1858 (17 page)

A correspondent for the
Chicago Tribune
wrote, “I can hardly conceive it possible that [Douglas] will break with the South and the administration.”
²¹⁷

The iron-willed Douglas had no qualms about a rift with the administration. In one angry conversation about Buchanan, the Illinois senator blurted out, “By God, sir, I made Mr. James Buchanan, and by God, sir, I will unmake him.”

By late November, Buchanan had made it obvious to insiders that he was going to support the Lecompton Constitution, approving slavery in Kansas if the residents of the territory voted for it, and expected everyone in the party to fall in line with his policy. Douglas was the chair of the Senate Committee on Territories, and the bill would go to his committee first. Buchanan should have consulted Douglas but, as usual, he ignored him.

An irate Douglas confronted Buchanan about Lecompton in December 1857, at the White House. He told the president that he expected much of the year 1858 would be filled with legislative and public arguments over Lecompton and slavery in the territories and that the president should work with him on the issue. Buchanan heatedly reminded Douglas that he would suffer harsh consequences if he broke with the administration on Kansas. He reportedly told him of two Democratic senators who had opposed Andrew Jackson twenty years earlier. “Mr. Douglas, I desire you to remember that no Democrat ever yet differed from the administration of his own choice without being crushed. Beware of the fate of Tallmadge and Rives.”

Douglas looked back at him and said chillingly, “I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead, sir.”
²¹⁸

Buchanan was not afraid of Douglas. He was the president and his will, and his Lecompton bill, would prevail. If he had been an astute politician, Buchanan would have worked with Douglas and tried to earn some compromise victory over Kansas. An alliance with Douglas would not only strengthen the party in the South, but in the North, where it had been roughed up in the last elections by upstart Republicans. The president refused to even acknowledge Douglas’s influence, despite the Little Giant’s political capital in the Senate, his fame across the country, and the political clout he maintained in the Democratic Party—even more than that of Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis. Douglas was such an important political figure at the beginning of 1858 that a correspondent for the
New York Times
wrote that his skills and power “combine to make him an influence which will be decisive in the settlement of this controversy,” and several other papers wrote that he was the key to the administration’s success.
²¹⁹

Buchanan had ignored Douglas yet again, following the cabinet appointees snub just prior to the inauguration, and turned a simmering feud into a political conflagration between the two men. It was personal, too, because the president continually refused to permit Douglas to visit the White House, refused to meet with him, and on occasion, just for spite, called him “Samuel Douglas” in letters he mailed to him.
²²⁰

Douglas plunged into the work of defeating the Lecompton bill with a fury, writing public officials and friends days before the matter was introduced in Congress that this was a political Armageddon. He wrote one man, “The battle will soon begin. We will nail our colors to the mast and defend the right of the people to govern themselves against all assaults from all quarters. We are sure to triumph. Keep the ball rolling and the party united.”
²²¹

He was not only determined to lead that crusade in the Senate, but called for people throughout the United States to debate Lecompton and Kansas. “The time has now arrived when the democracy of the whole country should hold meetings in the cities, towns, and counties, and proclaim in tones that will command respect their devotion to and determination to sustain and carry out in good faith the great principles of self government,” he wrote, adding that Lecompton was “a scheme so monstrous as to force a constitution at the point of the bayonet down the throats of an unwilling people.”
²²²

He took the floor of the Senate seconds after the president’s annual message, including his proslavery stand on Kansas, was read. The dynamic Douglas cut quite a figure, as always. He was a very short man, about five feet two inches tall, dark complexioned, with an unusually large head. Much of his brown hair had turned thin and gray by 1858. The senator also had gray eyes with thick eyebrows, connected by a deep wrinkle between them, and a large and firm mouth in the middle of an oval-shaped face. The Judge had, one man wrote, “small white ears, small white hands, small feet, a full chest, and broad shoulders.” Reporters always noted his oversized face that, one said, “seems too large for shoulders as support it.”
²²³

He was nearly always described as “thick set” or “burly” and possessed, many said, a “fierce, bull dog bark.” But Douglas was an electric figure to behold. “Small as he was, you would choose him out of a crowd,” one reporter who covered his campaigns wrote. Carl Schurz said he was “the very embodiment of force, combativeness, and staying power.” Egomaniacal and defiant, he was sometimes portrayed as a cocky rooster and a few newspapers even ran drawings of a rooster in stories about him.
²²⁴

Douglas’s great strength was public speaking. One reporter wrote of him, “He is haughty and imperative, his voice somewhat shrill and his manner positive, now flattering, now wild with excess of madness. That trembling forefinger, like a lash, was his whip to drive the doubting into the ranks. He is a very tyrant…” Another man added, “No one among the gray beards in the United States Senate commands such instant attention when he rises to speak.” He delivered “brilliant, sledge hammer speeches,” wrote one reporter. A woman who listened to him often from the Senate gallery wrote that Douglas had “the power of thrilling his hearers through and through…his language is always sharp, clear, and strong.”
²²⁵

“I totally dissent from all that portion of [President Buchanan’s annual] message which may fairly be construed as approving of the proceedings of the Lecompton Convention,” Douglas roared that day.

The next day, following administration efforts to muzzle him, Douglas exploded again. He angrily told the Senate that his Kansas-Nebraska bill had been twisted by the administration to mean something it did not. He said that if slavery had to be approved by the residents of a state or territory, then so did every single article of the Constitution, adding that the Lecompton Convention was not legal. He said that his hopes for the territories to adopt popular sovereignty were being “frittered away” by the administration, that the plan was “a system of trickery and jugglery to defeat the fair expression of the will of the people.” He told the Senate that since the proslavery faction had hammered together the Lecompton Constitution and that antislavery residents stayed away from the polls when it was proposed in referendum it could not possibly reflect the will of the people—the cornerstone of both popular sovereignty and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He asked the Senate if the plan of Buchanan and others was “to force a constitution on the people against their will?”

Finally, Douglas said, “If this constitution is to be forced down our throats, in violation of the fundamental principle of free government, under a mode of submission that is a mockery and insult, I will resist it to the last!”

As he finished speaking, the packed gallery of the Senate, equally divided with proslavery and antislavery forces, broke into jeering and applause at the same time, causing general havoc.
²²⁶

Reaction to Douglas’s defection from the administration was explosive. Southerners were genuinely shocked, not just by Douglas’s stand against the proslavery constitution, but by his 180-degree change of heart on the subject. They not only felt abandoned by the Illinois senator, but betrayed.

Buchanan reveled in that, writing close friend J. B. Baker that “Douglas has alienated the South on the Kansas question.” The Southerners were afraid, though, that Douglas’s stand against Lecompton, and what appeared to be the irreparable rift with Buchanan, who never made an effort in all of those months to meet with Douglas, would cause the Democratic Party to split in half, just as the Whigs had only six years earlier. Clearly Buchanan, a slavery defender, would lead the Southern half of the party along with Jefferson Davis. Douglas would lead the Northern half.

Douglas had support all over America. He had letters from residents of many Northern states urging him to hold his ground on the Lecompton issue. Typical was the plea of Daniel Morton, of Cleveland, Ohio. He wrote Douglas, “Yield not one inch. Consent to no compromise. Stand firm by the right and God and country will stand by you.”
²²⁷

Buchanan not only refused to negotiate policy or discuss politics with Douglas, but would not listen to rumors, many true, that the Republicans in Illinois and nationally were courting Douglas, trying to convince him that his feelings on Lecompton, and on slavery in general, were far more within the Republican camp than the Democratic. Several Republican leaders met with Douglas and hinted that he should become a Republican.
²²⁸

The president became paranoid about Douglas as the Kansas debate droned on through February and March of 1858 and his obsession with the Illinois senator caused just about all business at the White House to grind to a halt. Buchanan came to the conclusion that thousands of Democrats had drifted into the Douglas camp and that they were all secretly working to undermine the party and the White House. He wrote later of the Kansas debacle and the Civil War in general, “It is clear that the original cause of the disaster was the persistent refusal of the friends of Mr. Douglas to recognize the constitutional rights of the slaveholding states in the territories, established by the Supreme Court.”
²²⁹

And by 1858, Buchanan was starting to blame all of his woes on Kansas and Douglas. He wrote that the Supreme Court decision on
Dred Scott
should have ended the slavery debate, but “the Douglas Democrats disregarded this decision altogether. They treated it as though it had never been made and still continued to agitate without intermission.”

The besieged president said too that it was Douglas who led the South to believe that everyone in the North was against them. Again and again, he told Democrats that the South had “utterly repudiated” the idea of popular sovereignty in the territories, and yet Douglas continued to insist upon it. In doing so, the president said, the Illinois senator had turned Democrats and non-Democrats alike against the South.
²³⁰

The spat with Douglas once again underlined Buchanan’s shortsighted view of the toll that slavery was taking on the country. In private correspondence with friends, the president said that he honestly believed that if Kansas was admitted to the Union as a slave state it would end the national debate on slavery and demolish the Republicans. He wrote one friend, “The admission of the state will annihilate the Black Republican Party to end the question of slavery…[it] will equally end the strife on that subject,” and blithely added that “I am an optimist on my politics and have ever looked upon the bright side of things.”
²³¹

The efforts of Douglas and others failed to defeat the proslavery Lecompton Constitution in the Senate because there were few Democratic defectors to the banners of Douglas and the Republicans. The bill had to be passed in the House of Representatives also, though, and the fight in the Senate ignited an equally heated battle in the House that included a fist fight between two congressmen. In the House, the Republicans wooed twenty-two Democrats to their side and Lecompton was defeated, 120 to 112. To save face, the administration managed to get through both houses a bizarre bill that permitted Kansas to enter the Union if residents approved of new federal land grants; rejection would defer any chance for statehood for two long years. The carrot of immediate entry failed and Kansans rejected the offer. Kansans elected a new free-state legislature a year later, in 1859, that called for a new constitutional convention and the territory entered the Union as a free state in 1861.