Almost President (9 page)

Holding the nation together with string and gum, the Compromise of 1850 was nonetheless crucial to the eventual outcome of the Civil War, for it gave the North another decade to develop the industrial resources that would ultimately overwhelm the South when the conflict came. It also gave the North another ten years to become increasingly hostile to the existence of slavery, and therefore committed to the cause. And it ensured that the war came when a man equal to the task of keeping the Union together—Lincoln being a Clay man at that!—was in the White House.

Many understood at the time what Clay had accomplished. Van Buren wrote a friend, “Tell Clay for me that he added a crowning grace to his public life . . . more honorable and durable than his election to the Presidency could possibly have been.” There were many who believed that if Clay had lived another decade, he might have been able to postpone the Civil War once more. He was not there to try, of course, but the conflict was likely inevitable given that, as Lincoln would ultimately conclude, no nation could survive forever half slave and half free.

After his death in 1852, Clay was the first American accorded the honor of having his body lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda. Presaging Lincoln's death thirteen years later, tens of thousands of mourners lined the route of Clay's funeral train back to Lexington.

A few months after Clay died, the Whigs ran their last candidate for president, General Winfield Scott. After that, the Whigs were no more. There were many factors contributing to the party's dissolution, of course, but the party essentially died when Clay died. He had wanted a party rooted in principles, but his own personality dominated the party, perhaps to an extent that ultimately suffocated it.

Ten years after Clay's death, with the Civil War raging in full fury, his great admirer Lincoln wrote a note to one of Clay's surviving sons to thank him for the memento of a snuff box once owned by Clay. Thinking of the great statesman for the Union, Lincoln wrote, “I recognize his voice, speaking as it ever spoke, for the Union, the Constitution, and the freedom of mankind.”

CHAPTER THREE

STEPHEN DOUGLAS

1860

There can be no neutrals in this war,
only patriots—or traitors
.

Having lost the 1860 presidential election to his lifelong rival, Abraham Lincoln, Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas astonished observers by becoming one of Lincoln's staunchest defenders and his apparent confidant in devising a strategy to crush the Southern rebellion. Douglas's Democratic followers were confused. Why had Douglas, who had worked so hard to conciliate the South and avoid war, now become a strident advocate of military coercion to maintain the Union? Why should they now support Republican policies and a president whose candidacy they and Douglas had so vigorously opposed?

Even following the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, Democrats were uncertain what path to follow. Lesser Democratic leaders in the North, such as outgoing president James Buchanan, had been ready to throw up their hands and let the South secede in peace. Now that war had come, Democrats debated whether the Union cause was only a Republican cause. But Douglas, as the only politician of his day with a truly national following, insisted, “There can be no neutrals in this war,
only patriots—or traitors
.”

He traveled home to Illinois to rally Democratic opinion. “Do not allow the mortification growing out of defeat in a partisan struggle . . . convert you from patriots to traitors against your native land,” Douglas said. Defense of the Union did not require fusion with the Republican Party in a national unity party (as some Republicans demanded), or even deference to Republican policies. It did require repudiation of secessionists. The nation, Douglas explained, needed the Democratic Party to chart an independent course and would be best served by—and strong enough to handle—a loyal opposition party, providing vigorous debate even in the midst of civil war.

“Unite as a band of brothers and rescue your government,” Douglas entreated his followers. It was not only the right thing to do, it was good politics. Already mindful of the Republican taunt, “Every Democrat may not be a traitor but every traitor is a Democrat,” Douglas admonished his followers, “If we hope to regain and perpetuate the ascendancy of our party, we should never forget that a man cannot be a true Democrat unless he is a patriot.”

Protesting that he was exhausted in “strength, and voice, and life” from two years of exertions to prevent civil war, Douglas could happily report that the “ablest and bravest” opponents of secession were now Northern Democrats, who were “firm and unanimous” in their loyalty to the Union. In those few months following his presidential defeat, Douglas had assured the Democratic Party would survive the war as a viable independent political party. Less than a month later, on June 3, 1861, he died at the age of forty-eight.

Douglas's exhortations had an enormous and lasting impact upon his party. Northern Democrats—and some Southern Democrats, too—did fight for the Union, as Douglas urged. The
North American
Review,
in its July 1886 edition, investigated the question of the partisan makeup of the Union Army and concluded Democrats willingly enlisted and fought for the Union in the same numbers and percentages as Republicans—and with an equal fervor. Many key Union commanders were Democrats, including Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and Generals George McClellan, George Thomas, Benjamin Butler, and Winfield Scott Hancock. Even Ulysses S. Grant was a nominal Democrat before and during the war, quoting Douglas's remark about their being only “traitors and patriots” in a letter to his father that explained why he was accepting a Union officer's commission.

The value of a loyal opposition party, however, was not limited to the battlefield. Douglas's insistence that Democrats remain independent from Republicans even as they remained loyal to the Union had enormous ramifications during and after the war. While unity may seem critical in a time of civil war, scholars have concluded that continued partisan bickering was to the Union's benefit.

A 1967 essay written by historian Eric L. McKitrick outlines the several ways that a vigorous Democratic opposition strengthened the Union war effort. First, Democratic opposition unified Republicans and greatly reduced intraparty squabbling that might have undermined Lincoln's administration. Second, Democratic critiques sometimes helped correct flawed administration policies. Third, an independent Democratic Party provided those opposed to Lincoln's policies with a peaceful means to express their grievances. Those who criticized the administration could be treated simply as ambitious politicians seeking partisan advantage within the established political system, rather than as traitors.

In contrast, the absence of political parties in the South greatly weakened the Confederacy. Political parties are designed to weave together various and differing constituencies for a larger national purpose. Lacking a national perspective, many Southern political leaders acted parochially. Further, without the system of discipline and rewards that political parties provide their members, Southern politicians suffered little consequence for acting out in petty ways that undermined the Confederate cause. Georgia governor Joseph Brown, for example, expressed his displeasure with Confederate president Jefferson Davis by arbitrarily furloughing ten thousand Georgia troops for thirty days—the week after the fall of Atlanta! In contrast, states with Democratic governors in the North, including New York and New Jersey, always met their Union conscription quotas.

As the war dragged on, and as emancipation of the slaves (an idea unpopular with Democrats) became a key war aim, an element known as the “Peace Democrats” grew in strength, demanding a negotiated peace with the Confederacy. But they remained a minority within the party. While their political activities annoyed the Lincoln administration, there was no “fifth column” of disaffected Northern Democrats undermining the Union war effort. The course Douglas set for the party at the beginning of the war ensured that, in 1864, Democrats nominated “War Democrat” General George McClellan, who, during a heated but peaceful campaign, said only the unconditional reunion of North and South could lead to peace.

Douglas had had to fight on several fronts to ensure the Democratic Party would survive the war. In addition to the Republican proposal to meld the two parties into one, Southern Democrats, known as “Fire-Eaters” for their aggressive pro-slavery and pro-secession views, had tried to destroy the party before the war began. Former Democratic Alabama congressman William Lowndes Yancey, one of the South's great orators and leading proponents of secession, actively promoted “the disorganization of the Democratic Party.” Yancey and his cohorts believed that all institutions that continued to bind North and South together must be dissolved for secession to succeed. With even religious denominations, such as the Methodists and Baptists, having split North and South, the Democratic Party was one of the few remaining institutions in which Southerners and Northerners might find common cause.

Even election of another pliant Democratic president like James Buchanan was anathema to the Fire-Eaters, for that would only postpone by a few years what secessionists believed was inevitable. Better to ensure Lincoln's election by sabotaging the Democrats and Douglas in order to drive other Southerners to embrace secession.

Yancey's belief in the power of the Democratic Party to unite the nation was proven correct after the war. Then, the Democratic Party played a vital, if controversial, role in the reconstruction of the nation. It had survived the war intact, one of the few national institutions ready to welcome white Southerners back with open arms, and one of the few that Southerners would willingly join. As such, the Democratic Party was an important tool in bringing white Southerners back into national affairs and providing them with lawful means to express their political passions—though this did not prevent appalling post-war violence against newly freed blacks.

While Republicans continued to “wave the bloody shirt” during every national election for a generation after the war ended, because of Douglas's leadership in establishing the Democrats as
loyal
opposition, the label “party of treason” fell short of its intended effect. The Democratic Party was competitive in national elections during and after the war. Indeed, it emerged from the war with its political fortunes improved. Republicans had been united by the war effort, but with the war over, fissions developed within the party. Meanwhile, Southern states, which would overwhelmingly vote Democratic for the next one hundred years, perversely saw their political strength increase: Slaves had counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional apportionment, but post-slavery African Americans now counted as full human beings.

That the end of slavery could increase the political influence of slaveholding states is another illustration of Douglas's complicated legacy. Compared with his fellow Illinoisan, the sainted Lincoln, the man known as “The Little Giant” may seem a small man indeed. Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass charged that no man in antebellum America had “done more to intensify hatred of the negro” than Douglas. No Northern politician had tried harder to appease the slave-holding South, and no individual, because of his introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, was more directly responsible for the chain of events that led to the Civil War.

Yet . . . no man had worked harder to prevent that war or to rally public opinion behind Lincoln and the Union. Douglas's premature death was brought on by a lifetime of heavy drinking but even more by exhaustion from his yearlong exertions on behalf of the Union. Months before the 1860 election, realizing that he could not defeat Lincoln, Douglas devoted the remainder of his campaign not to soliciting votes, but to convincing Southerners that Lincoln's election could not justify secession. Despite death threats, including one from future Confederate president Jefferson Davis, Douglas traveled into the heart of Dixie to make his case. After the election, Douglas worked feverishly with Kentucky senator John Crittenden to try to forge a last-minute compromise to end the secession crisis.

While Douglas's and Crittenden's proposals were unacceptable to Lincoln (and some were genuinely outrageous, such as prohibiting even free blacks from voting), their work provided a valuable service to the Union. Faith in Douglas's ability to forge an acceptable compromise led four Southern states to delay their secession until after Lincoln's inaugural. This delay, particularly in the secession of Virginia, gave Lincoln crucial time to form a government, preventing the Confederacy from becoming a
fait accompli
before he could take office and plan his response to the secession crisis.

The slave-holding border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland declined to secede at all, which led an admirer to write to Douglas that without his efforts by March 1, 1861, “Mason and Dixon's line would now be the boundary of the Southern Confederacy”—and the Mason-Dixon line was north of Washington, D.C. Douglas did not merely preserve the Democratic Party; he also played an important role in creating a set of facts on the ground that proved to be essential to the preservation of the Union.

Despite his final attempt at appeasement, once the war began, Douglas left no doubt where his loyalties lay. Embittered that his efforts at conciliation were so poorly received by the South, when secession came Douglas proposed to fight it with a greater ferocity than Lincoln. When Lincoln told Douglas he initially planned to call up seventy-five thousand militia, Douglas urged him to call up nearly three times that number, telling Lincoln that he would have to deal sharply with the South. “You do not know the dishonest purposes of these men as well as I do,” Douglas told Lincoln of the secessionists. “If I were president, I'd convert or hang them
all
within forty-eight hours.”

In a private meeting, which he later reported to the press with Lincoln's permission, Douglas assured Lincoln that Northern Democrats would seek no partisan advantage from the conflict. “Our Union must be preserved,” he said. “Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I am with you, Mr. President, and God bless you.” After Douglas left their meeting, Lincoln exclaimed, “What a noble man Douglas is!”

Lincoln had not always thought so. For most of their adult lives, their rivalry was one-sided in favor of Douglas, which made Lincoln uncharacteristically jealous. Lincoln was four years older than Douglas, and while Lincoln achieved considerable political success at a young age (he was a state legislator at age twenty-five), it paled next to Douglas's extraordinary rise to prominence. Douglas was an Illinois Supreme Court justice at age twenty-seven, a U.S. senator at thirty-three, and a serious presidential contender in 1852 at age thirty-nine, by which time he was the most famous, respected, and controversial statesman in America. Lincoln, meanwhile, remained unknown outside Illinois, until he ran a gallant but losing race against Douglas for the U.S. Senate in 1858.