Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America (Simon & Schuster Lincoln Library) - Softcover

THE LEAST MAN I EVER SAW

Upon our platform there will stand

Clad in judicial toga

With clinking hand-cuffs in his hand

An old pro-slavery fogy,

And first beside him on the box

In attitude defiant

Like frog that tried t'outswell the ox

There stands our Little Giant.

And these two worthies shall engage

In a vehement tustle

Each other from the platform's edge

By lawful right to hustle

Displaying thus before our sight

The right to drive away there

What has itself an equal right

By the same law to stay there.H. P. H. BROMWELL PAPERS,

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

The Honorable Senator from Illinois, Stephen Arnold Douglas, began digging his political grave with the first item of business before the Senate of the United States on Wednesday, January 4, 1854. For a man approaching the height of his political powers, Senator Douglas did not look particularly uneasy, nor did the instrument he had in hand appear all that lethal. It was simply a "bill to organize the Territory of Nebraska," which Douglas was reporting out of the Senate Committee on Territories and laying before the entire Senate for its action. But it would be the undoing of Douglas all the same, and of the peace of the American Republic.

Ever since 1803, when Thomas Jefferson shrewdly bought up half the American West in the great Louisiana Purchase, Congress had been slowly organizing the immense landmass of "Louisiana" and setting up provisional governments there as territories -- Missouri in 1812, Arkansas in 1819, Iowa in 1838, Oregon in 1848, Minnesota in 1849. A territory was a legal halfway house between the moment when lands like the Louisiana Purchase were acquired by the United States, and the moment they could be admitted to the Union as full-fledged states. Under Article IV of the Constitution, Congress was responsible for setting up temporary governments in newly acquired lands, subdividing or fixing their boundaries, recognizing each of the new units as an incorporated territory, appointing territorial governors and supervising the creation of territorial legislatures and constitutions, and eventually, if territorial organization was successful, guiding a territory's application for statehood. This process stabilized the rule of law, allowed the people living there a measure of self-government, and created a test period before the territory was fully admitted to the Union as a state. Without it, land titles, law enforcement, incorporation, investment, and development would all hang fire.

The territorial process, however, was not necessarily rapid. By the time Minnesota was organized as a territory, in 1849, most of the immense bulk of the Louisiana Purchase, from the northern Rockies to the vast plains west of Nebraska, was still without territorial government. And then, in 1848, another expansion-minded president, James Knox Polk, used the Mexican War to acquire the great southwestern triangle of the continent, from the Rio Grande west to California and from Texas northwest to the Great Salt Lake. If the pace of territorial organization in the old Purchase lands was any indication, organizing the huge new American West could take another century.

No one felt the burden of pushing territorial organization in the West more urgently than Stephen A. Douglas, whose life up to this point read like a primer in the opportunities of western development. Douglas's forebears arrived in Rhode Island as early as the 1640s, but they gradually drifted north and west in search of new land, finally setting up on four hundred acres of land near Brandon, Vermont, in the 1790s. The Douglases acquired enough wealth and standing in Vermont to send Douglas's father to Middlebury College to become a physician, and the elder Douglas soon settled down to marriage and medicine in Brandon in 1811, followed by the birth of Stephen Arnold in 1813. Then, the bliss of the Douglas family abruptly stopped. In 1815, the doctor suffered a fatal heart attack. "I was only about two months old, and of course I cannot recollect him," Douglas wrote years afterward. But "I have often been told he was holding me in his arms when he departed this world." With the death of the senior Douglas died any prospect of Stephen following his father into a lucrative and respectable profession. Despite his "taste for reading" -- his favorite works were "those telling of the triumphs of Napoleon, the conquests of Alexander, and the wars of Caesar" -- and spending "night and Sundays in reading and study," the young Stephen Douglas was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker.

It was typical of Douglas that he at once began looking for a new way upward. He wheedled permission from his master to attend the Brandon Academy, and when his mother remarried in 1830 and moved to New York, young Stephen was given leave to enter the Canandaigua Academy and then, in 1833, to begin reading law with two local lawyers. But his stepfamily's money began to run dry, and the process of examination and admission to the bar in New York was long and expensive. In mid-1833, he embarked on yet another Douglas move westward, to Cleveland. "When shall we expect you to come home to visit us, my son?" pleaded his mother. "On my way to Congress, Mother," he replied.

The way to Congress appeared to be no easier for Douglas than the way to law. Cleveland was a professional dead end. Douglas hoped to find work in St. Louis, but St. Louis was already overstocked with lawyers, as were the Illinois towns on the other side of the Mississippi River. It was not until he walked into the middle of a public auction at Winchester, Illinois, in the fall of 1833 and volunteered his services to an auctioneer who needed somebody literate enough to keep track of sales that Douglas finally found himself earning two dollars a day -- as a clerk. This bounty gave him the bright idea of opening a school for clerks. In short order, Douglas had forty pupils and (at the end of the school quarter in March 1834) enough money to support him in a year's law study. Before the end of the year, Douglas was licensed to practice in Illinois and was the proprietor of his own one-man law practice. He was all of twenty-one years old.

Lawyering followed a short path to politics in Illinois, and never more so than in the volatile year of 1834. The President of the United States, the white-haired but iron-tempered hero of the Battle of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson, had thrown every ounce of his energies against the sucking of the American economy into the maw of the Industrial Revolution. Jackson was a devout old Jeffersonian Democrat -- which is to say that he saw American life in much the same terms as Thomas Jefferson had when Jefferson wrote that God's only chosen people were farmers on their own land. Democrats from Jefferson to Jackson looked uneasily on men who worked in shops for wages, since mere wage earners became dependent on the goodwill of wage payers and were vulnerable to political manipulation by their employers. They looked even more coldly on those who traded in bonds and securities (these were examples of imaginary wealth, whose value could be driven up and down without warning) or who made their living in merchandise and commerce (since they traded in fancy goods which no upstanding farmer really needed but which could trap him in a punitive cycle of debt and dependence). No man who did not own his own land, or who could not live from that land, could ever be truly free and independent.

This hostility led to political war in 1834 between Jackson and the Second Bank of the United States, the pumping station of the national financial system created by Alexander Hamilton in the 1790s. Andrew Jackson was one of the few real heroes Americans could boast of in the disastrous War of 1812, and he had not defeated one enemy in scarlet coats only to concede to another in silver and gold. The Second Bank became, for Jackson and his allies, a monster with financial tentacles, seeking to reach into every corner of the Republic and entrap its virtuous farmers in paper chains of debt. When in 1834 the bank's president, Nicholas Biddle, challenged Jackson by seeking an early renewal of the bank's charter by Congress, Jackson vetoed the renewal legislation with all the vehemence with which he had bestowed gusts of grapeshot on the British.

All this should have been of little consequence to a novice lawyer in central Illinois in 1834. But when an attorney from Jacksonville stood up before a local club to which Stephen Douglas belonged and denounced Jackson's veto of the bank as tyrannical and treasonous, Douglas was furious at hearing America's premier military hero flogged verbally like a common bandit. "I could not remain silent when the old hero's character, public and private, was traduced, and his measures misrepresented and denounced," he recalled later, and in a trice, Douglas was on his feet making a speech of his own. A week later, an Illinois Democratic newspaper printed Douglas's speech in "two entire columns" and "for two or three successive weeks," and suddenly Douglas was a political celebrity. He was elected state's attorney for the First Judicial Circuit and then, in August 1836, won a seat in the state legislature. Seven months later, Andrew Jackson's successor in the presidency, Martin Van Buren, rewarded Douglas's faithful party service by appointing him register of the lucrative federal land office in Springfield. In 1838, Douglas ran for Congress on a platform which denounced corporate charters for "railroads, canals, insurance companies, hotel companies, steam mill companies &c., &c." as "unjust, impolitic, and unwise" -- and lost by a squeaker to John Todd Stuart. But in 1840, Douglas was back on the upward spiral when he was appointed by the Democratic governor Thomas Carlin to the Illinois Supreme Court.

Finally, in 1843, Douglas won the congressional seat he craved in a special election, defeating the formidable lawyer from the Mississippi River town of Quincy, Orville Hickman Browning. After he won reelection in 1846, the Illinois legislature's Democratic ma...