All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  The Slidell affair was instantly followed by another clash. After Douglas denounced Buchanan’s shadow party in Illinois of National Democrats working against him, Senator Graham N. Fitch of Indiana, who owed his seat to Bright’s machine, accused Douglas of a personal affront because Fitch’s son was among those who had received a patronage appointment in Illinois. On January 21, Douglas responded to Fitch’s insults. “Today, in secret session of the Senate, you offered me an affront so wanton, unprovoked, and unjustifiable that I am obliged to infer it must have been the impulse of momentary passion, and not of deliberate premeditation.” Douglas demanded “retracting the offensive language which you thus gratuitously and unwarrantably applied to me.” His notes were hand delivered by Tom Hawkins. Fitch wrote him the next day of his “determination to defend the honor and character of my son.” Douglas finally sent a letter that his remarks did not include his son. Fitch withdrew his challenge and Douglas accepted. “I am averse to prolonging this controversy.” The Washington Union published in full Douglas’s and Fitch’s letters to highlight the bad blood.

  On February 23, the Senate of the 35th Congress convened for one of its last orders of business—the Southern claim for protection of slavery in the territories in the Democratic platform. It was raised not for any legislative purpose, but entirely to derail Douglas on his road to the presidential nomination. Senator Albert Gallatin Brown of Georgia demanded, “We have a right of protection for our slave property in the Territories. The Constitution, as expounded by the Supreme Court, awards it. We demand it and we mean to have it.” Without it, he said, “the Constitution is a failure, and the Union a despotism, and then, Sir, I am prepared to retire from the concern.” “I would never vote for a slave code in the Territories by the Congress,” replied Douglas. “We are not, without eyes open, to be cheated,” said Jefferson Davis.

  Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi

  Davis had risen from the near dead. For months in 1858, during the Lecompton debate, he had been wracked with fever, chills, and blindness, suffering his worst bout with the effects of the venereal disease that chronically afflicted him for years. He was confined to a darkened room, gripped with pain, his left eye filled with pus. He appeared in the Senate for debates “a pale ghastly-looking figure, his eye bandaged with strips of white linen over the head,” according to a reporter for the Washington Union. He never regained sight in his left eye. Clouded and discolored, he could see only light and darkness. He posed for photographs in the future showing only his right side. The year before, in July 1857, he and his family went on a recuperative holiday for months to Maine. He spoke in Boston defending both slavery and the Union, the latter emphasis opening him to denunciations from fire-eating newspapers, the Charleston Mercury and the New Orleans Delta, as a traitor. His rival in Mississippi, Albert Gallatin Brown, saw the moment as a chance to seize the banner of Southern Rights from him. Davis corrected the record with a public letter stating he did not mean the Union could not be dissolved.

  Davis delivered a formal speech before the Mississippi legislature on November 16, 1858, casting a malediction on Douglas. He declared there was no difference between Douglas and Seward, whom he called the “master mind of the so-called Republican Party.” “I cannot be compelled to choose between men, one of whom asserts the power of Congress to deprive us of a constitutional right, and the other only denies the power of Congress, in order to transfer it to the territorial legislature. Neither the one nor the other has any authority to sit in judgment on our rights under the Constitution.”

  Then Davis laid down the conditions for secession in the event an antislavery candidate would be elected president. “Whether by the House or by the people, if an Abolitionist be chosen President of the United States, you will have presented to you the question of whether you will permit the government to pass into the hands of your avowed and implacable enemies. Without pausing for your answer, I will state my own position to be that such a result would be a species of revolution by which the purposes of the Government would be destroyed and the observance of its mere forms entitled to no respect. In that event, in such manner as should be most expedient, I should deem it your duty to provide for your safety outside of a Union with those who have already shown the will, and would have acquired the power, to deprive you of your birthright and to reduce you to worse than the colonial dependence of your fathers.”

  In his speech on February 23 in the Senate, Davis chose the metaphor of blindness to describe Douglas, whom he personally despised, and compare him with Seward, whom he personally liked. “If I have to choose between the two, I could forgive more to the blindness of the man who warred upon a constitutional right, and who I hoped was ignorant of its existence, than to the man who admitted it and withheld from me every possibility of its enjoyment.”

  Douglas piped up. “I recognize slave property as being on an equality with all other property, and apply the same rules to it,” he protested. But Davis would not accept Douglas’s explanation. He called popular sovereignty “a siren’s song . . . a thing shadowy and fleeting, changing its color as often as the chameleon . . . a delusive gauze thrown over the public mind” (referencing his failing eyesight), and declared that Douglas had committed “a fatal blunder” and was “full of heresy.” He accused Douglas of creating “a squabble by which men seek to build up a political reputation by catering to the prejudice of a majority to exclude the property of the minority. It is that upon which I set my feet with scorn and indignation.”

  James M. Mason of Virginia rose to revile Douglas as a false messiah: “You promised us bread, and you have given us a stone; you promised us a fish, and you have given us a serpent; we thought you had given us a substantial right; and you have given us the most evanescent shadow and delusion.” “I have no idea of leaving,” Douglas said defiantly. “I intend to stand here in my place.”

  The Senate floor on that date, February 23, was the opening of Douglas’s abyss. His gestures at conciliation and candidacy were summarily rejected. His motives were censured as purely selfish and lacking any principle. He had misjudged that he would be treated with some modicum of deference as the presumptive candidate, that the Southerners would approach him as the coming power, and they would adjust to him. Douglas was always attempting to re-create the moment of his greatest success, when he burst onto Washington in 1850, taking command of passage of the Compromise and enacting the Illinois Central Railroad Act. But he had been easily shunted aside for the nomination in 1852 after offending nearly everybody. Four years later, in 1856, his championing the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which he calculated would more than replicate his 1850 feat, did not carry the nomination for him. He was again denied as Southern support went to an eternal Northern man of Southern sympathy. Douglas supposed his concession at the convention and his political and financial contributions to Buchanan’s campaign would smooth his nomination in 1860, when he would have earned his turn after all. But the Southerners were resolved to resist him to the end. His own mechanism, constructed for his victory, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, inexorably ground down his hopes. Lecompton forced him to choose his doctrine or the fraud his doctrine had fostered. His ambition was posed against his ambition. He could either lose Illinois and his reelection, the North and his nomination certainly, or much of the South and the nomination possibly. In 1858 he had no choice except for Illinois, and Lincoln drove him into a corner with the Freeport Doctrine. Lincoln understood what Douglas did not, that his opposition to Lecompton was unforgivable, his Freeport Doctrine fatal. Lincoln the fatalist, a believer in the cause and effect of circumstances, also believed in intervening when he felt he could hasten the process. After Douglas’s reelection, his opportunism, which had been intended to meet the Southerners halfway, was repulsed with utter contempt. His vapid nostrums about popular sovereignty to establish a middle ground within his party were taken as an ill wind. His rote attacks on Lincoln’s “house divided” speech did him little good with those who
classified him as menacing as Lincoln. Pointedly indifferent to slavery, he could not grasp the consequences of the central question for his own political future. Attempting to evade the issue, he made himself vulnerable. Trying to control events, he was consumed by them. He was both the cause and the effect. He was no longer suspended in midair. Douglas could not see that flying toward the sun he would be incinerated.

  It had become a truism since 1852 that the Democrats could not win the presidency without a Northern candidate, and Douglas was the only logical, preeminent, and viable one. He dispatched a host of agents far and wide to gather endorsements, delegates and gin up newspaper support. Many dark horses were touted, but no other candidate had a campaign remotely competitive. His Chicago Times editor, James W. Sheahan, was assigned to write the campaign biography from Douglas’s own outline. Douglas had an idealized portrait painted by the renowned artist George P.A. Healy, depicting him in the pink of health, rosy cheeked, with a slender silhouette. Douglas had it reproduced as a photograph and widely distributed it. One of his key men, A.D. Banks, editor of the Southside Democrat newspaper in Virginia, toured through the West and South and reported in person to Douglas that his support was “overwhelming and resistless.” Forney, working hand in glove with Douglas, plagued Buchanan in the Philadelphia Press with columns of embarrassing incidents while organizing Pennsylvania delegates. Even the mercurial George N. Sanders, who had defected for the main chance with Buchanan in 1856, was back on board. Reverdy Johnson wrote Douglas in March that Buchanan would pay the price for opposing him. “What a bankrupt Administration we have. To differ with the President is treason and he who does is reviled. I wonder if the fool will ever discover that in this he only makes his own course the more odious.”

  Visiting Chicago, J.B. Dorr, editor of the Dubuque Daily Express and Herald of Iowa, reported to Sheahan disquieting news about fraying support. He urged Douglas to announce his candidacy at once. On June 22, Douglas wrote a letter to Dorr intended as a public declaration. He stated that his platform would be exactly that of the party’s platform of 1856, which had endorsed popular sovereignty as a sop to him. On that basis, he would reject “new issues as the revival of the African slave trade, or a Congressional slave code for the Territories,” and “in such an event I could not accept the nomination if tendered to me.” With that he drew his own line in the sand beside the one Jefferson Davis and the other Southerners had drawn. Both Douglas and the Southerners were now agreed on the grounds for division. But Douglas gained more confidence. Delegations shaped up for him. While fire-eating Southern newspapers abused him, no other major candidate stepped forward. When, in Alabama, John Forsyth, editor of the Mobile Register, one of Douglas’s stalwarts, defeated an Ultra for a State Senate seat on the Douglas platform, Ultraism seemed in retreat.

  Stephen A. Douglas, portrait by George Peter Alexander Healy

  The Douglas bandwagon appeared to be rolling along. In New York, the campaign was under the firm direction of Dean Richmond, a corporate genius, first vice president of the New York Central Railroad, and chairman of the Democratic State Committee. Unexpectedly, the state convention to choose delegates in August turned into a maelstrom. The ancient enmities of New York’s internecine wars between the Hards and Softs resurfaced. Mayor Fernando Wood of New York City, boss of Tammany Hall, and favorite of the Five Points gangs that were both criminal and political organizations like the Dead Rabbits, stirred up trouble encouraging the Hards. Senator Daniel S. Dickinson, hardest of the Hards, advanced himself as a favorite son candidate. Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, who had until then presented himself to Douglas as a staunch supporter and unbending friend, leaked to the New York Herald a letter intended to devastate him during the New York convention and declared his own far-fetched candidacy. “The South cannot adopt Mr. Douglas’ platform,” Wise wrote. “It is a short cut to all the ends of black republicanism. He then will kick up his heels. If he does or don’t he can’t be nominated, and the main argument against his nomination is that he can’t be elected if nominated. If he runs an independent candidate and Seward run, and I am nominated at Charleston I can beat them both. Or, if squatter sovereignty is a plank of the platform at Charleston and Douglas is nominated the South will run an independent candidate on protection principles and run the election into the House. Where, then, would Mr. Douglas be? The lowest candidate on the list.” The Hards emerged from the chaos with about one third of the thirty-five delegates, a reprise of the split of 1848 between Hunkers and Barnburners, a reprise of their split of 1848 with the Softs, which would prove disastrous to Douglas at the Charleston convention.

  Buchanan’s peevishness, not only at Douglas, increased over the months. “In the privacy of the White House he became more irritable, impatient, fussy, and dictatorial,” wrote his biographer Philip Klein. Upon the death of his postmaster general, A.V. Brown, after Buchanan failed to get funding for his department’s deficit before the 35th Congress adjourned, Forney’s newspaper, the Philadelphia Press, reported, “Mr. B. is delighted at the idea that any member of his Cabinet should get sick, and is in the habit of saying every day, ‘I never was in better health in my life; I can take my glass of Old Monongahela, dine heartily, indulge in Madeira, and sleep soundly, and yet my Cabinet is always dilapidated.’ ” His obsessive overbearing need for petty control drove away his devoted niece Harriet Lane, who had been serving as first lady. “I can do very well without her,” he said. His private secretary and nephew, James Buchanan Henry, quit, moved to New York, and married. Buchanan did not attend the wedding or give a gift. He insisted that cabinet members spend their evenings with him. Jacob Thompson’s wife, Kate, referred to him as “Old Gurley,” partly after the Reverend Phineas Gurley, the Senate chaplain, and partly as a double entendre. Behind his back, cabinet members and their wives referred to “Old Buck” as “Old Venison.” In late July Buchanan went on his regular summer vacation to the resort of Bedford Springs, bringing along a companionable “grass widow,” a Mrs. Bass from Virginia, and her three children. Buchanan was aggravated that his room was near that of Simon Cameron, his old enemy, and exasperated when Mrs. Bass’s slave girl fled, allegedly encouraged by Cameron.

  Refreshed from his summer vacation, Buchanan insistently defended his purge of any and all Douglas supporters on the grounds of the Dred Scott decision. “I cannot retain in an important position any man who practices rebellion against the Supreme Court of the United States,” Buchanan wrote in a letter to a friend. Douglas, of course, incoherently upheld Dred Scott, and Buchanan stated that “Douglas and his followers resist it on the ground that a Territorial Legislature possess this right” to “prohibit slavery.” Buchanan’s delusional political strategy was staked on Dred Scott, which was toxic in the North. “The issue in 1860,” he wrote, “beyond all question will be between the Republicans who refuse to yield obedience to the decision, and the Democrats who sustain it and in doing so will sustain the cause of law, property and order. On this line we shall win.”

  Douglas decided to publish a brief for popular sovereignty to establish its historical, constitutional, and political legitimacy. The September issue of Harper’s Monthly gave over most of its pages to his article, “Popular Sovereignty in the Territories: The Dividing Line Between Federal and Local Authority,” a pedantic and turgid piece, replete with bowdlerized quotes, which attached unreadable paragraph to unreadable paragraph like freight cars coupled in a train yard. Douglas’s essential argument was that the founding fathers were earlier versions of Stephen A. Douglas in their view of slavery as a matter of popular sovereignty in the states and territories, or as he infelicitously put it, “every distinct political Community, loyal to the Constitution and the Union, is entitled to all the rights, privileges, and immunities of self-government in respect to their local concerns and internal polity, subject only to the Constitution of the United States.”

  The most important lasting effect of his article was to serve as a text for Lincoln to ref
ute in his Cooper Union speech five months later. But the immediate impact was to further alienate Southerners. John B. Floyd, Buchanan’s secretary of war, hoped the article “will finally extinguish him.” Attorney General Jeremiah Black published a lengthy response on September 10 in the Washington Constitution newspaper (successor to the Union). “The style of the article is, in some respects, highly commendable,” he wrote. “It is entirely free from the vulgar clap-trap of the stump, and has no vain adornment of classical scholarship. But it shows no sign of the eloquent Senator; it is even without the logic of the great debater. Many portions of it are very obscure. . . . We do not deny, that the article in Harper is extremely difficult to understand. Its unjointed thoughts, loose expression, and illogical reasoning, have covered it with shadows, clouds, and darkness. But we will not admit that it has no meaning at all.” Black proceeded easily to deconstruct Douglas’s confusedness, particularly on Dred Scott, which Douglas endorsed but claimed allowed for popular sovereignty, which it did not. But soon the back-and-forth controversy over abstruse theoretical points was superseded with news of a sensational killing.