Year of meteors : Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the election that brought on the Civil War

307 Pages·2011·2.96 MB·English

by  Douglas

Contents
Prologue “Let Us Press On”: April–June, 1861
Chapter 1 A Nation with Its “Hands Full”: The Republic on the Eve of 1860
Chapter 2 “Douglas or Nobody”: The Democrats
Chapter 3 Principles and the “Duty to Recognize” None: The Constitutional Union and Liberty Parties
Chapter 4 “Moving Heaven and Earth”: The Republicans
Chapter 5 “Beyond the Power of Surgery”: The Democrats, Again
Chapter 6 “Lincoln Is the Next President. I Will Go South”: The Campaigns
Chapter 7 “The Union Is Dissolved”: The Lower South Secedes
Chapter 8 “Others to Share the Burden”: Two Governments Prepare
Chapter 9 “All Our Labor Is Lost”: Compromise Committees and the Washington Peace Conference
Epilogue “To Act the Part of a Patriot”: March–April, 1861
Acknowledgments
Notes
Appendix 1860 Election Scenarios and Possible Outcomes
Footnotes
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
For my daughters Kearney and Hannah,
who always make me smile
Year of meteors! brooding year!
I would bind in words retrospective, some of your deeds and signs;
I would sing your contest for the 19th Presidentiad;
I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair, mounted the scaffold in Virginia;
(I was at hand—silent I stood, with teeth shut close—I watch’d;
I stood very near you, old man, when cool and indifferent, but trembling with age and your
unheal’d wounds, you mounted the scaffold;)
I would sing in my copious song your census returns of The States,
The tables of population and products—I would sing of your ships and their cargoes,
The proud black ships of Manhattan, arriving, some fill’d with immigrants, some from the
isthmus with cargoes of gold;
Songs thereof would I sing—to all that hitherward comes would I welcome give;
And you would I sing, fair stripling! welcome to you from me, sweet boy of England!
Remember you surging Manhattan’s crowds, as you pass’d with your cortege of nobles?
There in the crowds stood I, and singled you out with attachment;
There in the crowds stood I, and singled you out with attachment;
Nor forget I to sing of the wonder, the ship as she swam up my bay,
Well-shaped and stately the Great Eastern swam up my bay, she was 600 feet long,
Her, moving swiftly, surrounded by myriads of small craft, I forget not to sing;
Nor the comet that came unannounced out of the north, flaring in heaven;
Nor the strange huge meteor procession, dazzling and clear, shooting over our heads,
(A moment, a moment long, it sail’d its balls of unearthly
light over our heads,
Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone;)
Of such, and fitful as they, I sing—with gleams from them would I gleam and patch these chants;
Your chants, O year all mottled with evil and good! year of forebodings!
Year of comets and meteors transient and strange! lo— even here one transient and strange!
As I flit through you hastily, soon to fall and be gone, what is this chant,
What am I myself but one of your meteors?
—WALT WHITMAN, 1859–1860
Prologue
“Let Us Press On”
April–June, 1861
R
llinois as Little Egypt, not only because the flat terrain
ESIDENTS DUBBED SOUTHERN I
resembled the Nile delta but also because the region exhibited the proslavery
attitudes of its ancient namesake. Although the Northwest Ordinance of 1787
allowed “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” in the region, settlers who
had carried their slaves into the territory before the ordinance were permitted to
retain their unwaged laborers. A resident of the aptly named Cairo could gaze
east across the Ohio River into Kentucky, while another might face west and spy
Missouri. Boatmen sailing down the Mississippi River reached the Tennessee
border after forty-three miles. So it was no surprise that public opinion in lower
Illinois was bitterly divided following the Confederate bombardment of Fort
Sumter on the morning of April 12, 1861. The Golconda Weekly Herald warned
residents to arm themselves against “black Republican” armies, and several city
leaders in Cairo threatened to turn the town into an independent city-state.
“Many who profess to be Union men,” fretted one Democrat, “hesitate about
coming out boldly against treason, fearing hereafter to be classed as
Republicans.” The state assembly was preparing to go into special session on
April 23, and worried legislators peppered Stephen A. Douglas, the state’s
Democratic senior senator, with urgent requests to “stand by our Government,
and sink party feeling for the present.” Douglas’s health, damaged by a
lifetime’s fondness for whiskey and cigars, had yet to recover from the grueling
fall campaign and a bruising winter legislative session in Washington. But
vowing, “Let us press on,” he resolved to “come home to arouse the people in
favor of the Union.”1
On April 20, Douglas and his second wife, Adele, left the besieged national
capital by rail; across the river in Virginia, the Stars and Bars, the first of several
Confederate flags, flapped in the spring breeze. The Baltimore and Ohio
Railroad passed through portions of western Virginia, and when his train reached
the arsenal town of Harpers Ferry, southern militiamen boarded the car and
threatened to arrest the senator as a prisoner of war. With more courage than
realism, the diminutive Little Giant, as the senator was known, warned the
soldiers that if they did so, they would have to answer to the “largest army” that
Virginia had yet seen. Cooler heads prevailed, and the senator was sent on his
way. On the morning of April 25, Douglas’s party pulled into Springfield, the
Illinois state capital. Although exhausted from his journey, Douglas promptly
met with Governor Richard Yates, Republican Illinois senator Lyman Trumbull,
and Orville Hickman Browning, a former Whig whom Douglas had bested in an
1843 congressional race. The time for partisanship had passed, Douglas insisted,
and together the group forged “an understanding” regarding the various militia
bills pending in the state assembly.2
That evening, as legislators and curious residents of the city shoved their
way into the packed statehouse, Douglas delivered one of the most important
speeches of his career. Once capable of speaking for hours, the weary senator
kept his remarks short. But his words were both blunt and emotional, and as he
spoke, some in the audience began to weep openly. Uncharacteristically,
Douglas began by confessing an error. He had devoted his career to compromise
and sectional reconciliation, he admitted, and had “lean[ed] too far to the
southern section of the Union against my own.” As had many northern
Democrats, Douglas had once believed that appeasement was the wisest
response to southern demands regarding slavery in the western territories. But
the fruits of his munificence, he fumed, were a “piratical flag” unfurled near the
White House and the obstruction of Illinois’s commerce along “our great river.”
A “wide-spread conspiracy exists to destroy the best government the sun of
heaven ever shed its rays upon,” Douglas shouted, for a “war of aggression and
extermination [was] being waged” against the republic by proslavery forces. As
Douglas paused to catch his breath, somebody entered the rear of the chamber
waving an American flag, and the tears in the hall transformed into cheers and
applause.3
On May 1, Douglas reached Chicago. Journalists waiting at the depot
marveled at the crowd of thousands that met his car with a resounding roar.
Judging from the throng, one might never have known that the politician
returning home had finished fourth in the Electoral College during the previous
November’s presidential election. An impromptu parade escorted Douglas
through the streets toward the Wigwam, the cavernous pine auditorium
constructed only the preceding year to house the Republican National
Convention. According to one reporter, Douglas’s “words rolled out in unbroken
cadences of patriotic devotion as they never rolled before.” Clutching the
podium unsteadily, Douglas assured the “ten thousand persons” who had
elbowed their way into the hall that the election of Abraham Lincoln was merely
the excuse for secession. Returning to the theme he had first advanced in
Springfield, Douglas charged that the Confederacy was the product of “an
enormous conspiracy” devised months before the fall election. “There are only
two sides to the question,” Douglas thundered in conclusion. “Every man must
be for the United States or against it. There can be no neutrals in this war, only
patriots—or traitors.” It was to be his last speech.4
For the past eighteen years, Douglas had called Washington his home, and
he owned no house in Illinois. He and Adele checked in to the Tremont House,
on East Chestnut, Chicago’s finest hotel. For the next few days, the senator
continued to receive visitors, and despite Adele’s concerns, Douglas and his
guests habitually washed down their conversations with copious amounts of
whiskey. By May 4, what he described as a “slight cold” had settled into a low
fever. The senator sent for several doctors, who pronounced his illness to be
“acute rheumatism” of a “typhoid character” complicated by “an ulcerated sore
throat.” Within days, Douglas could not use his arms, but he continued to dictate
letters denouncing “the Cotton States” and calling on Democrats to “rally to the
support of our common country.” Determined to continue his efforts on behalf of
his longtime foe who now served as president, Douglas insisted that he be
carried outside “into open air,” and by May 19 his doctors were hoping for a
complete recovery. But three days later, his “torpor of the liver”—that is,
cirrhosis—worsened, and the physicians warned Adele that he “could not
recover.”5
Adele sent for their young sons, Robert and Stephen Jr., who attended a
private school in the Georgetown section of Washington, and she was joined by
her brother, James Madison Cutts Jr. A devout Catholic, Adele brought in
Bishop James Duggan, who attempted to perform a long-overdue baptism and
administer last rites. Douglas declined both offers, and when a stunned Duggan
raised the issue a second time, the senator roused himself to bark in a “strong,
full voice” that the bishop “perhaps, did not understand me,” adding that when
he “desire[d] it,” he would “communicate with [Duggan] freely.” When Douglas
continued to deteriorate, Duggan returned the following day with an offer of
extreme unction, only to be rebuffed again by the senator, who snapped that he
had “no time to discuss these things now.”6
The senator began to sink “rapidly” just before dawn on Monday, June 3.
Lying with his eyes partially closed, Douglas slowly muttered, “Death! Death!
Death!” Adele asked if he had any messages for their sons, who had yet to arrive
in Chicago. A politician even in the shades, Douglas replied, “Tell them to obey
the laws and support the Constitution of the United States.” For the next several
hours, he slept quietly and said nothing more. As morning broke, Adele leaned
across the bed and said, “Husband, do you know me? Will you kiss me?”
Douglas opened his eyes and smiled, and the muscles of his mouth twitched as if
in an attempt to comply. According to his doctors, Douglas gave one final
“quick, convulsive shudder.” They pronounced him dead “at ten minutes past
nine o’clock.” Douglas was forty-eight years old.7
Chicago plunged into “the deepest sorrow” at the news of Douglas’s death.
Although word had spread that the senator was gravely ill, city residents had
prayed that he would rally, and when his doctors emerged from the Tremont to
announce his passing, the several hundred people waiting at the hotel “bowed in
awe and sorrow.” Once-hostile reporters were equally stunned. As is often the
case, editors “forgot past differences and spoke only of his many virtues.” Yet
for once, such journalistic postmortems were more than polite embellishment.
Since Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration three months before, Douglas had ceased
to be the bitter partisan as he had labored to rally his party and the nation behind
the new Republican administration. The mayor of the city ordered that flags be
lowered to half-mast and public buildings be “draped in mourning.” The city’s
board of trade adjourned when its members heard the news, and most banks
closed their doors as well. The Masonic fraternity quickly organized a
procession to Bryan Hall, where “their departed member” was to lie in state for
the next two days.8
At the offices of the Magnetic Telegraph Company, R. J. Mernick tapped
the news along to President Lincoln and to the Capitol. A stunned Lincoln
instructed Secretary of State William Henry Seward to drape the White House
and the State Department in black crepe. The following day, Secretary of War
Simon Cameron—like Seward and Douglas, an unsuccessful contender for the
presidency just months before—ordered “the Colonels of the different
Regiments” to likewise drape their colors in mourning. Douglas was “a Senator
who forgot all prejudices in an earnest desire to serve the Republic,” Cameron
wrote, a man “whose last mission on earth was that of rallying the people of his
own State of Illinois” to the cause “of the Union.”9
Although Lincoln was well aware of Douglas’s injurious personal habits, he
was staggered by the news. Several years before, Lincoln had been asked when
he and Douglas had first met, and it had been such a distant memory that he had
only been able to guess at 1834. Lincoln had been twenty-five at the time, and
the younger Douglas but twenty-one. For nearly three decades the two attorneys
had been rivals, first in Illinois law and politics and then on the national stage.
But each had respected the other’s considerable talents, and even when locked in
bitter contests in 1858 and 1860, Lincoln and Douglas had rarely engaged in
personal barbs but had kept the focus on their ideological differences. Douglas
had often praised Lincoln during the final days of the 1860 campaign, and since
Inaugural Day the two had spent long hours discussing secession and the war. If
sometimes given to severe bouts of melancholia that were obvious to all, Lincoln
generally preferred to keep his inner thoughts private, and he said almost nothing
about the death of his longtime adversary. The fact that Lincoln put even fewer
words to paper about Douglas’s decease suggests the depth of the president’s
sorrow, as does the fact that he remained solicitous about Adele and the
senator’s children.10
This brief telegram, sent from Chicago and dated June 3, 1861, informed a stunned President
Abraham Lincoln of the death of his longtime rival and recent supporter. Courtesy Library of
Congress.
Adele Douglas wished her husband to be buried in Washington alongside
their previously deceased infant daughter. Governor Yates and Senator
Trumbull, however, urged her to reconsider in hope of preserving the symbolism
of Douglas’s last crusade. Concerned that the unionist sentiments of Illinois
Democrats might perish along with their leader, Yates cabled Adele that he and
Trumbull were “unwilling that one whose life has been closely identified with
the interests of the state should in death be separated from it.” Adele gave way
on this point, but not on another. Although the senator had never revealed any
interest in “any particular faith,” Adele was determined that he would be interred
a Catholic, and Bishop Duggan, twice rebuffed by the dying Douglas, was
invited to speak at the funeral. For once, the pugnacious Douglas did not have
the last word.11
The senator was not mourned everywhere. When told the news, black
abolitionist Frederick Douglass bluntly observed that “in the death of Stephen A.
Douglas, a most dangerous man has been removed. No man of his time has done
more to intensify hatred of the negro.” And if northern activists could not forgive
Douglas’s racist past, white southerners detested his staunch unionism. The
senator’s first wife, Martha Denny Martin of North Carolina, had brought to her