Douglas soon found a way to retaliate. When James Lane was named the free state U.S. senator and appeared with a petition for admission of Kansas under the Topeka Constitution, Douglas accused him of presenting an altered document without a provision that would prohibit free blacks. “You withheld the part you would not defend!” Douglas crowed at Seward. “I drove the Senator from New York to the wall on this point the other day. Let there be an end to this system of fraud.”
To Douglas’s intense displeasure three senators decided to tangle with him. His display of ferocity had not intimidated them. They were practiced politicians with the scars to prove it. Benjamin Wade of Ohio spoke up first. “Supposed the fact to be one way or the other, what differences does it make now?” he said. Douglas hardly frightened “Bluff” Ben. Wade, who embraced the forbidden label of “abolitionist” flung at him, was the former law partner of Congressman Joshua Giddings of the notorious boardinghouse known as “Abolition House,” had been an Ohio state senator, where he had opposed a state fugitive slave act in 1839, a stand for which he lost his seat, and had been a district court judge. An old Whig turned Free Soiler, Wade despised Fillmore and was friendly with Seward. He was renowned for his scorn and sarcasm. During the debate over the Compromise of 1850, Senators Andrew Butler of South Carolina and Archibald Dixon of Kentucky had ganged up on him, jibing whether, if he believed that “all men are created equal,” according to the Declaration of Independence, blacks and whites should work side by side. “By the law of God Almighty,” replied Wade, “your slave is your equal, and so you will find out at the day of judgment, though probably not before, at your rate of progress.” Now, acting like the judge he once was, he rejected Douglas’s objection to the Kansas free state petition as “immaterial,” adding, “Is it because you were driven from the real merits of the controversy?”
Senator John P. Hale, Pierce’s nemesis in New Hampshire, who had been prominent in the earliest antislavery party, the Liberty Party, next took on Douglas, dismissing his demagogy: “It does not seem to me to be possible that there can be any sophistry which can mislead anybody upon so simple a proposition.”
Then Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts confronted Douglas, who he charged, “has endeavored today to put some of us in a false position in regard to this question.” Of impoverished working-class origin and self-schooled, learning his trade as a shoemaker and campaigning as the “Natick cobbler,” Wilson was fervently antislavery. He built his own political organization on the loyalty of the Middlesex Regiment of the Massachusetts militia of which he was a colonel, published the Free Soil newspaper in Boston, and had been president of the State Senate. “I am proud of the name of ‘abolitionist.’ I glory in it,” he declared in 1846. Two years later, he defected from the Whigs to the Free Soil Party. Wilson was an adroit dealmaker and coalition builder, and the hidden hand behind the rise of Sumner to the Senate. Striking an alliance with the Know Nothings in the legislature in 1855, he installed himself in the Senate as the successor to the distinguished Old Whig Edward Everett, the cobbler replacing the president of Harvard.
“The Senator often talks to us about ‘abolition agitators,’ and ‘abolitionism,’ ” said Wilson to Douglas. But he “knows as well as I know” that he was distorting the position of senators “opposed to the extension of slavery and to the connection of slavery with the Federal Government.” Yet Douglas had persisted in his distortions. “Sir, this is not the first time, during the present session that the Senator from Illinois has indulged in the profuse use of mere partisan catch-words. These partisan phrases, I tell the honorable Senator frankly, are unworthy of him and of the Senate. He talks again today about ‘Black Republicans.’ This is a favorite phrase of the honorable Senator from Illinois. . . . He should leave such petty warfare to little men. . . . You may sneer at us as Abolition agitators. . . . We have passed beyond that. The people of this country are being educated up to a standard above all these little sneering phrases. We will accept your issue, but you will not, cannot subdue us. . . . You may vote us down, but we shall live to fight another day.”
Douglas jumped in on that line to depict his opponents as cowards. “He who fights and runs away, may live to fight another day,” he derided. “If we fall,” replied Wilson, “we shall fall to rise again.” Again, he urged Douglas “had better discuss this grave question without the application of taunts and epithets.” But Douglas fired back that it was Wilson who had “forgotten what was due to the proprieties of the Senate.” And he offered a new definition of the pejorative term “Black Republicans.” “The new creed,” he said, “adjures and ignores every question which has for its object the welfare and happiness of the white man—every question which does not propose to put the negro on an equality with the white man, politically and socially. . . . Every plank in their platform rests on a black basis—every clause relates to the negro. . . . I wish to call things by their right names. . . . For these reasons the whole country seem, by common consent, to recognize the propriety of calling this new party, the ‘Black Republican Party.’ ”
“We claim our principles are national,” Wilson replied. And Wade interjected that in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives a bill was being introduced to restore the Missouri Compromise—“the Jefferson proviso,” Wade called it, after the Ordinance of 1787—raising the icon of the Democratic Party against Douglas.
Douglas challenged these “Black Republicans.” “I wish to bring these gentlemen to the test,” he said. In the coming election, “the standard-bearer on our side” (whom Douglas hoped would be himself) would “take issue with you on every one of the points which you tender—‘no more slave State,’ ‘the repeal of the fugitive slave law,’ ‘the abolition of the slave trade between the States,’ and ‘the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.’ Upon each and all of them you need have no fear that our candidate will not stand firmly, immovably and unequivocally, upon the Democratic platform.”
Douglas now threw the epithet of “abolitionist” at Seward. “If the Senator is aiming at the reputation of being a martyr to his cause, I think he is adopting the proper course. . . . I sense that the Senator from New York did not object to be called an Abolitionist. He was looking to the honors of martyrdom.” After threatening Trumbull with hanging for treason, he suggested Seward was looking to be strung up.
Then Douglas accused Wilson of the blackest of black accusations against a “Black Republican”—sexual race mixing. Wilson’s offense had been to support the petition of Kansas to be admitted as a free state while dissenting from the Topeka Constitution’s provision barring free blacks. Douglas mocked that Wilson opposed it as “barbarous.” He proudly proclaimed that Illinois had “a similar clause in her constitution; she had a right to put it there; it was our business, and not yours; and if Massachusetts does not like it let her do as she pleases within her own limits, so that she does not violate the Constitution of the United States. We do not believe in the equality of the negro, socially or politically, with the white man. You may practice it, but do not try to force the negro on an equality with us in our State. Our people are a white people; our State is a white State; and we mean to preserve the race pure, without any mixture with the negro. If you wish your blood and that of the African mingled in the same channel, we trust that you will keep at a respectful distance from us, and not try to force that on us as one of your domestic institutions.” The Congressional Globe recorded: “[Laughter, and applause in the galleries.]” (Unquestionably, the word “negro” was substituted for Douglas’s usual use of the word “nigger.”)
Douglas’s crowd-pleasing riff slid from invidious comparison of state black codes to interracial lust, which prompted Wilson to chide him for his coarseness: “Let me tell the honorable Senator from Illinois, that these taunts so often flung out about the equality of races, about amalgamation, and the mingling of blood, are the emanations of low and vulgar minds.” Wilson declared that he was “proud to live in a co
mmonwealth where every man, black or white . . . is recognized as a man, standing upon the terms of perfect and absolute equality before the laws . . . in a commonwealth that recognizes the sublime creed embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” He acknowledged that “the people of Massachusetts may not believe that the African race—‘Outcast to insolence and scorn’—is the equal of this Anglo-Saxon race of ours in intellectual power; but they know no reason why a man, made in the image of God, should be degraded by unjust laws.” He invoked the antislavery spirit of John Quincy Adams, of George Washington who wished for “some plan adopted by which slavery could be abolished by law,” of Jefferson who also hoped for an end to it, and of Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton—all “abolitionists.”
“Do I understand,” demanded an astonished Douglas, “the gentleman to say that Washington and Jefferson were Abolitionists?” “I certainly say it,” replied Wilson. “Then I hope the gentleman will not complain when I call him one,” said a triumphant Douglas.
But if Wilson was not an “abolitionist” he was unlike radical abolitionists. He was a political man who understood other political men. Now he called attention to Douglas’s political weakness, his “gigantic task” in winning the support of the Southerners of his party for the Democratic nomination. “We all know,” explained Wilson, “that he has ‘a hard road to travel.’ . . . The men for whom he fights cannot afford to be generous. An eminent politician once said that ‘political gratitude is a lively sense of favors to come.’ He may yet discover that the men for whom he has toiled are governed only by ‘a lively sense of favors to come.’ ” Wilson saw to the heart of Douglas’s political conundrum to expose his vulnerability and predict he would not be rewarded with his party’s nomination. It was the deepest cut of all.
Among those observing the fevered debate in the galleries was Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the passion play novel of slavery and fugitives, who recorded her impressions for an abolitionist newspaper. “This Douglas,” she wrote, “is the very ideal of vitality. Short, broad, and thick-set, every inch of him has its own alertness and motion. He has a good head and face, thick black hair, heavy black brows and a keen eye. His figure would be an unfortunate one were it not for the animation which constantly pervades it; as it is, it rather gives poignancy to his peculiar appearance; he has a small, handsome hand, moreover, and a graceful as well as forcible mode of using it—a point speakers do not always understand. . . . He has two requisites of a debater—a melodious voice and a clear, sharply defined enunciation.”
She described how he used his peculiar but captivating physical appearance to spin his demagogy. “His forte in debating is his power of mystifying the point,” she wrote.
With the most off-hand assured airs in the world, and a certain appearance of honest superiority, like one who has a regard for you and wishes to set you right on one or two little matters, he proceeds to set up some point which is not that in question, but only a family connection of it, and this point he attacks with the very best of logic and language; he charges upon it horse and foot, runs it down, tramples it in the dust, and then turns upon you with—“Sir, there is your argument! Did not I tell you so? You see it is all stuff”; and if you have allowed yourself to be so dazzled by his quickness as to forget that the routed point is not, after all, the one in question, you suppose all is over with it. Moreover, he contrives to mingle up so many stinging allusions to so many piquant personalities that by the time he has done his mystification a dozen others are ready and burning to spring on their feet to repel some direct or indirect attack, all equally wide of the point. His speeches, instead of being like an arrow sent at a mark, resemble rather a bomb which hits nothing in particular, but bursts and sends red-hot nails in every direction.
But Stowe also noticed a telltale flaw in his bravado, a missing element from his repertoire. “It is a merciful providence that with all his alertness and adroitness, all his quick-sighted keenness, Douglas is not witty—that might have made him too irresistible a demagogue for the liberties of our laughter loving people, to whose weaknesses he is altogether too well adapted now.” There was another flaw she did not chronicle that was related to his lack of humor. For an experienced politician, Douglas was remarkably sensitive and thin-skinned. He took nearly every criticism as a personal slight. Still, she wrote, the new Republicans “have pitted against them a leader infinite in resources, artful, adroit, and wholly unscrupulous.” Two years later Douglas would deploy his panoply of mystification, principally his exploitation of race, in his debates with Lincoln.
Through the spring of 1856, during the Senate debates of March and April, Douglas filled the chamber with personal vilification, racial invective, and death threats. He raised the spirit of violence to achieve several practical results at once: to turn his critics into political foils for his own advantage in his quest for the Democratic presidential nomination; to make himself acceptable to the Southern wing of the party; and to overshadow potential rivals as exhausted men of the past. He could see himself ascendant, the convention bestowing its prize, the telegraph with the news in his hand, his resounding victory over the “Black Republicans,” the chief justice administering the oath of office—Stephen Arnold Douglas, the fifteenth president of the United States. But his heated theatrics exposed his fear that his dream was slipping out of his grasp again. His tactics were backfiring.
CHAPTER FOUR
WAR TO THE KNIFE
What hath Douglas wrought? On March 3, 1856, days before Douglas presented his Kansas report, the House of Representatives authorized a Special Committee to Investigate the Troubles in Kansas. The creation of the committee was among the first acts of the new House now controlled by an anti-Nebraska coalition—a repudiation of Douglas.
Andrew Reeder, first territorial governor of Kansas, disguised to escape arrest
When the 34th Congress arrived in Washington in the first week of December of 1855 no party held a majority in the House. Douglas’s lieutenant there, William A. Richardson of Illinois, declared himself the Democratic candidate for Speaker, and made the Nebraska Act the dividing line. Joshua Giddings of Ohio, the longtime antislavery champion, held together the disparate anti-Nebraska caucus. He still resided across from the Capitol in “Abolition House,” where Lincoln had lived during his one term in the House and Giddings had assisted him in writing his stillborn proposal for emancipation in the District of Columbia. The anti-Nebraska caucus eventually coalesced around Nathaniel Banks, a former millworker who had risen to become the Free Soil Speaker of the Massachusetts House in alliance with the Know Nothings and helped engineer the election of the antislavery Charles Sumner to the Senate. After seemingly endless balloting, Banks prevailed on February 2, 1856. The House divided exposed both parties divided. In the House vote, Banks received not one ballot from a Southerner. The “lines of demarcation” between North and South, proslavery and antislavery, “are becoming more and distinctly marked,” remarked Giddings, who administered the oath of office to the first Republican Speaker.
The majority members of the Committee to Investigate the Troubles in Kansas consisted of William A. Howard of Michigan, John Sherman of Ohio (brother of one William Tecumseh Sherman), and for the minority, Mordecai Oliver of Missouri, who had been a delegate at the proslavery convention of the “bogus legislature” and described the Ruffians as “men of wealth, intelligence and high moral worth” standing for “the high state of civilization and refinement.”
“The second month of spring was quickly passing away, and quiet reigned—a quiet which seemed almost fearful from the very stillness,” wrote Sara Robinson, wife of the free state “governor,” Charles Robinson. The congressmen arrived in Lawrence on April 17 after conducting a first round of inquiries in the rough proslavery town of Lecompton. The free staters “anticipated that quiet would continue while the investigation was entered into; that, from motives of policy alone, the enemy would hide in their lair, and a
ttempt to gain the favor of the committee by a present show of fairness.”
Two days after the investigators came to Kansas, Sheriff Samuel Jones, the Ruffian enforcer, reappeared in Lawrence. He grabbed S.N. Wood, who had attended the founding convention in Pittsburgh of the Republican Party, where he had lectured the delegates on the Kansas outrages. A crowd gathered around Jones, diverted him, stole his pistol, and Wood simply walked away. Jones’s bafflement quickly turned to anger. The next day he came back with a posse, searched for Wood, and unable to find him seized another free state man, striking him. The man knocked Jones down and escaped, yet another humiliation. Jones rode back to Lecompton, demanding that Governor Shannon send federal troops to “assist me in the execution of the laws.” Shannon ordered a squad of ten dragoons to accompany Jones in enforcing his arrest warrants, which he had expanded to encompass forty men, including “Governor” Robinson. The investigating committee, meanwhile, shuttled back and forth between Lecompton and Lawrence. “This first effort of theirs, showing clearly that the work of investigation would be carried on systematically, struck terror into the heart of the wrong-doers,” recalled Sara Robinson. “That all their labors hitherto might not be foiled at one blow, they felt that a desperate effort must be made to break up the sittings of the committee, and the plan unfolded itself.”
Jones arrested six free state men and imprisoned them in a tent for the supposed felony of failing to help him arrest Wood. “These men were thus kept in Lawrence,” wrote William A. Phillips, a free state man who was also a correspondent for the New York Tribune, “the design being, beyond all question, to provoke the people of the town to a rescue, when there would be another excuse for attacking the place, and, in the disturbance, destroying the testimony taken, if not killing the commissioners.” The free state leaders decided on a policy of “non-resistance” to avoid a provocation. But on the evening of April 23 an unknown shooter wounded Jones. Robinson formally condemned the “criminal” attack. Jones, who had quickly recovered, was now celebrated as a martyr. “His death must be avenged,” declared the Squatter Sovereign, the newspaper of the proslavery forces. “His murder shall be avenged if at the sacrifice of every abolitionist in the Territory. . . . We are now in favor of leveling Lawrence and chastising the traitors there congregated, should it result in the total destruction of the Union.” The paper urged a “war to the knife, and knife to the hilt; neither asking quarters nor granting them.”
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