In the controversy into which the country was now plunged by the new turn of the Kansas struggle, the storm no longer raged in that territory, for the ascendency of the Free State party was seen to be assured; nor did it convulse the country at large, for a sense of fatigue and disgust over the whole Kansas affair made itself felt, and the financial depression served to distract public attention. The vital matter was now the complicated and exceedingly bitter party situation resulting from Buchanan's attempt to force the admission of Kansas under the Lecompton constitution, the dramatic bolt of Douglas, and the consequent likelihood of the disruption of the Democratic party.
The contest began in Congress with an attempt to punish Douglas for his desertion at this crisis, when victory seemed in the grasp of the south, by breaking him down altogether. The Lecompton debate in the Senate took the form of a savage attack upon Douglas and three other Democratic senators who stood with him — Stuart, of Michigan, Pugh of Ohio, and Broderick, of California. At the same time an official proscription which surprised even the hardened spoilsmen of that day was carried through, every adherent of Douglas being mercilessly turned out of the public service, while congressmen were given to understand that a vote against the Lecompton bill meant political death.
Under this heavy fire, the conduct of Douglas was admirable. Carefully refraining from assailing either the president or any of his defenders, he confined himself to justifying his right to an independent opinion and delivering a series of crushing attacks upon the Lecompton constitution, as a violation not only of "popular sovereignty" but of common fairness and equity. The Republicans, for obvious reasons, gladly allowed him to take the brunt of the conflict. On the other side the arguments did little more than repeat those of Buchanan's messages, but underneath all that the southern senators said ran the assumption that Kansas was by right theirs and ought to be a slave state; and that a refusal to admit it under the Lecompton constitution was sufficient ground for secession.
Feeling ran extremely high in Congress during the contest, especially between the administration Democrats and those who followed Douglas, and the session of the House in which the bill was introduced broke up in a series of fist-fights between northern and southern members. The struggle was not long, however. On March 23 the Senate voted to admit Kansas under the Lecompton constitution, by 33 to 25, two southern Americans — Bell, of Tennessee, and Crittenden, of Kentucky — voting in the minority with the Republicans and the four bolting Democrats. In the House, however, on April 1, no less than 22 Democrats joined with 6 Americans and 92 Republicans to carry an amendment providing for a resubmission of the constitution; the administration retaining 104 Democrats and 8 of the Americans. In accepting this amendment, the Republicans abandoned their earlier principle of unqualified opposition to slavery, and accepted the ground which they rejected in the discussion of the Toombs bill of 1856; but the practical certainty that the constitution would be rejected, coupled with the unsettling effect of the Dred Scott decision, made them willing to use the opportunity even at the risk of a violation of consistency.
The administration could not afford to let this amendment kill the bill, for a settlement of the Kansas question had become an absolute political necessity. Accordingly, in the conference committee, W. H. English, of Indiana, offered a compromise by which the resubmission was granted, but on the condition that if Kansas rejected the Lecompton constitution it was to lose part of the public land it desired, and was not to be admitted as a state until its population equaled the ratio necessary for a representative in Congress. This proposition bore marks of the same kind of statesmanship as that which framed the Lecompton constitution itself, joining as it did a penalty and a bribe to induce the voters of Kansas to accept the objectionable document. Yet the fact that it yielded the main point induced nine of the anti-Lecompton Democrats in the House to change front, and thereby the compromise was accepted, by a vote of 120 to 112. In the Senate Douglas fought the English bill to the end, but it passed easily on April 30.
The final decision was now remitted to the voters of Kansas; their response was made on August 2, when the vote stood, for accepting the constitution, 1926; for rejecting it, 11,812. The Free State majority preferred to remain in the territorial status rather than to enter the Union under a pro-slavery constitution. With this decision, the Kansas difficulty came to an end. Legally, according to the Dred Scott doctrine, slavery might exist in Kansas, but practically it was excluded, through the control of the territory by northern men.
The Kansas question had been settled by Buchanan, at last, although in a manner which brought him neither glory in the south nor popularity in the north, but the party problem created by it remained to be solved. Was Douglas to be pardoned and restored to good standing in the Democratic ranks, or would the administration and its southern counselors persist in the effort to ruin the man who had been their strongest northern ally? The answer to this question in the summer of 1858 was unmistakable. From the southern leaders and newspapers and from the administration organs in the north came an uninterrupted chorus of condemnation of the traitor. "We shall treat Judge Douglas," said a Tennessee newspaper, "just as we should treat any other Democrat who, in an emergency, abandoned his principles and made common cause with the enemy." When Douglas was renominated to succeed himself as senator from Illinois, the south repudiated the action of the Illinois Democrats, and, with the exception of Wise, of Virginia, and the Richmond Enquirer, expressed a desire for his defeat; and the federal office-holders in the state, with the support of the administration, organized separate anti-Douglas nominations for state and legislative offices in order to divide the Democratic vote.
It now became a question in the minds of many Republican leaders, notably Greeley, of the New York Tribune, and Senator Wilson, of Massachusetts, whether their party ought not to seek to enlist Douglas as a new recruit in order to use his great powers in behalf of their cause. Accordingly, they urged that the Illinois Republicans should not contest his return to the Senate, thinking that he would be more troublesome to the Democrats than any Republican who could be elected; but the western Republicans saw insurmountable obstacles. " What we have seen, heard, and felt of him," said Chase, "will make it impossible for us to trust him until after a very sufficient probation, . . . which he has not the slightest intention of undergoing. In fact, he neither expects nor wishes more from us than a suspension of hostilities until his reelection is made secure." "The fact is," said the Chicago Tribune, "Mr. Douglas has recanted none of his political heresies. . . . The exigencies by which he was surrounded brought him into conflict with the administration upon a simple question of fact as to whether the Lecompton constitution had been sufficiently submitted to the people; upon matters of principle his views are substantially those of Mr. Buchanan... It is asking too much of the freemen of Illinois... to support a man for Senator who, if not avowedly a champion of slavery extension, gives all his influence to it." The nomination by the Illinois Republicans in state convention on June 16, 1858, of Abraham Lincoln as their party candidate for senator ended the hopes of any coalition.
In the congressional and state elections of 1858, the people of the country passed their verdict upon the administration of Buchanan. In the south the Democrats found the opposition party still in the field — once Whig, later American, and now nameless — but had no difficulty in preserving their ascendency. In the north, however, the Republicans made a vigorous campaign on the issue of rebuking the administration for the "Lecompton swindle," and were aided in a decisive way by the commercial depression following the panic of 1857. In the state of Pennsylvania, which had remained unswervingly Democratic through the Kansas excitement, the prostration of the iron industry caused a sharp revival of protectionist feelings and a desire to rebuke the Democratic administration. Fired by these sentiments, the Republicans and Americans, joined by a group of anti-Lecompton Democrats led by J. W. Forney, met in a People's convention at Harrisburg on July 14, and nominated candidates for state judge and canal commissioner on a platform that denounced the Lecompton iniquity and demanded "adequate protection for American industry."
Public interest centered in Illinois, for Douglas, declining to submit to his political enemies, made a desperate canvass of the state. So great was his hold over the Illinois farmers that the utmost efforts of the administration agents failed to undermine his popularity; from the opening of the campaign, he was greeted by crowds in every town and country with cheers and enthusiasm. Popular excitement was soon increased when Lincoln issued a challenge to Douglas to hold seven joint debates in various parts of the state. This was a bold step, for there was no better debater in the United States than Douglas. He was quick, adroit, plausible, and wonderfully gifted with the power of fallacious and mendacious assertion in a way that made exposure seem laborious and ineffective. No man in the Senate could hold him to the point or avoid being driven into an uncomfortable defensive attitude by his ruthless personality. Lincoln, on the other hand, was less self-confident, slower in thought, clumsy in repartee, and by no means Douglas's match in running de-bate; but he never lost his temper or allowed himself to be distracted by side issues, and he struck steadily and mercilessly at the weak points in Douglas's armor. The result was a contest that stirred excitement in Illinois beyond anything hitherto known. To see such debaters matched brought enormous crowds together in sheer joy of sportsmanship. Brass bands and cannon welcomed the candidates, processions by day and night kept enthusiasm from flagging, and scores of political orators besides the two protagonists took the stump in every congressional and legislative district.
The debates showed from the start that although Douglas had voted with the Republicans against the Lecompton constitution, there was no real ground of common principle between them. He attacked Lincoln, precisely as he would have done in 1854, with the charge that he was an abolitionist, a member of a sectional party whose success would imperil the Union. As to the existence of slavery in the territories, he declared himself absolutely indifferent so long as the principle of "popular sovereignty" was adhered to. "I will vote," he said, "for the admission of just such a state as by the form of their constitution the people show they want; if they want slavery, they shall have it; if they prohibit slavery, it shall be prohibited. They can form their institutions to suit themselves." He spent a great deal of time insisting upon the natural inferiority of the negro, enlarged upon the necessity of "a white man's government," sneered at the Republicans as "amalgamationists," and in every way showed that he had not changed since 1854.
One of his principal grounds of attack upon Lincoln was a sentence used by the latter in his speech accepting the senatorial nomination. Lincoln had demonstrated the impossibility of ending the slavery agitation so long as slavery existed, and, quoting the Bible to the effect that "a house divided against itself cannot stand," had predicted that the Union could not exist permanently half slave or half free, but must become all one thing or all the other.
This Douglas denounced as a virtual declaration of war upon the southern states, "revolutionary and destructive of the existence of this government," and "inviting a warfare between the north and the south to be carried on with ruthless vengeance until the one section or the other shall be driven to the wall and become the victim of the rapacity of the other."
On his part, Lincoln was obliged to devote much time to defend himself from the charges of fanaticism and incendiarism leveled against him, and he showed by his replies that he was by no means radical in his anti-slavery views. But he showed also that the fundamental difference between himself and Douglas lay in the fact that he regarded slavery as wrong, while Douglas reiterated his entire indifference. Moreover, he made an unremitting effort to force Douglas to commit himself concerning the effect of the Dred Scott decision upon his doctrine of "popular sovereignty" in the territories. This put Douglas in a difficult position, for he could not reject Taney's opinion, nor could he afford to abandon the cherished dogma on behalf of which he had fought his fight against the Lecompton constitution. With characteristic adroitness, he replied that undoubtedly the decision stood, and neither Congress nor a territory could expressly prohibit slavery in a territory, but that practically slavery could not exist unless supported by "local police regulations." Hence, he concluded, a territory might effectually exclude slavery, in spite of the Dred Scott decision, by "unfriendly legislation." This utterance of Douglas at Freeport, August 27, became known as his "Freeport doctrine," and showed that, regardless of law or logic, he was determined to adhere to his cherished pretension that the people of a territory could regulate their own affairs under all circumstances.
Lincoln is reported to have said that he was pushing the campaign for the purpose of killing Douglas as a presidential candidate. As it later appeared, he was successful in this aim, but in the immediate contest, he was beaten. Aided by a somewhat favorable legislative apportionment, Douglas barely carried the day over Republicans and Lecompton Democrats and secured a majority of both the Senate and House of Representatives. It was a brilliant personal triumph and made him the most prominent individual in the party and in the country. Instead of being crushed, he returned to the Senate with greater prestige than ever before, a prestige accentuated by the results of the elections; in other northern states.
Everywhere the verdict of the voters upon the Lecompton administration was decisive. Outside of Illinois, every state was carried by the opposition except Indiana, where the successful Democratic candidate for governor was also a Douglas follower. In Pennsylvania, the hard times proved disastrous for Buchanan's own state, and the fusion, on the tariff issue, won a complete victory. "Pennsylvania may well be proud of the high position she has just assumed," said a local paper. "She has fully identified herself with the Republican cause of Popular Sovereignty, and at the same time has taken a bold and decided stand in favor of Home Mills, Home Manufactories and American Industry." In the congressional elections, the Republicans gained twenty-one seats. The northern Know-Nothing party now ceased to be of importance except in the states where its coalitions gave the Republicans a victory.
As a result of the events of 1858, the Republican party stood forward stronger than before, undamaged by the Dred Scott decision and confident of victory in i860. Its leaders everywhere were taking bolder ground than ever, and even Seward, who was never in advance of popular sentiment, took occasion to make a speech containing a passage parallel to the phrase of Lincoln which had been the object of Douglas's attack. After describing the struggle between north and south as one between free labor and slave labor, he concluded, "It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave-holding nation or a free-labor nation."
The result of Buchanan's Kansas policy was thus apparent. By his mismanagement he had presented his recently beaten enemy with a winning issue, had lost the cordial support of the Democrats in the north, and by his failure, after all, to retain Kansas as a slave state had damaged the prestige of his party at the south. No president has a record of more hopeless ill-success.