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of Springfield to reply to a speech made by Douglas in the South, he was almost petulant of temper from first to last. He had no heart in the business; his humor, when not strained, was at times coarse; and even Herndon, always an admirer, admitted that the effort was flat and unworthy of its author. Of his eulogy of Clay, while it was in no sense a great speech, more may be said. It was much more than a perfunctory memorial. He was still loyal to his hero, still under the charm of that "long-enduring spell" which had bound the souls of men not only to Henry Clay but to the cause of the Union; and this gave glow and color to his tribute. He upheld the position of Clay as against that of the Abolitionists on the one hand, and of those increasing in number on the other, who sought to perpetuate slavery, and were beginning to assail the "charter of freedom, the declaration that all men are created free and equal." No allusion was made to the Compromise of 1850, which he ap parently accepted regretfully as one accepts something less than the best. Clearly he had come to see that the slavery issue could no longer be compromised, but he still hoped that some plan of gradual emancipation and colonization might be devised. Yet what a fearful looking for, of judgment to come, was foreshadowed in his closing words!

Only a few men, said Edmund Burke, really see what is passing before their eyes, and Lincoln was one of them. By nature a watcher of the signs of the times, he did not read them amiss, but he was slow to admit, even to himself, the bitter truth as he saw it. The words of Calhoun in the Senate two years before still echoed in his ears; and what he feared more than all else was a clash between the radicals of the North and the hotspurs of the South, and a rush to arms. When John T. Stuart, his former partner, warned him that the time was coming when all men would have to be either Abolitionists or Democrats, he replied ruefully but emphatically: "When that time comes my mind is made up." But he hoped, almost against hope, that the time would not come, for he regarded the Abolition movement as an erratic crusade, led by moral idealists rather than by

practical men. None the less he brooded over the abyss, often gloomily, nor did he see any way out of the depths into which the nation seemed to be rushing.

Herndon voted the Whig ticket in 1852, swearing eloquently and picturesquely that he would never do so any more. Yet no doubt he would have voted it again, had the party lived to, put a ticket in the field; for with all his wild words, he had a certain dog-sagacity, as he confessed, which suspected his own enthusiasms, and made him rely upon the calm, slow, sure logic of his partner. At times he would try to prod Lincoln out of his tardy conservatism, descanting fervently on the needs of the hour, only to receive the reply: "Billy, you're too rampant and spontaneous." Their relations were free and easy without being familiar, and the attitude of Herndon was that of a younger brother toward one whom he loved, but whose greatness he felt and admired. At the same time Lincoln was becoming every day more serious, more solitary, more studious than ever before. Mr. Herndon writes:

I was in correspondence with Sumner, Greeley, Phillips, and Garrison, and was thoroughly imbued with all the rancor drawn from such sources. I adhered to Lincoln, relying on the final outcome of his sense of justice and right. Every time a good speech on the great issue was made I sent for it. Hence you could find on my table the latest utterances of Giddings, Phillips, Sumner, Seward, and one whom I considered grander than all of the others

Theodore Parker. Lincoln and I took such papers as the Chicago Tribune, New York Tribune, Anti-Slavery Standard, Emancipator, and National Era. On the other side of the question we took the Charleston Mercury, and the Richmond Enquirer. I also bought a book called "Sociology," written by one Fitzhugh, which defended and justified slavery in every conceivable way. In addition I purchased all the leading histories of the slavery movement, and other works which treated on that subject. Lincoln himself never bought many books, but he and I both read those I have named. After reading them we would discuss the questions they touched upon and the ideas they suggested, from our different points of view.'

1 Abraham Lincoln, by Herndon and Weik, Vol. II, p. 32.

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All that year and the next 1853-4 this study went on at odd hours, in the midst of a practice always busy, and rapidly becoming lucrative, until they knew the subject from both sides, through and through, from end to end. This fact should be kept in mind by those who seem to think that Lincoln was led by intuition rather than by brains, and that his speeches were made as if by magic. These country lawyers canvassed the slavery question in all its phases, and when they had finished no conceivable aspect of it had escaped them. One arrived at truth by swift flashes of insight, the other by a slow and labored process; but when they arrived they stood together, and nothing could move them. During this time Herndon served as mayor of Springfield to the credit of himself and his city, while his partner was as indifferent to local affairs as he was to the beauty of trees and flowers.

CHAPTER III

"The Genius of Discord"

I

History had dealt severely with Stephen A. Douglas for the part he played in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, in 1854. Of that Compact he had said, some years before, that it was "canonized in the hearts of the American people as a sacred thing which no ruthless hand would ever be reckless enough to disturb." Yet he it was who made that Compact null and void, opening Pandora's box and letting loose again the furies of sectional discord which all hoped had been laid and locked up. Whatever may have been his motives-and they are as muddy today as they were then-he precipitated a revolution, and became the avant courier of Civil War.

While it is true that Senator Douglas did not originate the Repeal, yet as the leader of his party he not only accepted the fatal amendment,' but boasted of it as his work and the master feat of his career. Drawn further than perhaps he had intended to go, he was forced to follow if he was to retain his leadership, much less his hope of the Presidency. So astute and sagacious a politician could not have been unaware of the temper of the country and the peril of his course. He, himself, had prophesied it in 1850. Yet so obsessed was he by his ambition that he was deaf to the voices of protest heard while the Bill was brewing in Congress, and plunged into a policy of madness which, as some of his best friends warned him, sealed his political doom. Adroitly and persuasively he 1 Strangely enough, the amendment to repeal the Missouri Compromise was introduced by Senator Archibald Dixon, of Kentucky, a Whig who had been appointed to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Henry Clay. - The True History of the Missouri Compromise and its Repeal, by Mrs. A. Dixon (1899). It was the irony of fate that the work of Clay should be undone by his successor.

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tried to justify himself by appeal to his elastic dogma of popular sovereignty," which had apparently taken such hold of him as to obscure his mind, otherwise clear. That dogma would have meant, in its ultimate logic, that there could be no slavery without the consent of the slaves; but it became in his hands only another form of that referendum whereby politicians seek to evade issues and shift responsibility. When tested on the prairies of Kansas it proved to be "squatter sovereignty," enacting a wearisome story of rump legislatures, fraudulent constitutions, and outrages at the polls, from which Douglas himself revolted. Whatever may have been the motives of Douglas, the Repeal was an act of political suicide for himself and a tragedy for the nation.

It has often been noted, as an instance of how great things hang upon small things, that it was a sleepy old game of whist that led to the repeal of the Compact of 1820. The KansasNebraska Bill was framed, so runs the story, to make a Territory immediately west of Missouri, which David R. Atchison was to go and organize and bring in as a State; so returning to the seat in the Senate he had lost, and back to the sleepy old game of whist whose players loved and missed him. The country itself, resting in the belief that slavery was in course of ultimate extinction, was more than half asleep. But when the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was introduced 2 there was a rude

1 Concerning the acrobatics of Douglas much has been written, and many have been the theories as to his motives. Perhaps the best discussion of the whole subject, from all sides, is The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise: Its Origin and Authorship, by P. Orman Ray (1909). There all the circumstances are recalled without heat or passion, and if the question of motive is not settled it is because it must remain a puzzle. See Stephen A. Douglas, by Allen Johnson, Chap. XI (1908). Some of the motives attributed to Senator Douglas by polemical writers are incredible; he was unwise, but he was neither stupid nor vicious.

2 Of the seventy Democrats in the Illinois Legislature, then in session, only three were in favor of the Bill. Two days later orders came from Douglas that resolutions be passed endorsing it, and so complete was the "flop " that only three Senators stood out against it. Those three were John M. Palmer, Norman Judd, and B. C. Cook, nor could they be whipped into line. See History of the Republican Party, by F. A. Flower (1884).

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