All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  Douglas, according to Davis, was a pathetic narcissist simply seeking the attention of his better. “Nothing but the most egregious vanity, something far surpassing even the bursting condition of swollen pride, could have induced the Senator to believe that I could not speak of squatter sovereignty without meaning him.” Sumner had been caned for the similar offense of lèse-majesté.

  A week later, after the Republicans nominated Lincoln, Senator Judah P. Benjamin, of Louisiana, who was Slidell’s law partner and speaking ex cathedra for the administration, took the floor to cast a curse on Douglas. “The causes that have operated on me have operated on the Democratic party of the United States, and have operated an effect which the whole future life of the Senator will be utterly unable to obliterate. It is impossible that confidence thus lost can be restored.” Benjamin consigned him to a ring of the Inferno as a betrayer. “We accuse him for this, to wit: that having bargained with us upon a point upon which we were at issue, that it should be considered a judicial point; that he would abide the decision; that he would act under the decision, and consider it a doctrine of the party; that having said that to us here in the Senate, he went home, and under the stress of a local election, his knees gave way; his whole person trembled.” Douglas had pledged his fealty to Dred Scott, was a turncoat on Lecompton, and embraced the heresy of the Freeport Doctrine.

  Benjamin exalted Lincoln to diminish Douglas. His description of the reversal of fortune was the apotheosis of the lifetime rivalry. “His adversary stood upon principle,” said Benjamin, “and was beaten; and lo! he is the candidate of a mighty party for the Presidency of the United States. The Senator from Illinois faltered. He got the prize for which he faltered; but lo! the grand prize of his ambition today slips from his grasp because of his faltering in his former contest, and his success in the canvass for the Senate, purchased for an ignoble price, has cost him the loss of the Presidency of the United States. Here were two men, struggling before the people of a State on two great sides of a political controversy that was dividing the Union, each for empire at home. One stood on principle—was defeated. Today, where stands he? The other faltered—received the prize; but, today, where stands he? Not at the head of the Democratic party of these United States. He is a fallen star.”

  Benjamin cornered Douglas in his contradictions. He pronounced him guilty of his crimes of ambition. He convicted him of perfidy and duplicity, and he excommunicated him. “We have separated from him. He is right in saying we have separated from him. We have separated from him, not because he held principles in 1856 different from ours. We have separated from him, not because we are intolerant of opposition from anybody. . . . We separated from him because he has denied the bargain that he made when he went home; because, after telling us here in the Senate that he was willing that this whole matter should be decided by the Supreme Court, in the face of his people, he told them that he had got us by the bill; and that, whether the decision was for us or against us, the practical effect was to be against us; and because he shows us now again that he is ready to make use of Black Republican arguments used against himself at home, and to put them forth against the Democratic party in speeches here in the Senate.”

  The “fallen star” was the fallen angel. Douglas might yet gain the prize, but he would be expelled from paradise. Every protest he made against the injustice directed at him further condemned him. His attempt to assert ultimate authority was a rebellion against true authority. His claim to his rightful place in the seat of power was blasphemous against those in whose name he claimed it. Assailing hypocrisy, his own was exposed. The closer he came to power, the more tragic his fall. In a reversal of Milton’s Lucifer, his refusal to serve in hell would deprive him of the redemption of reigning in heaven.

  On the eve of the second Democratic convention, staged for his resurrection, Douglas’s health was already failing. He had less than a year to live. He was drinking and smoking heavily. He had trouble speaking. His voice was thick and raspy. He breathed with difficulty. He had bronchial attacks. He was bedridden for much of the time. He feared he would have an operation on his throat that would not cure his illness. He was certainly suffering from cirrhosis of the liver, likely heart disease, and possibly throat or lung cancer. He was deeply depressed. His eight-month-old daughter, who had never thrived, died. He had two sons from his previous marriage, but he and Adele were not able to have any children of their own.

  After the debacle at Charleston, Douglas loyalists in Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia ousted the bolters in state conventions. But some of those that had walked out wanted their seats back at the second convention, if only to make more trouble. Douglas refused to accept them, writing in a letter of June 4 that they “openly avow their object to be to bolt again and break up the convention.”

  On June 18, the Democrats met at the Front Street Theatre in Baltimore. Caleb Cushing, who had presided as the double-crossing chairman at Charleston, was back with the gavel. “The hostile feeling between the factions of the Democracy was even more embittered than at the time of the adjournment at Charleston, and the more the points of difference were caucused, the more intense was the warfare,” wrote Halstead. Rival Southern delegations—pro- and anti-Douglas—the newly invested and the bolters—appeared before the credentials committee. That night in the streets crowds of Southerners yelled “deafening and persistent cries of ‘Yancey!’ Yancey!’ ” who stepped forward to entertain them with “one of his handsome silver-toned speeches.” The credentials struggle dragged on day after day. The Douglas forces were willing to accept a divided delegation from Georgia, but none of the other bolters. On the fourth day the floor of convention hall collapsed, a physical manifestation of the political situation. “The panic was dangerous,” reported Halstead. “Delegates rushed in masses to the windows, and climbed, nimbly as monkeys, over the chairs of the reporters.”

  On the fifth agonizing day Georgia’s bolters were seated. But would the others also be forgiven? “There was no longer any doubt about the disruption of the Convention. It was merely a question of time, and the time short.” Rumor swept the convention that Douglas offered to withdraw in the interest of party peace, but Douglas’s camp adamantly denied it. In fact, the discouraged Douglas had written such a letter, which was suppressed by his convention manager, William Richardson. Douglas had lost heart. He had hit bottom. It was too late anyway. “The long looked-for ‘Crisis’ a hundred times postponed, arrived at last,” wrote Halstead. His followers were in no mood for compromise; they did not share their champion’s loss of nerve. “He had stirred up the storm but could not control the whirlwind,” wrote Halstead. The core of the Douglas supporters ran out of patience. Southern implacability standing in the way of the obvious solution had led to rejected overtures, turning into simmering frustration and boiling anger. “The Democracy of the North-west rose out of the status of serfdom. There was servile insurrection, with attendant horrors, and Baltimore became a political St. Domingo.” The majority refused to seat Alabama, which would mean admitting Yancey, and refused to seat Louisiana, and refused the others. “The South was amazed to hear its favorite threat of secession despised and hooted at.” The chairman of the Virginia delegation stood, “very pale, nervous and solemn,” and announced Virginia would walk out. The Virginians “rose in a body, and passing into the aisles, proceeded to leave the theater, shaking hands and bidding personal friends good-by.” Then they were followed one after another by North Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland, and the Pacific Coast states in the hands of the pro-slavery sympathizers, California and Oregon, and the next day Kentucky, Missouri, and Arkansas departed. Caleb Cushing left, too. Out of the original 303 delegates assembled fewer than 200 remained. On the sixth day, on the second ballot, Douglas was nominated as the candidate of a party in pieces.

  The Southern bolters moved across Baltimore to the Maryland Institute. Caleb Cushing appeared on its podium as chairman. “The leading Southerners of the delegations smiled radiantly,
” wrote Halstead. “Yancey, who always wears a surface smile, twisted about in his seat with the unrest of intolerable felicity, laid his head first upon one shoulder and then upon the other, and glowed with satisfaction.” The convention unanimously nominated its own candidates: John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, Buchanan’s thirty-nine year-old vice president, a passive tool of the Southern Directorate, for president, and Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon as his running mate.

  “Yancey! Yancey!” yelled the delegates. Yancey stepped forward to the platform to bury Douglas. “I will let Mr. Douglas rest where his friends have placed him, contending, however, that they have buried him today beneath the grave of squatter sovereignty. The nomination that was made (I speak it prophetically), was made to be defeated and it is bound to be defeated.” Often brilliant and compelling, Yancey then veered interminably into byways of Alabama politics, and spoke on and on. Cushing tried to close him down. The climax turned into an anticlimax. Hundreds of spectators clambered toward the exits. “His speech was a disenchanter,” wrote Halstead. “He was not calculated to assist his party at all, but rather to place embarrassments in its way.” But it did not matter what he said. The breakup of the Democratic Party foreshadowed Democratic defeat. Yancey had achieved his aim, precipitating his revolution.

  Late in the evening of June 23, Douglas’s supporters welcomed delegates at the Washington train station returning from the Baltimore convention and marched to his home to serenade him. Douglas came out to address them. He had strained every fiber to reach this point. He had at last realized his life’s ambition. And his mouth was filled with ashes. “Secession is disunion,” he said. “Secession from the Democratic Party means secession from the federal Union.”

  The close of the two disastrous conventions was hardly the end of the Democratic shambles. Douglas had named Senator Benjamin Fitzpatrick of Alabama as his running mate. Yancey paid him a call to urge him to drop out, which he promptly did. Douglas couldn’t hold his ticket together. Finally, he secured Herschel V. Johnson, a former Georgia senator and governor, and Democratic loyalist.

  Two days after the Baltimore convention, on June 25, Breckinridge, Toombs, and Cushing dined at Jefferson Davis’s house in Washington. Davis proposed that John Bell, the candidate of the Constitutional Union Party, Douglas, and Breckinridge withdraw in favor of Fitzpatrick, a single unifying candidate in order to beat Lincoln. It’s possible that Davis might not have had Fitzpatrick in mind, but Franklin Pierce or himself, or someone else. During the Baltimore convention, Davis and Cushing, who had been the powers behind Pierce’s presidency, attempted to convince him to declare his candidacy to rescue the party from Douglas, but Pierce instructed Cushing to prevent “even a remote possibility” of that happening. Davis’s name was put into nomination, but he received few votes. After dinner the men all walked to Breckinridge’s house, which was next door to Douglas’s, where a crowd had come to serenade Breckinridge as the somewhat bewildered candidate. Davis, according to his account, proceeded to raise his scheme with Douglas. “When I made this announcement to Mr. Douglas—with whom my relations had always been such as to authorize the assurance that he could not consider it as made in an unfriendly spirit—he replied that the scheme proposed was impracticable, because his friends, mainly Northern Democrats, if he were withdrawn, would join in the support of Mr. Lincoln, rather than of any one that should supplant him (Douglas); that he was in the hands of his friends, and was sure they would not accept the proposition.” Douglas was in no mood for conceding to Jefferson Davis.

  Davis’s far-fetched notion of a fusion candidate had already been attempted behind the scenes at the Baltimore convention. Congressman John Cochrane, of New York, on the evening before the convention, had dinner at Toombs’s house with Breckinridge and several others. Toombs and Breckinridge took him aside, “accosting me in the hall,” to inform him that he should meet at Baltimore with Slidell. Cochrane brought Dean Richmond, the head of the New York delegation, with him to call upon Slidell at a private home. Slidell had a proposal. If the New Yorkers would drop Douglas and support Horatio Seymour, the former New York governor, Slidell could assure them that “the seceded states, together with the whole South, would return into the Convention, and make him the candidate of the party.” Richmond seriously considered the proposal. He discussed it with some key members of the delegation, only to return with the report that it was “impossible.” “Negotiations ceased,” recalled Cochrane. “Further concessions seemed to be useless.”

  John Cabell Breckinridge was the heir to a privileged and distinguished family. His uncle, Robert J. Breckinridge, had been the Speaker of the House, U.S. senator, and Thomas Jefferson’s attorney general. His father, Robert’s brother, Joseph Cabell Breckinridge, was the Kentucky Speaker of the House and business partner of John J. Crittenden and Robert Todd, the father of Mary Todd. His mother was the daughter of the founder of Hampden-Sydney College and granddaughter of John Witherspoon, a signer from New Jersey of the Declaration of Independence and founder of Princeton. John C. Breckinridge had played as a boy with Mary and met Lincoln on one of his visits to his wife’s hometown of Lexington. Nor was Breckinridge hostile to Douglas. He had been his ally in passing the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and Douglas had arranged loans for him to become his partner in real estate speculations. He had risen quickly and far on the basis of his eminent background, proper conduct, and deference to his elders, who kept rewarding him. John Witherspoon had also been a founder of the Presbyterian Church in the United States and a notable Calvinist theologian. His grandson was imbued with a fatalist sense of obligation to authority that overcame his inner reservations. He was a Unionist who went along with being given the nomination of the breakaway branch of the party, but was not the actor in the most dramatic turn in his life. “My course has been surrounded by difficulties for which I am wholly blameless,” he told a friend about accepting the nomination. “We must each pursue what seems to be the path of duty.” He confided to Varina Davis, Jefferson Davis’s wife, “I trust I have the courage to lead a forlorn hope.” Breckinridge was his own lost cause.

  As Buchanan’s vice president Breckinridge had been viewed as decorative and decorous, and excluded from the councils of the administration’s policies and politics. His presidential campaign was run out of the White House by Slidell and company in consultation with Buchanan. Young Breckinridge assumed the role of figurehead on a ship headed for the rocks. “They will spare no effort, therefore, to defeat Douglas,” commented the New York Times, “and whatever of influence may remain to the Administration will be remorselessly and unscrupulously used in aid of the same object. Mr. Buchanan is not a man of strong passions, but all the hatred of which his cold and clammy nature is susceptible is concentrated upon Mr. Douglas.”

  John C. Breckinridge

  The existence of two Democratic parties created conflict and confusion in the states outside the lower South. The Democratic National Committee under Douglas’s control urged “unequivocal support” for him, but Pennsylvania presented a combined electoral ticket that allowed electors to vote for either Douglas or Breckinridge, which of course sabotaged Douglas. “An amalgamation ticket with the bolters,” he said, “would disgust the people and give every northern state to Lincoln.” His use of the words “amalgamation” and “disgust” had the connotation of sexual race mixing.

  Douglas had expected to run a traditional campaign in which he did not give stump speeches. “It is the first time in my life that I have been placed in a position where I had to look on and see a fight without taking a hand in it,” he said. He continued to issue statements against the Breckinridge and Lincoln candidacies, but left open the door to some sort of relationship with the Bell campaign. “We must make the war boldly against the Northern abolitionists and the Southern Disunionists, and give no quarter to either. . . . We can have no partnership with the Bolters.”

  But he started delivering stem-winding speeches, first in Boston, then Albany and Newport, and
receiving harsh criticism and derision from his opponents for venturing out in public, proof of his coarseness. His enemies circulated a broadside: “ ‘Boy’ Lost.” The National Democratic Executive Committee of the Breckinridge party issued a formal statement calling him a “traveling mountebank.” He had trouble raising money, especially from New York interests connected to the Southern trade. August Belmont, agent of the Rothschild bank, his finance chairman, was reduced to dunning local district party organizations for $100, but received little return. At a meeting at his Fifth Avenue mansion, where Belmont and his wife were preparing to entertain the visiting Prince of Wales, he held a conference with the Wall Street donors, who rejected his supplication unless there would be a miraculous fusion with Breckinridge.

  Douglas’s campaign put out stories that Breckinridge had favored the Whig candidate for president in 1848, signed a petition to pardon John Brown, and was a secessionist. In a speech on September 5 at Lexington, his only major speech of the campaign, Breckinridge called all the charges untrue. He accused Douglas of responsibility for destroying the Democratic Party by victimizing the South at the Baltimore convention. “Whole States were excluded and disfranchised in that Convention, not to speak of individuals,” he said. “The most flagrant acts of injustice were perpetrated for the purpose of forcing a particular dogma upon the Democratic organization, and the gentleman who is the representative of that dogma is the representative also of principles which I will be able to show repugnant alike to reason and the Constitution.”

  Cushing spoke at a Breckinridge rally in Boston on September 12, declaring Douglas would not win a single Northern electoral vote and the Republicans would start a civil war. “The Republican Party,” he said, “is a monstrous and ridiculous abortion, a gigantic falsehood, swindle and fraud,” and that if Lincoln was elected “the Republicans will have to burst up at once, or to attack the domestic rights of the States.”