was the signal for an invasion of hundreds of heavily armed proslavery men from the western border counties of Missouri. They organized into groups called Blue Lodges and Sons of the South, equipped with weapons provided from state armories, and pledged to make Kansas a slave state. Threatening poll judges and intimidating free state men from voting, the Ruffians installed their favored candidate. Governor Reeder scheduled an election for the legislature for March 30, 1855. On that day more than five thousand men lubricated with whiskey, flying flags and banners, overran the polls to stuff ballots for what the free staters called the “bogus legislature.”
Reeder’s refusal to certify rigged elections came as a shock to the proslavery forces. His actual belief in the orotund phrases he had uttered about the popular will surprised all sides and infuriated the Missourians. Pierce summoned him to Washington to fire him.
Reeder’s replacement as territorial governor, Wilson Shannon, a former Democratic governor and congressman from Ohio, who had voted for the Kansas-Nebraska Act, appeared at a rally at Westport, Missouri, the headquarters town for the Ruffians, where he blessed the proslavery “bogus legislature” as legal and announced, “He was for slavery in Kansas.”
Abraham Lincoln feared the worst-case scenario, driven by those exploiting “the spirit of violence.” “That Kansas will form a Slave constitution, and, with it, will ask to be admitted into the Union, I take to be an already settled question,” he had written his friend Joshua Speed on August 24, 1855. “By every principle of law, ever held by any court, North or South, every negro taken to Kansas is free; yet in utter disregard of this—in the spirit of violence merely—that beautiful [Bogus] Legislature gravely passes a law to hang men who shall venture to inform a negro of his legal rights.”
Despite two invasions, the Border Ruffians failed to drive off the antislavery settlers, most of whom had been recruited to the territory by the New England Emigrant Aid Society in a deliberate effort to use the popular sovereignty concept to keep Kansas free. In September 1855, in Kansas, a gathering of Free Soilers, Whigs, and some Democrats formed a new political party, the Free State Party, under the banner: “A Free State; Opposition To Tyranny By Peaceable Measures First; When They Fail, By Force.” The newly formed party resolved, “That we owe no allegiance or obedience to the tyrannous enactment of this spurious Legislature. . . . the monstrous consummation of an act of violence, usurpation, and fraud.” Then the free state men reconvened at Topeka on October 23 to ratify a constitution emblazoned, “Slavery shall not exist i
n the state.” To accommodate the Democrats in the Free State coalition, however, the constitution banned free blacks. Governor Shannon, meanwhile, attended the founding of the proslavery Law and Order Party as a delegate, representing Lawrence, where he did not reside, and was elected the convention’s chairman. He informed the cheering crowd that the Topeka Constitution was “treasonable,” adding, “The president is behind you.”
In late November 1855, a series of startlingly tragic and absurd events precipitated yet another Ruffian invasion. In a dispute over a land claim, a proslavery man brutally murdered a free state man. The killer fled for safety to the sanctuary of Missouri. His protector was Samuel J. Jones, postmaster of Westport, the hotbed of the Ruffians, who had participated in the first invasion of Kansas to threaten election judges and destroy a ballot box, and was appointed sheriff of Douglas County (named after Stephen A. Douglas) by the “bogus legislature.” A contemporary Kansan historian described him as “the most consummate rogue” of “contemptible meanness.” Jones arrested the only eyewitness to the murder, a free state leader named Jacob Branson. But an armed band of free state men confronted Jones, rescuing the prisoner. The humiliated Jones informed Governor Shannon he faced “an open rebellion.” Then the governor summoned the militia to suppress it, though less than a hundred men answered his call, followed by an official order, a bugle call, to bring in about 1,500 heavily armed Missourians to exterminate the foe. They anticipated a turkey shoot. “We expect bloodshed,” read the editorial in the proslavery Squatter Sovereign newspaper, “and we . . . expect to wade in the blood of the abolitionists.”
The Ruffians descended on Lawrence bristling with muskets and bowie knives, toting whiskey jugs to stoke their bravado, and expected to stage a swift massacre to settle the question of Kansas for good. They were stunned to encounter a well-drilled militia entrenched in breastworks and five forts, and wielding hundreds of Sharps rifles, the most modern, rapid-firing, and accurate long-range weapon in the world, of which the Ruffians had not one, aimed in their direction. They “will give us the victory without firing a shot,” the leader of the free staters Charles Robinson wrote Lawrence. The shaken Ruffians pleaded for intervention from the governor, who instead chose to negotiate. They felt Shannon, like Reeder, betrayed them. The Missourians sullenly retreated for the winter, losers of what was called the Wakarusa War, to prepare for a bloody spring offensive.
On January 15, 1856, the free staters named their own governor and legislature. Kansas was now divided by dual and dueling powers. There were two legislatures, two constitutions, and two armed camps. The proslavery party’s government had come into existence under federal legal authority, yet in defiance of the presidentially appointed governor and every rule of fair elections. The antislavery party’s government had no legal status but claimed the mantle of justice. Both claimed the other was illegitimate.
In February, Lincoln attended a meeting in Springfield, Illinois, to hear firsthand accounts from free state Kansans on the front lines. Lincoln spoke up, advising a political strategy against creating a separate government, unaware that the free staters had already done so in their effort to resist making Kansas a slave state. “You can better succeed with the ballot,” Herndon recounted him saying. “Let there be peace. Revolutionize through the ballot box. . . . Your attempt, if there be such, to resist the laws of Kansas by force is criminal and wicked; and all your feeble attempts will be follies and end in bringing sorrow on your heads and ruin the cause you would freely die to preserve!” When a subscription was taken up, Lincoln chipped in, “showing his sincerity,” and it was sent “to our friends in Kansas.”
Under Douglas’s exalted “popular sovereignty” free elections were being trampled. The congressional committee investigating the “troubles” in Kansas would conclude, “each election in the Territory . . . has been carried by organized invasion from the State of Missouri, by which the people of the Territory have been prevented from exercising the rights secured to them.”
The conflict on the distant plains of Kansas exposed the contradiction between Douglas’s doctrine and the squalid reality. His problem was not theoretical. Douglas had attached his fate to that of Kansas. He saw the opening of the 34th Congress as a new opportunity to recast the crisis and resolve his danger.
CHAPTER THREE
THE SPIRIT OF VIOLENCE
Who names Douglas for the next President now?” mocked an editorial in the New York Times after the passage of his Nebraska bill provoked an outcry in 1854. Under the headline “The Prophet on the Nebraska Question,” the newspaper approvingly quoted the sermon of the famous Hartford theologian Horace Bushnell: “But tidings out of the East and out of the West shall trouble him; therefore shall he go forth with great fury to destroy and utterly to make waste, yet he shall come to his end and none shall help him.”
Lyman Trumbull
“I could then travel from Boston to Chicago by the light of my own effigies,” Douglas would later observe during his 1858 campaign for the Senate against Lincoln, when he also boasted that he had envisioned his resurrection and his enemies’ demise. “I predicted that in less than five years you would have to get out a search warrant to find an anti-Nebraska man.”
Not quite two years after the New England evangelist had cast a malediction on him, Douglas announced he was seeking “perfect and complete vindication,” as he wrote to Howell Cobb, trying to ingratiate himself with the former Georgia governor. Cobb was one of the wealthiest slaveholders, just returned to the Congress where he had been Speaker of the House under Polk, and as establishment a Southern Democrat as there was. Despite the devastation of the Northern Democrats in the midterm elections of 1854, Douglas took heart from the comeback of Democrats in state contests the following year and the rapid dissolution of the Whig Party. Even as the anti-Nebraska forces claimed control of the U.S. House of Representatives, Douglas plotted his next presidential campaign. His prospective rivals seemed damaged and weak. Pierce was ruined, mainly for signing Douglas’s Nebraska bill, and Douglas believed he could rise on Pierce’s ashes.
“Douglas first!” was his new slogan, proclaiming his self-confidence. “Ohio is as sure for us as Illinois,” he wrote James W. Sheahan, whom he had installed as editor of the Chicago Times. Douglas intended to play the inside game rather than repeat the failed strategy of storming the citadel. For his campaign managers Douglas enlisted two seasoned politicos, David T. Disney, a former congressman from Ohio, and James W. Singleton, an Illinois state legislator and railroad builder by way of Virginia and Kentucky who had been an Old Whig. Singleton slyly filled Southern newspapers with letters touting Douglas, while Disney set up shop at New York’s Astor House, where he tried to forge peace between the proslavery Hards and antislavery Softs, hostile factions of the New York Democratic Party, to promote Douglas’s candidacy. But Disney could no more achieve an armistice between the scorpions in the bottle than had Pierce.
Still, Douglas believed the leadership of the Democratic Party was a vacuum that he alone could fill. The exhausted ambition of Secretary of State William L. Marcy had left his New York backers searching for an alternative. For two generations Marcy had been the towering Democratic figure in the state and a recurrent presidential hopeful. His disdain for Pierce, who treated him shabbily, and Buchanan, an old rival, exceeded his distaste for Douglas. Dean Richmond, Marcy’s key man and the vice president of the New York Central Railroad, traveled to Washington to confer secretly with Douglas. Richmond promised a winning scenario: if his delegation of Softs would be seated at the convention and the Hards were excluded, he guaranteed New York would vote as a unit for Douglas and deliver to him the nomination.
When the 34th Congress reconvened on March 4, 1856, Douglas stepped on to the stage for the first scene of the drama that he hoped would end with his inauguration as president. He had returned to Washington recovered from one of his periodic physical collapses brought on by his chronic alcoholism. (“It is well known in Chicago that
he is a drunken little blackguard,” jibed the Cleveland Leader, a Republican Party newspaper tied to antislavery senator Benjamin Wade.) The Democratic majority anxiously awaited Douglas’s move. He planned to use his chairmanship of the Committee on Territories to deliver a report on Kansas to tout his “great principle” of popular sovereignty, and expected it would prove “a crusher, and would cut down Pierce completely,” according to his close ally, Congressman Thomas L. Harris of Illinois. Douglas’s presentation was carefully produced as the launch of his presidential campaign.
On March 12, Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina formally requested that Douglas read aloud his entire report before the Senate. For two hours, Douglas held forth to make his whole constitutional, historical, and political case. It was a transparent bid for Southern support. He offered the Calhoun explanation of the Union as a compact of states with the “reserve right” of slavery.
Butler’s introduction and Douglas’s tribute to Calhoun suggested the tactical alliance that Douglas believed was essential for his next run for the presidency. He could not rise without the blessing of the Southern Democrats. They had blocked him from the Democratic nomination in 1852, but he had accomplished the Kansas-Nebraska Act with their cooperation.
All the Powers of Earth Page 4
