A hell of a storm, p.6
A Hell of a Storm, page 6
Others questioned the provincial capital’s uneven pretensions to a clean-columned eminence. A visiting Charles Dickens, one of the century’s more seasoned social critics, sniffed at the ambitious District’s unmet prospects with a stinging skepticism: “Spacious avenues, that begin in nothing and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete; and ornaments of great thoroughfares which only lack great thoroughfares to ornament—are its leading features.” The British writer Harriet Martineau, typically dry and direct in her measurements, barely more charitably described Washington as a rare mélange of “flippant young belles, ‘pious’ wives… grave judges, saucy travelers, pert news-paper reporters, melancholy Indian chiefs, and timid New England ladies, trembling on the verge of the vortex; all these are mixed up together in daily intercourse like the higher circle of a little village.” She found this intensely fluid society “singularly compounded.”4
In contrast to these distinguished English observers, Douglas delighted in the capital’s minor-key cosmopolitanism, even as its budding urbanity drew attention to his green inelegancies. He enjoyed cigars and whiskey, dressed carelessly, and, until he became a more practiced pol, liked to chew (and spew) tobacco. Short, stocky, and lacking in any evident physical grace, he attracted attention with an unusually large head, a thick chest, and palpably stubby legs (some thought the clumsy combination evoked the slapstick strut of a bantam cock). Pocket-sized in appearance but a growing figure in Congress, he soon earned the inevitable sobriquet “the Little Giant.” Accounts differ on whether he had blue or gray eyes, though all seemed to agree on his terrific energy and commanding presence. Perhaps to compensate for a lack of stature, Douglas issued a determined enthusiasm that sometimes, in certain familiar company, verged on rowdiness. “His figure would be an unfortunate one,” wrote one woman, “were it not for the animation which constantly pervades it.”5
In the spring of 1847 Douglas married Martha Martin, a native North Carolinian described as “small, hazel-eyed, with fair and graceful features.” Compromised by delicate health, she struck some observers as “frail.” Offspring of a distinguished political family whose auxiliaries occupied over the years various House and Senate seats, Martha, a dozen years younger than her husband, met Douglas while on a trip to Washington. They wed at her Dan River plantation home thirty miles north of Greensboro. The following year Douglas’s father-in-law, Colonel Robert Martin, died and left a twenty-five-hundred-acre Pearl River (Mississippi) plantation and its more than one hundred enslaved people to Martha. His will further directed Douglas to manage the estate and to receive for his efforts 20 percent of its annual profits. In January 1853 Martha died soon after giving birth to the couple’s third child; the infant, their only daughter, perished a month later. Moving beyond what a biographer described as “deep despair,” Douglas remarried in 1856, taking the tall, chestnut-haired twenty-year-old Adèle Cutts, a Chesapeake beauty from a prominent Maryland family and a great-grandniece of Dolley Madison, as his second wife. Said to enter Washington society “with the air of a queen, with perfect features as if carved in marble, white and smooth as marble, too, with clear liquid eyes and shadowy lashes,” Cutts proved to be a rather conspicuous point of spousal pride.6
Though the Yankee-born Douglas had married into southern situations, he thought both his political career and the nation’s future lay in the West. At one time a limited-government Jacksonian Democrat presumably suspicious of federally sponsored tariffs, banks, and internal improvements, he softened his stance as Jacksonianism receded into the background, and actively promoted railroad development across the advancing borderland. His efforts helped to secure federal grants to build both the Illinois Central and Northern Cross railroads—these serving, so he hoped, as the apprentice pieces to more elaborate paths to the Pacific. An aggressive expansionist, Douglas anticipated a steady Anglo diaspora colonizing the continent. He wanted Texas brought into the Union, the Oregon Territory occupied, and Cuba made an American appendage. He grew particularly infatuated with Nebraska, a colossal enclave extending beyond the western borders of Iowa and Missouri that might serve—when sufficiently peppered with military posts, surveyors, and emigrants—as an artery to the coast. Former president John Quincy Adams, now serving in Congress, informed his diary in December 1844 of the first stirrings on this front: “At the House, Douglas, of Illinois, gave notice that he would, at an early day, move for leave to introduce a bill to establish a new Territory with a strange name.”7
But what of slavery? The sectional implications of expansion were clear and vigorously debated in the 1840s. Their dangerous repercussions seemed, however, to have little impact on Douglas. He coolly presumed that an uncongenial “desert” climate prevented the peculiar institution’s extension in the northern territories, though he seemed indifferent to its sweep across the southwest. He actively supported, moreover, the Gag Rule, denounced antislavery activism—“I have no sympathy for abolitionism,” he asserted in 1848—and admonished Britain for its emancipation of its Caribbean empire through the Slavery Abolition Act (1833), denouncing it as an effort to stir up discontent in America “and thus render the Union itself insecure.” Embracing the widely held view of racial inferiority, Douglas further objected in a very public and proselytizing fashion to allowing freed blacks to enter free states: “We do not believe in the equality of the negro, socially or politically, with the white man. We mean to preserve the race pure, without any mixture with the negro.”8 Hardly an outlier, Douglas politicked in line with majority race sentiment in Illinois at this time.
His views took on added import in the late 1840s when, following the Mexican cession, governments needed to be established in these newly acquired territories. Along with numerous northern Democrats, Douglas lazily latched on to the convenient principle of popular sovereignty. Advanced by the saggy-jowled, baggy-eyed, and red-tinted-toupeed Michigan senator Lewis Cass, the concept called for the people of a territory—not the federal government—to determine slavery’s legality in the public lands. It meant, broadly defined, local self-government, and thus struck a resonant chord with many, though by no means all, Americans. Some pointed out that the Constitution gave to Congress, not the people, the power to regulate the territories, while others more generally resisted the idea of potentially opening the West to bondage, which they invariably saw as a threat to free labor. Voter reaction, in any case, was mixed and Cass, the pro–popular sovereignty candidate, narrowly lost the 1848 presidential election to the Whig candidate and war hero Zachary Taylor; both men carried fifteen states. In Douglas’s hands, however, the principle, as noted earlier, was adroitly employed in the new territories as part of the sweeping Compromise of 1850.
Having solidified his reputation with this spotlight success, Douglas actively sought to protect popular sovereignty. In 1851 Shadrach Minkins, an enslaved Virginia man, was arrested in Boston under the Fugitive Slave Act; the city’s Vigilance Committee used force to rescue Minkins from federal marshals and then helped secure his passage to Canada. A sympathetic Boston jury acquitted two men prosecuted for aiding in the escape. Holding court in the Senate, Douglas branded several of his northern colleagues “conspirators” for creating a climate conducive, so he put it, to “evad[ing] the obligations of the Constitution.” Glaring angrily and a little theatrically upon four graduated rows of semicircular-seated senators, he arraigned those otherwise unidentified “white men now within the range of my sight responsible for the violation of the law at Boston. It was done under their advice, under their teaching, under their sanction, under the influence of their speeches.”9
In more reflective moments, Douglas realized that popular sovereignty might now be conveniently applied to those territories still governed under the Compromise of 1820. Certainly, some form of organization needed to be initiated. Several communities in the western parts of Iowa and Missouri were currently pressuring Congress to open the grassy lands just beyond their borders. In 1853 “sooner” groups of settlers and native peoples moved peremptorily into this region and, in July of that year, attempted, without sanction from Washington, to establish a provisional government.10 As of yet no firm consensus had emerged on how to respond to such sub rosa sodbusters. Douglas’s Democratic Party remained divided, largely along sectional lines, on popular sovereignty, though it was now obvious that congressional action could scarcely be delayed much longer. In December Douglas won reappointment as chairman of the Committee on Territories. That same month he received a communication from citizens of Buchanan County, Missouri, all but demanding Nebraska’s immediate organization. In a more or less official capacity, he called for them to rally around the principles unveiled in the Compromise of 1850:
The slavery agitation which followed the acquisition of California and New Mexico… had an injurious effect by diverting public attention from the importance of our old territory [the Louisiana Purchase] and concentrating the hopes and anxieties of all upon our new possessions [the Mexican cession]…. It is hoped that the necessity and importance of the [popular sovereignty] measure are manifest to the whole country, and that so far as the slavery question is concerned, all will be willing to sanction and affirm the principle established by the Compromise measures of 1850.11
The extent to which Douglas actually believed “the slavery question” under control is a matter of conjecture, though by squeezing the Compromise through Congress he perhaps added a little incautious courage to an already ample ego.
Having won reelection to the Senate in 1852 at the age of thirty-nine and considered by many speculating politicos to be a president-in-waiting, Douglas seemed destined for greatness. By now a practiced hand in the capital city’s more polished salons, he reached casually for brandy and cognac or even champagne rather than his old spicy rye whiskey with its signature sting; private dinners were served in his quarters on fine French porcelain plates paired with floral damask linen napkins, after which good Havana cigars made the rounds. One might catch about the District a glimpse of the senator draped in flattering “silk and striped Valencia vests and doeskin pants,” greeting visitors from Illinois in a “knightly” fashion, so a guest attested, “as if he had been born in the best society.”12 At the peak of his powers, Douglas now moved to organize Nebraska.
He hoped, of course, to stir up as little resistance as possible, even as he endeavored to bring the principle of popular sovereignty to territory currently closed to slavery. Without managing to overturn this taboo, he knew the Senate’s imposing line of southern leadership would never go along. Douglas personally believed slavery incompatible with the comparatively arid northern latitude and thought a quiet replacement of “the principle of 1820” (exclusion) with “the principle of 1850” (popular sovereignty) offered the South a merely rhetorical concession that would not lead to the actual removal of enslaved men and women to Nebraska. Accordingly, and on behalf of the territorial committee, he introduced his bill to the Senate on January 4. In calling for Nebraska’s settlers to determine the fate of race in the region, it implicitly overturned the 1820 prohibition. Pleased with his work, though underestimating its potential to shatter the unstable sectional peace patched together in 1850, Douglas proudly said of the bill, “It was written by myself, at my own house, with no man present.”13
One imagines a lone figure, possibly fortified with liberal quantities of tobacco and alcohol, hunched over a candlelit desk, crafting a great state paper—that quickly succumbed to the unexpected pressure of southern disapproval. The bill, this cotton bloc noted, did not explicitly overturn the act of 1820 but rather permitted Nebraska’s colonizers, should they wish, to draft a proslavery constitution when they applied for statehood. But if slavery were not permitted in Nebraska at the earlier territorial stage, these critics pointed out, then the territory would be de facto filled with free labor. The still-extant Compromise of 1820, after all, excluded slavery in the pre-statehood phase, and the planters now demanded its repeal.
Accordingly, Kentucky’s silver-haired Whig senator Archibald Dixon, appointed in December 1852 to serve the remainder of the recently deceased Clay’s term, offered an amendment to Douglas’s bill on Monday, January 16, rescinding that part of the 1820 act prohibiting slavery. The Missouri Compromise, it read, “shall not be so construed as to apply to the Territory… of the United States; but that the citizens of the several States or Territories shall be at liberty to take and hold their slaves within any of the Territories of the United States, or of the States to be formed therefrom, as if the [Missouri] act… had never been passed.” That evening, elated southern partisans, Dixon’s wife, Susan, remembered, crowded “our parlor… expressing a delighted surprise.” Two days later, in an effort to bridge their differences, Douglas and Dixon took an afternoon carriage ride around the capital, the latter elucidating at length on the need for an amendment that overturned the old Compromise. After some obligatory to-ing and fro-ing, Douglas impetuously, perhaps too hastily—though recognizing all hinged on southern sanction—agreed: “By God, sir, you are right, and I will incorporate it in my bill.”14 Seeing popular sovereignty as a tool to open the West short of, so he believed, literally enlarging slavery’s sphere, Douglas presumed his political skills sharp enough to appease both sections, to excise a divisive subject from public debate, and finally to embellish his already considerable reputation. But he overreached.
Over the next few days Douglas’s territorial committee introduced two significant changes to the original bill. First, it unambiguously repealed the Missouri Compromise, after which it split the territory in two—calling for the organization of Nebraska and, to its south, of Kansas. This last measure probably had to do with the machinations of railroad development. Proponents of both an “upper” (Nebraska) and a “lower” (Kansas) road might now jointly support legislation to open these territories as their respective routes ostensibly stood equal chance of being selected. But the visible division of the region into northern and southern sections gave to many Americans the unshakable assumption that slavery was to be banned in Nebraska and permitted in Kansas.
Moving forward, Douglas requested the Senate take up the revised bill on the twenty-third, just five days, that is, after he had agreed to Dixon’s alterations. He worried, however, about President Franklin Pierce’s reaction to the proposed repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which many Americans regarded as a sacred pact. He need not have. Though a Yankee born and raised in New Hampshire, Pierce had the reputation of being a “doughface,” a northern man with southern principles. The insult seems to have first appeared in politics during the Missouri debates when the soprano-voiced Virginia representative John Randolph, whose erratic behavior perhaps owed something to opium and alcohol addictions, expressed his distaste for those northerners who voted with the South. “They were scared at their own dough faces!” he crowed. “We had them, and if we wanted three more, we could have had them: yes, and if these had failed, we could have three more of these men, whose conscience, and morality, and religion, extend to ‘thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes north latitude’ ”—this mocking geographical reference denoting the southern boundary of Missouri, which, apropos the 1820 Compromise, divided prospective free and slave states west of the Mississippi.15 For a generation now, Democrats above the Mason-Dixon Line hoping to carry presidential contests had to appease their party’s minority southern wing. In deferring at times to this truism, the persuasible Pierce—as well as New York’s Martin Van Buren before him and Pennsylvania’s James Buchanan after—was occasionally accused of giving too much to the South.
A heavy drinker, Pierce possessed a classic Roman nose, thin lips, and gray eyes; his conventionally good looks exuded, so some said, that ineffable quality of “presidential.” While a student at Bowdoin College, he forged an enduring friendship with the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, who later wrote a slender and slightly ludicrous campaign biography of his classmate—“His speeches, in their muscular texture… resembled the brief but pregnant arguments and expositions of the sages of the Continental Congress”—for which the author of The Scarlet Letter was appointed to the U.S. consulate in Liverpool: a couple of unpleasant rooms in a dreary building near the city’s old docks, though a sinecure for all that.16 Pierce suffered from depression and self-doubt; he had made his way politically through the increasingly uncertain (given the tumultuous times) arts of conciliation and accommodation, yet even an obliging president could not oblige all.
Before Douglas managed to arrange an audience with Pierce, Lewis Cass had already stolen a march on his Senate colleague, complaining to the president that Dixon’s amendment threatened party unity in the North. Secretary of State William Marcy of New York concurred and urged the president to reject efforts to repeal the venerable Compromise. On Sunday the twenty-second, the day before the Senate took up the Kansas-Nebraska bill, Douglas desperately sought an audience with Pierce, though he knew him “rigidly opposed” to conducting business on Sundays.17 In some haste he went to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who, he knew, supported the measure, and asked if he could persuade Pierce to see that very day a small group of congressmen. Davis, close to the Pierce family, did so. The president agreed and Douglas, accompanied by Davis, arrived at the White House with Senators David Rice Atchison of Missouri and Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia, along with Representatives John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky and Philip Phillips of Alabama. Two of these men would later serve in Davis’s Confederate cabinet.
Pierce received this small party in the mansion’s second-floor library where, surrounded by southerners including Davis, the only member of his official family present, he soon capitulated. Putting a high-minded spin on this impromptu Sabbath gathering, conspicuous for its absence of Yankee naysayers, Davis later wrote in a memoir that Pierce, having “patiently listened to the reading of the bill and [to his guests’] explanations of it, decided that it rested on sound constitutional principles, and recognized in it only a return to that rule which had been infringed by the compromise of 1820, and the restoration of which had been foreshadowed by the [popular sovereignty] legislation of 1850.” Reviewing the episode with more detachment, one recent Pierce biographer concluded that a “great pressure” had been applied to the pliable-as-dough president.18
