Stephen Arnold Douglas

CHAPTER II

THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE

It was the aggressive energy of the man, unrestrained by such formality as was still observed by the public men of the older Eastern communities, which most impressed those who have left on record their judgments of the young Western congressman. The aged Adams, doubtless the best representative of the older school in either branch of Congress, gave a page of his diary to one of Douglas's early speeches. "His face was convulsed," – so the merciless diary runs, – "his gesticulation frantic, and he lashed himself into such a heat that if his body had been made of combustible matter it would have burnt out. In the midst of his roaring, to save himself from choking, he stripped and cast away his cravat, unbuttoned his waistcoat, and had the air and aspect of a half-naked pugilist. And this man comes from a judicial bench, and passes for an eloquent orator!" On another occasion, the same critic tells us, Douglas "raved an hour about democracy and anglophobia and universal empire." Adams had been professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard College, and he was the last man in the country to appreciate an oratorical manner that departed from the established rules and traditions of the art. Ampère, a French traveler, thought Douglas a perfect representative of the energetic builders of the Western commonwealths, and predicted that he would come into power when it should be the turn of the West to dominate the country. "Small, black, stocky," so this observer described him, "his speech is full of nervous power, his action simple and strong." Douglas, however, quickly adapted himself to his new environment, – no man in the country excelled him in that art, – and took on all the polish which the Washington of that day demanded, without any loss of fighting spirit or any abandonment of his democratic manners and principles.

He soon got a good opportunity to plant himself on a powerful popular sentiment by urging, in a really excellent speech, that the country should repay to the aged Jackson the fine which had been imposed upon him for contempt of court during the defense of New Orleans. An experienced opponent found him ready with a taking retort to every interruption. It being objected that there was absolutely no precedent for refunding the fine, "I presume," he replied, "that no case can be found on record, or traced by tradition, where a fine, imposed upon a general for saving his country, at the peril of his life and reputation, has ever been refunded." When he visited The Hermitage during the following summer, Jackson singled him out of a distinguished party and thanked him, not without reason, for defending his course at New Orleans better than he himself had ever been able to defend it. Douglas won further distinction during the session by defending, in a report from the committee on elections, the right of the several States to determine how their representatives in Congress should be chosen. Later, in a debate with John J. Hardin, his rival in Congress as in the Illinois legislature, he contrasted the Whig and Democratic positions on the questions of the day with so much force and skill that the speech was used as the principal Democratic document in the presidential campaign of 1844.

In Congress, distinction does not always, or usually, imply power; but Douglas was consummately fit for the sort of struggling by which things are in fact accomplished at Washington. Whatever the matter in hand, his mind always moved with lightning rapidity to positive views. He was never without a clear purpose, and he had the skill and the temper to manage men. He knew how to conciliate opponents, to impress the thoughtful, to threaten the timid, to button-hole and flatter and cajole. He breathed freely the heated air of lobbies and committee rooms. Fast as his reputation grew, his actual importance in legislation grew faster still. At the beginning of his second term he was appointed chairman of the House Committee on Territories, and so was charged in an especial way with the affairs of the remoter West. In the course of that service, he framed many laws which have affected very notably the development of our younger commonwealths. He was particularly opposed to the policy of massing the Indians in reservations west of the Mississippi, fearing that the new Northwest, the Oregon country, over which we were still in controversy with Great Britain, would thus be isolated. To prevent this, he introduced during his first term a bill to organize into a territory that part of the Louisiana Purchase which lay north and west of Missouri. As yet, however, there were scarcely any white settlers in the region, and no interest could be enlisted in support of the bill. But he renewed his motion year after year until finally, as we shall see, he made it the most celebrated measure of his time.

His advocacy of the internal improvements needed for the development of the West brought him in opposition to a powerful element in his own party. Adams, writing in his diary under date of April 17, 1844, says: "The Western harbor bill was taken up, and the previous question was withdrawn for the homunculus Douglas to poke out a speech in favor of the constitutionality of appropriations for the improvement of Western rivers and harbors. The debate was continued between the conflicting absurdities of the Southern Democracy, which is slavery, and the Western Democracy, which is knavery." Under the leadership of Jackson and other Southerners, the Democrats, notwithstanding their long ascendency, had adhered to their position on internal improvements more consistently, perhaps, than to any other of the contentions which they had made before they came into power. Douglas did not, indeed, commit himself to that interpretation of the Constitution which justified appropriations for any enterprise which could be considered a contribution to the "general welfare," and he protested against various items in river and harbor bills. But as a rule he voted for the bills.

He was particularly interested in the scheme for building a railroad which should run north and south the entire length of Illinois, and favored a grant of public lands to aid the State in the enterprise. For years, however, he had to contend with a corporation which had got from the State a charter for such a railroad and was now trying to get help from Congress. In 1843, and for several sessions thereafter, bills were introduced to give aid directly to the Great Western Railway Company, and it was mainly the work of Douglas that finally secured a majority in Congress for the plan of granting lands to the State, and not to the company. That was in 1851. To his chagrin, however, the promoters of the company then persuaded the Illinois legislature to pass a bill transferring to them whatever lands Congress might grant to the State for the railroad. He at once sent for Holbrook, the leading man in the company, and informed him that no bill would be permitted to pass until he and his associates should first execute a release of all the rights they had obtained from the legislature. Such a release they were at last forced to sign, the bill passed, and the Illinois Central was built. It became an important agency in the development, not of Illinois merely, but of the whole Mississippi Valley; and it is the most notable material result of Douglas's skill in legislation. But throughout the whole course of his service at Washington he never neglected, in his concern about the great national questions with which his name is forever associated, the material interests of the people whom he especially represented. His district and his State never had cause to complain of his devotion to his party and his country.

But the questions which had the foremost place while he was a member of the lower house were questions of our foreign relations, and as it happened they were questions to which he could give himself freely without risking his distinctive rôle as the champion of the newer West. The Oregon boundary dispute and the proposed annexation of Texas were uppermost in the campaign of 1844, and on both it was competent for him to argue that an aggressive policy was demanded by Western interests and Western sentiment. It was in discussing the Oregon boundary that he first took the attitude of bitter opposition to all European, and particularly to all English interference in the affairs of the American continents which he steadily maintained thereafter. The long-standing agreement with Great Britain for joint occupation of the Oregon country he characterized as in practice an agreement for non-occupation. Arguing in favor of giving notice of the termination of the convention, he shrewdly pointed out that as the British settlers were for the most part fur-traders and the American settlements were agricultural, we would "squat them out" if no hindrance were put upon the westward movement of our pioneers. He would at once organize a territorial government for Oregon, and take measures to protect it; if Great Britain threatened war, he would put the country in a state of defense. "If war comes," he cried, "let it come. We may regret the necessity which produced it, but when it does come, I would administer to our citizens Hannibal's oath of eternal enmity. I would blot out the lines on the map which now mark our territorial boundaries on this continent, and make the area of liberty as broad as the continent itself." He even broke with the Polk administration when it retreated from the advanced position which the party had taken during the campaign, and was one of a hardy ten who, in the debate over the resolutions that led to the final settlement, voted for a substitute declaration that the question was "no longer a subject of negotiation and compromise." There can be little doubt that his hostility to England, as well as his robust Americanism, commended him at that time to the mass of his countrymen everywhere but in the commercial East.

On the annexation of Texas, popular sentiment, even in his own party, was far from unanimous, but the party was, nevertheless, thoroughly committed to it. After the election, when it appeared that Tyler was quite as favorable to the measure as his incoming Democratic successor, Douglas was one of those who came forward with a new plan for annexing territory by joint resolution of Congress, and in January, 1845, he stated as well as it ever has been stated the argument that Texas became ours by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, and was without the consent of her people retroceded to Spain by the treaty of 1819. When President Polk sent in his announcement that war existed by the act of Mexico, Douglas was ready with a defense of that doubtful casus belli and an ardent support of the army bill which followed. His speech on the army bill was an admirable exhibition of his powers, and it was the best speech on that side in the debate. Adams, who interrupted him, was instantly put upon the defensive by a citation from the argument which he himself, as Secretary of State, had made in 1819 for the American claim to the line of the Rio del Norte. When he asked if the treaty of peace and boundaries concluded by Mexico and Texas in 1836 had not since been discarded by the Mexican government, Douglas retorted that he was unaware of any treaty ever made by a Mexican government which was not either violated or repudiated. Adams came finally to acknowledge the unusual powers of the Western "homunculus" as a debater.

But the reputation and the influence won in the House of Representatives were to be extended in a more favorable arena. In 1846, Douglas being now thirty-three years of age, the Illinois legislature elected him United States senator for the six years beginning March 4, 1847. In April, 1847, he was married to Martha, daughter of Colonel Robert Martin, of Rockingham, N.C., a wealthy planter and a large slaveholder. Active as he continued to be in politics, he found time for business as well as love-making. He invested boldly in the lands over which Chicago was now spreading in its rapid growth and made the young city his home. His investments were fortunate, and within a few years he was a wealthy man according to the standard of those times. He used his wealth freely in hospitality, in charity, and in the furtherance of his political enterprises. In the year 1856, the corner-stone of the University of Chicago was laid on land which he had given.

The assembly of which Douglas was now a member had gradually risen to a higher place in our system than the founders intended. The House, partly by reason of its exclusive right to originate measures of a certain class, partly because it was felt to be more accurately representative of the people, had at first a sort of ascendency. The great constructive measures of the first administration were House measures. Even so late as Jefferson's and Madison's administrations, one must look oftenest to the records of that chamber for the main lines of legislative history. But in Jackson's time the Senate profited by its comparative immunity from sudden political changes, by its veto on appointments, and by the greater freedom of debate which its limited membership permitted. It came to stand, as the House could not, for conservatism, for deliberation, for independence of the executive. The advantage thus gained was increased as the growth of the Speaker's power into a virtual premiership and the development of the committee system undermined the importance of the individual representative, and as the more rapid increase of population in the free States destroyed in the House that balance of the sections which in the Senate was still carefully maintained. Moreover, the country no longer sent its strongest men into the White House, and the Supreme Court was no longer favorable to that theory of the government which, as Marshall expounded it, had tended so markedly to elevate the court itself. The upper house had gained not merely as against the lower, but as against the executive and the judiciary. The ablest and most experienced statesmen were apt to be senators; and the Senate was the true battleground in a contest that was beginning to dwarf all others. From the beginning to the end of Douglas's service there, saving a brief, delusive interval after the Compromise of 1850, the slavery question in its territorial phase was constantly uppermost, and in the Senate, if anywhere, those measures must be devised, those compromises agreed on, which should save the country from disunion or war. There was open to him, therefore, a path to eminence which, difficult as it might prove, was at least a plain one. To win among his fellows in the Senate a leadership such as he had readily won among his fellows at school, at Jacksonville, at Springfield, in the legislature and the Democratic organization of Illinois, and such as he was rising to in the lower house when he left it, and then to find and establish the right policy with slavery, and particularly with slavery in the Territories – there lay his path. It was a task that demanded the highest powers, a public service adequate to the loftiest patriotism. How he did, in fact, attempt it, how nearly he succeeded in it, and why he failed in it, are the inquiries with which any study of his life must be chiefly concerned.

But Douglas was too alert and alive to limit his share in legislation to a single subject or class of subjects. Save that he does not appear to have taken up the tariff question in any conspicuous way, he had a leading part in all the important discussions of his time, whether in the Senate or before the people. Unquestionably, his would be the best name to choose if one were attempting to throw into biographical form a political history of the period of his senatorship.

The very day he took his seat, he was appointed chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, and so kept the rôle of sponsor for young commonwealths which he had begun to play in the House. No other public man has ever had so much to do with the organizing of Territories and the admitting of States into the Union; probably no other man ever so completely mastered all the details of such legislation. He reported the bills by which Utah, New Mexico, Washington, Kansas, Nebraska, Oregon, and Minnesota became Territories, and those by which Texas, Iowa, Florida, California, Wisconsin, Oregon, and Minnesota became States. His familiarity with all questions concerning the public domain was not less remarkable. In dealing with both subjects, he seems always to have been guided by his confidence in the Western people themselves. He was for a liberal policy with individual settlers, holding that the government, in disposing of its lands, should aim at development and not at profit; and he was no less liberal in his view of the rights and privileges with which each new political community ought to be invested. As to the lands, he held to such a policy as looked forward to the time when they should be turned into farms and towns and cities. As to the government of the Territories, he held to such a policy with them as looked constantly forward to their becoming States, and his theory was that all the powers of the general government in reference to them were based on its power to admit States into the Union. To that rule of construction, however, he made a very notable exception. Declaring that the Mormons were for the most part aliens by birth, that they were trying to subvert the authority of the United States, that they themselves were unfit for citizenship and their community unfit for membership in the Union, he favored the repeal of the act by which the territorial government of Utah was set up. He went farther, and maintained that only such territory as is set apart to form new States must be governed in accordance with those constitutional clauses which relate to the admission of States, and that territory acquired or held for other purposes could be governed quite without reference to any rights which through statehood, or the expectation of statehood, its inhabitants might claim. This theory of his has assumed in our later history an interest and importance far beyond any it had at the time; but Douglas in that and in many other of his speeches clearly had in mind just such exigencies as have brought us to a practical adoption of his view.

His interest in the government's efforts to develop the country, and particularly the West, by building highways, dredging rivers, and deepening harbors, did not diminish, and he made more than one effort to bring design and system into that legislation. Always mindful of results, he pointed out that the conditions under which the river and harbor bills were framed, – the pressure upon every representative and senator to stand up for the interests of his constituents, and the failure to fix anywhere the responsibility for a general plan, – made it inevitable that such measures would either fail to pass or fail of their objects if they did pass. He suggested, in 1852, a plan which a year or two later, in a long letter to Governor Matteson, of Illinois, he explained and advocated with much force. It was for Congress to consent, as the Constitution provided it might, and as in particular cases it had consented, to the imposition by the States of tonnage duties, the proceeds to be used in deepening harbors. The scheme commended itself for many practical reasons; and it was more consonant with Democratic theory than the practice of direct appropriations by Congress.