Butler was an elder member of the F Street Mess, the epicenter of power in Washington, where the most powerful Southern senators, all chairmen of the most influential committees, resided together in a boardinghouse in the shadow of the Capitol. Butler was chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis was an ex officio member of the F Street Mess. Individually each of these great beasts claimed the mantle of John C. Calhoun, the “cast-iron man” from South Carolina, who had died in 1850 but still cast his spell. Collectively the F Street Mess amounted to a Senate Select Committee on the Legacy of John C. Calhoun. After their deaths Clay’s and Webster’s influence waned along with their party. Only Calhoun’s shadow remained. His tragic odyssey and bleak vision foretold the radicalization of the South.
Calhoun’s definition of the highest form of civilization was a chain of hierarchy from master to slave. The crusader for states’ rights, nullifier of federal authority, and prophet of secession had proclaimed slavery nothing less than “a positive good” and condemned any compromise to restrain its reach. Sensing a darkening horizon lowering over the country as approaching mortality clouded over him, Calhoun furiously composed dense tracts filled with tortuous formulas to perpetuate minority rule over the majority.
Despite his manifestos Calhoun was no mere ideologue. His driven and dry logic was the distilled product of an embittered lifetime at the pinnacle of American politics. He was the antithesis of a rabble-rousing, tobacco-stained, populist provincial. Nor did he ever make any demagogic appeals to the poor white forgotten man. There was nothing homespun, naive, or commonplace about Calhoun. He was Yale educated, married into Charleston wealth, and a consummate politician operating in Washington for decades.
Statue of John C. Calhoun in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Congress
In the deepest recesses of his brain and to the marrow of his bones Calhoun understood one thing above all: that slavery was power—economic power, political power, social power. Confining slavery to its regional cage would inevitably lead to a dwindling Southern political minority and force a crisis of its whole system. He knew that the future of the Slave Power depended on adroit mastery of the federal government’s inner levers, which as secretary of state he had manipulated in precipitating the Mexican War. He believed that slavery must become an imperial project claiming Cuba and other Latin American lands that would become slave states to tip the balance for the South. If Southern domination over the federal government was ever broken, there could be—should be—no Union. Peering into the abyss, he darkly predicted that the future loss of the executive branch to an antislavery president would trigger secession. Calhoun’s fatal damage outlived him. His overreaching failure provided a pessimistic and cautionary tale for Southern Rightists that they must eternally rule the Democratic Party and the citadel of the federal government to sustain their increasingly precarious power.
Anyone seeking to be the candidate for president of the Democratic Party had to span simultaneously the party’s Northern base and accommodate the Southern powers-that-be that constituted Calhoun’s living legacy. Pierce’s attempt to satisfy the Soft faction of the New York party through the patronage was sufficient for the F Street Mess to wreak retribution that early on hobbled his administration. And Douglas’s relationship with the Southerners was far more fraught than Pierce’s.
Despite his first wife’s ownership of a Mississippi plantation, which Douglas retained after she died through paperwork trying to disguise it, Southern aristocrats viewed his transparently concealed status as a large slaveholder as another aspect of his uncouth social climbing. No matter how brutal Douglas’s thrusts against antislavery senators, Southern legislators would never truly accept him as a member of their inner club. Douglas tried every device to court them, confiding in them, drinking with them, throwing his arms around them, and lining their pockets with lucrative real estate deals. They shared his company and shots of whiskey, but his gestures of intimacy only confirmed for Jefferson Davis and others like him Douglas’s unreliable and low character. To the Southerners, he was always undependable. His shifting positions, even when it momentarily appeased them, confirmed the suspicion. His “great principle” of popular sovereignty still remained anathema because he left open the possibility of the territories becoming free states. It did not take extraordinary insight to see through Douglas to his neediness. In private the Southerners spoke of him as a vulgar confidence man, “our little grog drinking, electioneering demagogue,” as Davis described him in a letter to Pierce in 1860. They would use him as far as he could be used, but they would never trust him. For all Douglas’s canniness he lacked the disinterested ability to see himself as others did.
The poor boy from Vermont who set off for Illinois to make his fortune could not escape being perceived as unrefined. Douglas’s meteoric rise from lowly Northern origins always made him seem suspect in Southern eyes. Douglas was the most brilliant, dynamic, and skillful Northern Democrat, but fatally flawed as his own man, an exemplar of Yankee individualism making himself on the frontier, unwilling to fall into line, and eternally erratic. It would not really have mattered to them if he were polished, distinguished, and cultured. Nor would his alcoholism have bothered them. But Douglas flamboyantly and unapologetically pursued his own interests, political and financial, and his supreme ambition defined him as a party unto himself. He owed no political debt for his rise to the Southerners. Yet Douglas needed the powers-that-be to attain his ultimate goal of the presidency. His schemes to put a host of Southern politicians into his financial debt did nothing to allay suspicion of him even as he enriched them. They happily pocketed the cash, while still regarding him as dubious. Douglas conceived himself as the true heir of Andrew Jackson, the still reigning spirit of Western democracy and his party. President Jackson had crushed Vice President Calhoun’s movement for states’ rights nullification of federal law and ambition to be president. He saw Calhoun’s maneuver as an attempted coup d’état. Calhoun hastily retreated in the face of Jackson’s threat of military force. To his dying day, Jackson regretted not hanging him.
Douglas wished to be the new Jackson, but was compelled to gain the tacit approval of Calhoun’s heirs. He had to hold the North while finessing the South. To realize his dream, he had to square the circle. The necessity of Douglas’s ambition within his party dictated his deliberate ambiguity. He spun out his doctrine of popular sovereignty as the simultaneous solution for the future of the Union and himself.
Douglas wrote his report on Kansas as a brief to appeal for Southern support even as he defended his doctrine. If popular sovereignty was the crux of democracy, for Douglas its core was the “right” of a new Northern state to choose slavery or not. He claimed that the Constitution granted each new state “the right . . . to decide the question of slavery for itself.” He insisted that popular sovereignty as applied to territories was rooted in the Constitution; that the Missouri Compromise had violated the Constitution because it “assumed to deny to the people forever the right to settle the question of slavery for themselves”; and that the Kansas-Nebraska Act restored “the cardinal principles of State equality and self-government, in obedience to the constitution.” His short history of the United States was bowdlerized to deny the basis on which Illinois itself was created a free state. He deliberately omitted mention of the Jefferson-inspired Ordinance of 1787 prohibiting slavery in the Northwest Territory, agreed upon in the Constitutional Convention and incorporated as one of the nation’s first laws. He knowingly ignored the legislative history behind the Missouri Compromise restricting slavery in the North. He purposely elided Jackson’s Proclamation Against Nullification condemning Calhoun’s states’ rights definition of the nation. He consciously failed to recall President Zachary Taylor’s resolve to close to slavery the territory gained through the Mexican War. Instead, he posited popular sovereignty as the Constitution’s original intent, carefully forgetting its recent origin, that the Democratic candidate in the 1848 presi
dential contest, Lewis Cass, had contrived it as a campaign gambit, which Douglas repackaged as an enduring principle. But he was unpersuasive in lifting it above controversy. Nearly everyone, whether antislavery or proslavery, considered his doctrine transparently self-serving. Douglas’s pastiche of Calhounism, fallacious history, and hackneyed legalisms were the talking points of his strategy to win Southern support and thereby the Democratic nomination. His tower of babble was a monument to his ambition.
Douglas built his intricate but rickety intellectual scaffolding to support his prosecutorial case against the antislavery forces in Kansas and defense of the Border Ruffians. He traced the source of violence threatening “the rights and liberties of the people” to a malevolent distant power engaged in an “act of aggression” in violation of “constitutional law,” and “in perversion of the plain provisions of an act of Congress passed in pursuance of the constitution” and “the laws of nations.” The native Vermonter finally identified the locus of subversion, the dangerous “foreign” menace to be the entire “State of Massachusetts,” which had authorized the Emigrant Aid Society. It was Massachusetts that was the “foreign State” seeking to impose “their own peculiar institutions,” twisting John C. Calhoun’s branding of slavery as the South’s “peculiar institution.” It was Massachusetts that was the tyranny trampling democracy. It was Massachusetts that would inspire foreign attack on the United States. “The same principle of action, when sanctioned by our example,” said Douglas, “would authorize all the kingdoms, and empires, and despotisms in the world to engage in a common crusade against republicanism in America, as an institution quite as obnoxious to them, as domestic slavery is to any portion of the people of the United States.”
Douglas’s accusation condensed into that single sentence a perfect illustration of his inimitable demagogic style: daring innuendo, false equivalence, bullying, absurd hypotheticals, and inverted meanings. He made it seem that those defending democracy in Kansas were its enemies and those suppressing it its defenders. Anyone attempting to engage Douglas on his own terms risked getting lost in the bramble of his mischief and made the object of his malice.
Douglas’s description of Massachusetts as an evil “foreign” power was central to his indictment. The “determined hostility” of the Emigrant Aid Society had aroused the reluctant opposition of the innocent citizens of Missouri, he said, having “created apprehensions that the object of the company was to abolitionize Kansas as a means of prosecuting a relentless warfare upon the institutions of slavery within the limits of Missouri.” The innocent Missourians were “excited by a sense of common danger to the necessity of protecting their own firesides from the apprehended horrors of servile insurrection and intestine war.” They were defending hearth and home from invading hordes of New England barbarians.
At the conclusion of Douglas’s tour de force, Senator Jacob Collamer of Vermont calmly stood to read the minority report into the record, refute his points, and propose the admission of Kansas as a free state under the antislavery Topeka Constitution. Then Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts took the floor.
“In the report of the majority,” Sumner said, “the true issue is smothered; in that of the minority, the true issue stands forth as a pillar of fire to guide the country.” He defended the Emigrant Aid Society from Douglas’s “assault,” declaring the society had “done nothing for which it can be condemned under the laws and Constitution of the land.” It was in fact Douglas, said Sumner, who had misrepresented the facts: “Very well, sir; a bad cause is naturally staked on untenable ground. You cannot show the misconduct. Any such allegation will fail. And you now begin your game with loaded dice.”
Douglas seized upon the gambling metaphor and upped the ante. “The Senator says that we begin our game with ‘loaded dice.’ I understand that to be a gambler’s phrase. He may be able to explain it; certainly it will require explanation before the majority of the Senate will be able to understand it. If he means that he is prepared to go to the country to justify treason and rebellion, let him go; and I trust he will meet the fate the law assigns to such conduct.” Douglas, who had been a judge on the Illinois Supreme Court, ruled Sumner guilty of “treason” and deserving a death sentence.
The New York Tribune reported that Douglas had threatened Sumner along with the “Free-State men of Kansas,” saying, “We mean to subdue you, sir.” The article, reprinted in the Chicago Tribune, agitated Douglas, and at his insistence the official record of the Congressional Globe may have been altered so that Douglas was recorded to have called for “submission to the laws and to the constituted authorities . . . and to punish rebellion and treason.” But the phrase—“We mean to subdue you”—assumed a life of its own, and it would never cease to haunt Douglas.
Two days later, Lyman Trumbull stood to make his maiden speech in the Senate. When Trumbull presented his credentials to the Senate, members of Douglas’s faction of the Illinois state legislature presented a petition asserting that he had been illegally elected because his term as a judge extended to 1861. It was a spurious nuisance claim swiftly dismissed by the Judiciary Committee as lacking merit, but it revealed Douglas’s fury at Trumbull’s presence.
Now Trumbull stood in the Senate to protest the government printing of Douglas’s report on Kansas without the minority report attached. Trumbull also emphasized that his election in Illinois was a repudiation of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise—by logical extension a repudiation of Douglas. Like Lincoln, Trumbull was intimately familiar with Douglas’s methods of invective and illogic. Both Trumbull and Douglas had been state judges; now Judge Trumbull judged Judge Douglas. For the first time in the Senate, an equal from his own state rose to challenge him.
Trumbull was a formidable figure in his own right, well-educated, talented, and skillful, a former judge on the state Supreme Court who had been swept into the U.S. House of Representatives in 1854 on the wave of opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but he owed his presence in the Senate entirely to the gesture of one man—Abraham Lincoln. He was there because Lincoln wished to thwart his lifelong rival, Stephen A. Douglas.
Yet another of the Kansas-Nebraska Act’s consequences was to destroy the Democratic majority in the Illinois state legislature, which elected U.S. senators. The new alignment drew challengers to Douglas’s suddenly vulnerable longtime ally, James Shields, who held the other Senate seat. “They don’t care two pence about Nebraska,” Shields confided to other Douglas men, “but Douglas they have sworn to destroy.” Trumbull emerged the leader of the anti-Douglas Democrats in Illinois, and in 1855 he threw his hat into the ring against Shields, but his support from anti-Douglas Democrats in the legislature only amounted to a handful, not close to win.
The Whig candidate, Abraham Lincoln, the last of the Whigs, like the last of the Mohicans, was the strong front-runner. When Shields faltered in the early balloting and Lincoln raced ahead, just short of a majority, the Douglas Democrats threw their backing behind the pliable and corrupt governor, Joel Matteson, who began bribing legislators. On the tenth ballot, as Lincoln’s numbers fell, he calculated he could not win, so in order to avoid a Matteson victory he instructed his followers to cast their ballots for Trumbull. Lincoln gracefully accepted his loss, gratified at the vicarious defeat of Douglas. “On the whole, it is perhaps as well for our general cause that Trumbull is elected,” he wrote his friend Congressman Elihu Washburne of Illinois. “The Neb. men confess that they hate it worse than anything that could have happened. It is a great consolation to see them worse whipped than I am.” Lincoln’s self-sacrifice to make Trumbull the senator became the foundation stone in the forging of the coalition that would become the Illinois Republican Party. Soon Lincoln would leave the husk of the Whig Party behind.
Standing on the floor of the Senate to confront Douglas, Trumbull declared he was not “frightened from a statement of what I believe to be the true condition of things in Kansas by the cry of insurrection and treason where none exist.
” He called out Douglas for using the epithets “abolitionize” and “Black Republicans” in his report. “The veriest simpleton in your streets may cry out ‘Black Republican’ or ‘Abolitionist,’ ” Trumbull said. The former judge dismissed Douglas’s attempt to wrap his Nebraska Act in constitutional legitimacy as “not very material” and filled with “inconsistencies.” He ruled Douglas in contempt of logic, law, and history. “The men who framed our Constitution understood the English language,” he said.
Then Trumbull cited the antislavery Ordinance of 1787 that Douglas had conspicuously left unmentioned. Quoting at length a particularly dense passage of Douglas’s that justified the Missouri Compromise repeal, “maintaining the fundamental principle of equality among all the States,” Trumbull ridiculed it as an absurdity: “I would like to know from the committee what under heaven the organization of a territorial government in Kansas has to do with equality among all the States?”
Reading further portions from Douglas’s report, he systematically demolished his sophistry, especially Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty: “that boasted principle of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which is claimed to be of such vital moment, has no sort of importance except for evil in consequence of its vagueness and uncertainty.” Never before had Douglas been treated so roughly within the Senate. But Trumbull was not done. He debunked Douglas’s skewed account of the Kansas conflict, citing chapter and verse of Border Ruffian violence, reading accounts from incendiary proslavery newspapers. “Had the Emigrant Aid Society been guilty of half the outrages which are here published to the world with impunity by the Missourians, do you believe the facts would have been smothered up by this report?”
When Trumbull concluded and as the Senate prepared to adjourn, Douglas went on the warpath. He played both the victim and the prosecutor in turning on Charles Sumner, who had not spoken that day. “Last year,” he said, “when the Nebraska bill was under consideration, the Senator from Massachusetts asked of me the courtesy to have it postponed for a week, until he could examine the question. I afterwards discovered that, previous to that time, he had written an exposition of the bill—a libel upon me—and sent it off under his own frank.” Douglas referred to the manifesto written by Senators Salmon P. Chase of Ohio and Sumner, “Appeal of the Independent Democrats,” that rallied antislavery opinion against Douglas’s bill as “a criminal betrayal of precious rights.”
All the Powers of Earth Page 5
