The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (11 page)

The newly elected President, James Buchanan, had been selected by the Democrats as their nominee because he was a
safe man on the slavery issue who came from a Northern state (Pennsylvania) with twenty-seven electoral votes. He had already demonstrated his devotion to the slaveowners’ interests. When he had been Minister to England he had distinguished himself by sponsoring one of the most shameless declarations of imperialistic foreign policy that ever disgraced the history of the United States. This was the infamous Ostend Manifesto, which was an ultimatum to Spain, stating that if she would not agree to sell Cuba to the United States to be used as additional slave territory, the island would be taken by force. Few Presidents have had the verdict of history so unanimously directed against them as has James Buchanan. He was a weak man, an old man, tired, lacking in energy, ideas and administrative ability. That he should have been elected to the Presidency of the United States at this critical moment was a disaster for the whole nation.

In his inaugural address he made two serious errors, one of which damned him for his own time, and the other for all time afterward. He said incautiously that he did not stand for re-election, that he was not interested in a second term. This immediately rendered him useless as a political leader for his party. The implications in his other statement are more serious. After making the usual tributes to popular self-government, the new President went on to remark how fortunate it was that Congress had seen fit to use the same method of popular choice in establishing the status of slavery in the territories. Popular sovereignty was the rule of the day and it would solve all problems—even the difficult one of Kansas. As to whether the problem was to be solved when Kansas was admitted as a state or while it was still a territory was, he said, “of but little practical importance. Besides, it is a judicial question which legitimately belongs to the Supreme Court of the United States before whom it is now pending, and will, it is understood, be speedily and finally settled. To their decision,
in common with all good citizens, I shall cheerfully submit, whatever this may be.”

This was, on the face of it, a reasonable enough statement. It referred to a case then before the Court, the case of Dred Scott, Negro slave Vs. John F. A. Sanford, his legal owner, in a suit for the freedom of the slave in question. But those who had little reason to trust Buchanan in matters regarding slavery wondered why he was so willing to submit “cheerfully” to the Court’s decision, unless, of course, he already knew that the Court would uphold the slave status of Dred Scott. The Chicago
Times
had predicted several months before that the decision would go against the poor Negro whose name has become famous in the legal annals of our country. And go against him it did, only two days later, when Chief Justice Roger B. Taney read the decision that made every Negro in the United States ineligible for Federal citizenship, and held that the Missouri Compromise had been unconstitutional from its very inception. Buchanan had evidently been informed of what the decision would be or he would not have been willing to submit to it so “cheerfully.” (Later it came out that one of the justices had told him beforehand just how the Court stood.)

This decision was one more move in the series of moves that the anti-slavery men had seen made against them. In 1850, in order to make peace with slavery, they had consented to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; in 1854 they had seen a Congress subservient to the slave interests pass the hated Kansas-Nebraska Act; they had seen blood flow in Kansas under an administration that cynically favored the pro-slavery element there; in the election of 1856 they had seen that the Southern states would not even permit the anti-slavery candidate to be placed on the ballot, although there were certainly some people in the South who were opposed to slavery. The South had an iron hand on the government of the whole country. It elected Northern men as Presidents when
they would favor its cause. It controlled the Senate absolutely, and even the House when necessity demanded. Now, with the Dred Scott decision, the South had apparently taken over the third and last branch of the government—the judiciary. Its victory was complete.

Charges of conspiracy were immediately made in the North about the decision and the way it had been handled. Five of the nine judges were of Southern origin; two of the Northern judges had dissented from the majority opinion. The power of the slaveholders had reached even into the Supreme Court of the United States—the one body that was popularly supposed to be above suspicion, influence or prejudice—and had dictated a legal opinion of sweeping importance.

Northern resentment again burned high. There was now as much talk of secession in the North as there had formerly been in the South. The abolitionists openly preached separation—slaveowners, they said, would hold to no compact, therefore it was necessary to cut loose from them so the North could build a new nation, free from all taint of slavery and having no compromise with it anywhere within its borders.

In the midst of all this controversy Douglas came to Springfield. Because of his eminent position with the Democratic party, he was asked to speak on Kansas and the Dred Scott decision. On June 12, 1857, he addressed a large audience assembled in the Hall of Representatives. He astutely tried to turn the Court’s decision to his own benefit. He said that the fact that the Dred Scott decision had removed the question of slavery in the territories from the jurisdiction of the Congress simply indicated that resistance to the Nebraska Act was useless. Popular sovereignty was in the ascendancy—it was, indeed, the only way in which the status of slavery could be settled in any section. His doctrine of popular sovereignty was the one cure for all evils. The country was indeed fortunate that it had been devised.

Douglas hammered this point home. He went on to say, too,
that peace had come at last to bleeding Kansas. Things were quiet there, and popular sovereignty would now solve the problem of Kansas’ status. Slavery could exist in any section only by the will of the people who lived there, since only they could make the necessary laws to support it. If Kansas—or any other section—did not want slavery, it was obvious that slavery could not be forced upon it. As to the Dred Scott decision, it was simply the duty of every citizen to abide by the law laid down by the highest tribunal of the land, otherwise the free institutions that had made America great could no longer exist. He attacked the principle of Negro equality that the Republicans were supporting. If Negro equality were to be carried out literally, he said, it would mean that every slave in the country must be freed, that Negroes could vote, hold office, and intermarry with the whites. Was Illinois willing to accept such a doctrine? Certainly, he insinuated, the Republicans would bring these things about if they got into power.

Lincoln was seated in the audience listening to Douglas and making notes on what he said. On June 26, he made his reply, speaking in the same place, but to a much smaller audience, for Stephen A. Douglas was then a very important man and Abraham Lincoln was not.

Lincoln’s speech was a good one—one that adequately answered Douglas’s charges in a temperate and logical manner. But the two weeks that had passed since Douglas had spoken had already made a difference in the situation. Things in Kansas were not going as well under Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty as its sponsor had predicted they would. The new turn in events had only begun when Lincoln spoke, but it was to make his well-reasoned arguments unnecessary—the whole course of history was moving against Douglas, and the doctrine of popular sovereignty that he had upheld
was to break him and break the power of his party, too. The Nebraska Act was running to its logical conclusion, but the conclusion was so outrageously a perversion of justice that even Douglas himself was unable to stomach it.

A few days before Lincoln spoke, the Free State men in Kansas had refused to participate in an election of delegates for a constitutional convention. The convention, solidly composed of pro-slavery men, later met in the town of Lecompton to draft a constitution that upheld (in a non-amendable provisory clause) the right to hold slaves, prohibited free Negroes from residing in the state and pledged rigid enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. The people were to be given the privilege of voting for this constitution with its non-amendable slavery cause, or of voting for it without the slavery clause—in any case they must adopt the constitution as written, except for the one clause. It was quickly pointed out that the provisions covering free Negroes and fugitives were contained in the constitution itself, not in the slavery clause. The anti-slavery men protested against the trick and again refused to vote. The election was held without them, and the fraudulent constitution with its slavery clause was finally “ratified” on December 21, 1857, by a vote of 6143 to 589.

Before this one-sided election was held, the Free State men won control of the Legislature in October, putting Kansas in the curious position of having a free-state government and a pro-slavery constitutional convention both at work trying to defeat each other. The Lecompton constitution, however, was denounced even by the pro-slavery Territorial Governor, Robert J. Walker. Nevertheless, it obtained the tacit approval of the Buchanan administration.

Governor Walker resigned in disgust. Early in 1858, the free-state Legislature in Kansas resubmitted the constitution to a vote by the people with the additional provision that the whole constitution could be refused. It was—by a vote of 10,226 to 138. Yet even after this firm rejection by people who
were obviously determined to make Kansas a free state, Buchanan persisted in his efforts to have the Lecompton constitution adopted. An amendment offering a large grant of public lands was added, and the constitution was again put to vote. Acceptance meant that Kansas would be made a state; rejection meant that statehood would be deferred until the Territory had a much larger population. Again the people of Kansas rejected the constitution—and the free-land bribe. On August 2, 1858, the vote against the Lecompton constitution ran 11,300 against to 1788 for accepting. Kansas remained a Territory and kept her honor. She was not brought into the Union until January, 1861, when she entered as a free state into a country that was then on the verge of civil war.

In November, 1857, Douglas went to Washington to protest to Buchanan that his plan of popular sovereignty was being used to cover an enormous fraud. Buchanan insisted that the Lecompton constitution stand as written. Douglas broke with him at once. Buchanan fumed and threatened, but Douglas, who was an infinitely more powerful political figure than the pompous old hack in the White House, laughed at his threats and said that he would take the whole matter to the public.

On December 9, 1857, Douglas spoke in the Senate and he minced no words. He aptly compared the choice given under the Lecompton constitution to a Napoleonic election, in which Napoleon was supposed to have promised his soldiers that they could vote as freely as they pleased, but that if they voted against him they would be shot. Douglas also revealed what was behind the peculiar manner of presenting the Lecompton constitution to the people. “I have asked a very large number of the gentlemen who framed the constitution,” he said, “quite a number of the delegates, and a still larger number of persons who are their friends, and I have received the same answer from every one of them.… They say that if they allowed a negative vote, the constitution would have
been voted down by an overwhelming majority, and hence the fellows shall not be allowed to vote at all.”

Thus the slaveholders’ methods were exposed by a man who had always been friendly to the South. It was made evident to the nation that the South had overreached herself in her desire to bring Kansas into the Union as a slave state by fair means or foul. But in his break with Buchanan, Douglas had broken with the Democratic party. He had deviated from the party line, and the party line, good or bad, honorable or dishonorable, had to be followed by a politician who wished to stay in the party. Douglas was made the butt of political vengeance; lesser men crept forward, eager to dethrone the “Little Giant.” Douglas, however, still considered himself a Democrat. He had differed with the President and with the party on a matter in which his moral scruples were involved. His duty now was to make the party come over to his way of seeing things. Certainly there were many men who would follow his lead rather than Buchanan’s, or, for that fact, anybody else’s. He was not alone in his belief that the Lecompton matter was unfair and unjustified. Plenty of Democrats in the South as well as in the North agreed with him. They would form the nucleus of his following; others, perhaps, could be won over by the inherent justice of his cause.

So Stephen A. Douglas, late in 1857, broke away from his party as Theodore Roosevelt was later to do in his Bull Moose campaign in 1912—and with as little success politically. The combined effect of Douglas’s revolt and growing sectional differences was to sweep the Democratic party out of power for twenty-four years. It is absurd, however, to suppose that if Douglas had remained meekly within the party fold, the South could have continued in its dominant position. The strength of the North was increasing too rapidly to be held in check by any more political maneuvers the South might devise. Another state was added to the Union in 1858—Minnesota, a free state. Population and wealth were predominantly
in the North; the North had to control the national Government in order to safeguard its vast interests. The Civil War had to come—only bloody conflict could wipe out a South grimly determined to hold on to her waning political power while the bigger, richer North was equally grim in its determination to break that hold. The real history of the period was being written in drafting rooms, machine shops, banks and brokers’ offices. The speeches in Congress, the outdoor debates and all the other political gestures with which Douglas was so familiar were merely shadow play that concealed the more important, more earnest and more deadly struggle going on underneath.