Almost President (10 page)

Lincoln spent his adult years measuring himself against Douglas and, at least until he won the presidency, found himself lacking. Shortly after returning to politics in 1856, Lincoln wrote:

Twenty-two years ago, Judge Douglas and I became acquainted. We were both young then; he a trifle younger than I. Even then we were both ambitious; I perhaps quite as much as he. With me the race of ambition has been—a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the nation, and is not unknown even in foreign lands. I would rather stand on that eminence than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch's brow.

Lincoln, of course, would far exceed that eminence by becoming what most consider our greatest president. Douglas, meanwhile, is forever linked to and overshadowed by Lincoln. Worse for Douglas, with Lincoln being America's foremost secular saint, popular perception has been that his great opponent, Douglas, must have been a great sinner. Yet, as Douglas repeatedly pointed out in their famed 1858 Senate debates, he and Lincoln held many similar political views—so similar that, to Lincoln's great chagrin, several prominent Republicans tried to recruit Douglas to become a Republican and the party nominee in 1860. But in the monumental disagreement between Lincoln and Douglas—the morality of slavery—there was a chasm between them as great as their disparity in height.

The names “Lincoln and Douglas” are as comfortably paired in the popular imagination as Abbott and Costello or Laurel and Hardy, and standing side-by-side, as they so often did, they must have appeared a perfectly mismatched vaudevillian duo. Lincoln was six-feet-four-inches tall, thin, gaunt, and homely, with a reedy tenor voice that spoke in a soft Kentucky drawl. Douglas was a full foot shorter at five-feet-four-inches tall with legs so short that Senator Thomas Hart Benton complained, “That part of his body, sir, which men wish to kick, is too near the ground.” But above these stumpy legs was a pair of broad shoulders topped by a massive head with a pompadour of thick, brown hair that gave Douglas a leonine appearance. He also had a deep, melodious bass voice that loved to roar.

Where Lincoln favored reason in his speeches, Douglas believed emotion carried the day and he could work himself into a fit when aroused, which was often. John Quincy Adams, who served with Douglas in the House of Representatives, gave a memorable description of the young Illinoisan's debating technique: “His face was convulsed, his gesticulation frantic, and he lashed himself into such a heat that if his body had been made of combustible matter, it would have burned out. In the midst of his roaring, to save himself from choking, he stripped off and cast away his cravat, and unbuttoned his waist coat, and had the air and aspect of a half-naked pugilist.”

Douglas's fury, sincere or feigned, was perhaps one means by which he overcompensated for his small stature. As Lincoln no doubt found that droll humor helped put people at ease when his height might have otherwise been intimidating, Douglas conversely compensated for his short stature and boyish looks with a forceful and vivacious personality that made him appear larger than he was. He also self-consciously adopted the vices of a “man's man.”

Douglas drank to excess (and may have died from cirrhosis of the liver), greatly enjoyed the company of women, and was always seen with a Cuban cigar clenched between his teeth. Despite his size, he would brawl when necessary, once nearly biting off a man's thumb to release the man's grip on his throat. Douglas worked hard to ensure his constituents thought of him as one of them, boasting, “I . . . eat with my constituents, drink with them, lodge with them, pray with them, laugh, hunt, dance, and work with them; I eat their corn dodgers and fried bacon and sleep two in bed with them.”

Lincoln had no need to pretend to be one of the common folk, for he had been born to a poor farmer on the Kentucky frontier in 1809. Douglas, however, was born April 23, 1813, into a prosperous family in Brandon, Vermont, his ancestors tracing their New England lineage to 1640. Douglas's father was a physician who died when Douglas was only two months old. The death of his father postponed his formal schooling for a while, but Douglas eventually was able to study English, mathematics, and classical languages at a local college preparatory academy.

While he had been briefly apprenticed to a cabinet-maker, Douglas concluded early in life, as did Lincoln, that he was not made for manual labor. Like Lincoln, Douglas decided to pursue the practice of law, which is why he moved west to Illinois where all that was needed to pass the bar was a simple oral examination by a judge and a character reference. Asked by his mother when she would see him again as he departed for Illinois at age twenty-one, Douglas supposedly replied, “On my way to Congress.”

Though not as brilliant at law as Lincoln, Douglas gained the reputation of being “the best lawyer for a bad case” in all of Illinois, usually by misrepresenting opposing counsel's position and twisting the logic of his opponent's case. It was a trait he brought to politics, which led Lincoln to once exclaim that while Douglas seldom told an outright lie, “I think he cares as little for the truth . . . as any man I ever saw.”

Despite Lincoln's feeling of inferiority in comparison to Douglas's achievements, Douglas thought highly of Lincoln. When Lincoln became the Republican presidential nominee in 1860, Douglas surprised his Democratic colleagues with his praise, saying Lincoln was the toughest debater he had ever faced and the strongest nomination the Republicans could have made. This echoed what he said of Lincoln during their 1858 Senate contest: “He is the strong man of his party, full of wit, facts, dates—and the best stump speaker, with his droll ways and dry jokes, in the West. He is as honest as he is shrewd, and if I beat him, my victory will be hardly won.”

Lincoln, who had a petty streak, seldom reciprocated this praise. He sarcastically referred to Douglas's reputation as a “great” man—although Lincoln thought enough of Douglas's influence to ask his help in getting his son, Robert, admitted to Harvard, which Douglas did. Despite this kindness and Douglas's admiration, Lincoln indulged in insults based on Douglas's diminutive stature. He called Douglas “the least man I ever saw,” and on another occasion suggested to his fellow Whigs that the best method of handling Douglas was to never mention his name, since this was “the best mode of treating so small a matter.”

The jibes were brought on by competing ambitions. Lincoln's ambition was memorably described as “the little engine that knew no rest”; Douglas was similarly labeled a “steam engine in breeches.” Nor was their rivalry exclusively political. Douglas briefly courted Mary Todd, and many thought the little dynamo was a better match for the vivacious Mary than her future husband, who was prone to melancholia. But Mary had vowed to marry a president, and her intuition served her well—though until 1860 it seemed she had made the wrong choice.

Douglas lost his first race for Congress by thirty-five votes out of thirty-six thousand cast. But he was rewarded for his service to the Democratic Party by his appointment to the Illinois Supreme Court, which is why Lincoln always referred to him as “Judge Douglas.” By 1844, Douglas was elected to Congress, and in 1846 to the Senate.

Douglas earned national renown when, as chair of the Senate Committee on Territories, he provided critical assistance to Henry Clay in passing the Compromise of 1850. This success, short-lived as it proved to be, made him a serious candidate for the 1852 Democratic nomination for president, even though he was but thirty-nine years old. The Democrats eventually turned to dark horse Franklin Pierce, but Douglas was not disappointed. He thought his better chance for the nomination would come in 1856. In the meantime, he could achieve his long-standing goal of organizing the Nebraska Territory.

As the leader of a group of congressmen known as the “Young Americans,” Douglas advocated national expansion and settlement. He believed that America's future was in the West, and the West needed homesteaders and railroads to bring them there. It was his support of a transcontinental railroad that led Douglas to push legislation to organize the Nebraska Territory, which included the present-day states of Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. Territorial organization would encourage lawful settlement and create the legal and regulatory system that would guide railway construction across the country. “No man can keep up with the spirit of this age who travels on anything slower than the locomotive, and fails to receive intelligence by lightning,” Douglas said. “We must therefore have Rail Roads and Telegraphs from the Atlantic to the Pacific, through our own territory.”

Because he had been born in New England, lived in the West, and ended up marrying two different Southern women (his first wife died in childbirth), Douglas fancied that he possessed a unique national perspective. He therefore advocated multiple transcontinental rail routes, including a Southern one. He especially favored two routes that not only were good public policy, but also promised to be personally profitable. Douglas, a great early booster of Chicago, had large real estate holdings in that city and strongly supported a central route from that emerging Midwest metropolis to San Francisco. Douglas also purchased large amounts of real estate near Duluth, Minnesota, where he expected the eastern terminus of a Northern rail route would be located.

Unfortunately for Douglas, others did not share his national vision (or own as much real estate). Southern legislators continued to block organization of the Nebraska Territory in part to give the proposed Southern transcontinental route that would originate in New Orleans a head start over the competing Central and Northern routes. Railroads were supposed to unite the country, East and West, but instead created division between North and South. If Douglas wanted to organize the territory and move forward on a transcontinental railroad, he would need to find some means to win over Southern support.

Douglas had already tried several possible compromises regarding slavery in the territories, but North and South were becoming increasingly radicalized on the issue. Southern writers no longer simply defended slavery as a necessary evil; Southern radicals now advocated slavery as a positive good and the basis of a better society than that supposedly suffered by the “wage slaves” of the North. Feeling besieged and isolated, the Southern elite wanted more and more guarantees of their minority rights as slaveholders, including the guarantee to take their slaves into any new territory—and perhaps any state.

Northerners, meanwhile, chafed at the South's demands for new concessions, and the initially small abolition movement had grown, fueled in part by the publication in 1851 of
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
Harriet Beecher Stowe's relatively sanitized but spectacularly best-selling depiction of the horrors of slavery. Where compromise had been possible in 1850, Douglas found conciliation less appreciated in a time of much greater political polarization.

Douglas believed he could circumvent this impasse by taking the slavery debate out of Congress, where the issue was paralyzing action on a host of issues important to the nation's development, and giving it to the people to decide. This was the doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” which simply meant that the residents of each territory would vote and determine for themselves whether the territory should be free or slave. Douglas had not originated the concept (it had been first advocated by Lewis Cass in his 1848 presidential campaign), but Douglas became its most passionate exponent and he had the hubris to think it would solve the slavery question once and for all.

As Douglas saw it, popular sovereignty not only rested on the bedrock American principle of democratic self-rule, but it also met each region's needs. He thought it would appeal to what was then called the West (what we would now call the Midwest) because most of the emigrants to the Nebraska Territory would come from that region and desire as much local autonomy as possible. Douglas thought (incorrectly) that popular sovereignty met the South's needs because it treated those favoring slavery as moral equals with the same rights as those who opposed it and because it removed the issue from Congress, where the South's political power was diminishing in relation to free states. Finally, the North should see wisdom in popular sovereignty because it was a practical means of limiting slavery expansion. It was clear to Douglas that the arid lands of the West would not be conducive to growing cotton or the other agricultural staples that were grown and harvested by slaves. So, while the “theoretical right” to extend slavery into the territories would exist, in practice most of the territories would most certainly be free.

When he introduced it in January 1854, Douglas predicted his legislation, which essentially repealed both the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, would “raise a hell of a storm,” but he still underestimated the fury it caused. Ignoring his arguments that slavery would be impractical in the West, Northerners believed Douglas had now opened territories previously expected to be free to the possibility of slavery. So numerous were the protests against the measure in the North that Douglas lamented, “I could travel from Boston to Chicago by the light of my own effigy.”

The South provided tepid support initially, with a few applauding Douglas for removing “an unjust and odious discrimination against her domestic institutions,” but the South soon understood that popular sovereignty would not truly protect the right to own slaves in the territories. The more rapidly increasing population of the North would provide more emigrants to the territories than the South, and they would vote to make the territories free and those territories would later become free states. The slave states would soon be an overwhelmed minority, inviting congressional action to eliminate slavery even in the Southern states. So while many in the North believed Douglas was a pawn of the “slave power,” many Southerners concluded that he was a closet abolitionist.