LITMIR.BIZ

      FOOTNOTES:

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      [13] These facts are detailed in a paper contributed to the Illinois State Historical Society in 1908 by Joseph B. Lemen, of O'Fallon, Illinois.

[14] Negro Servitude in Illinois, by N. Dwight Harris, p. 108.

CHAPTER III

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      FIRST ELECTION AS SENATOR

The repeal of the Missouri Compromise was the cause of Trumbull's return to an active participation in politics. The prime mover in that disastrous adventure was Stephen A. Douglas, who had been Trumbull's predecessor in the office of secretary of state and also one of his predecessors on the supreme bench. He was now a Senator of the United States, and a man of world-wide celebrity. Born at Brandon, Vermont, in 1813, he had lost his father before he was a year old. His mother removed with him to Canandaigua, New York, where he attended an academy and read law to some extent in the office of a local practitioner. At the age of twenty, he set out for the West to seek his fortune, and he found the beginnings of it at Winchester, Illinois, where he taught school for a living and continued to study law, as Trumbull was doing at the same time at Greenville, Georgia. He was admitted to the bar in 1834. In 1835, he was elected state's attorney. Two years later he was elected a member of the legislature by the Democrats of Morgan County, and resigned the office he then held in order to take the new one. In 1837, he was appointed by President Van Buren register of the land office at Springfield. In the same year he was nominated for Congress in the Springfield district before he had reached the legal age, but was defeated by the Whig candidate, John T. Stuart, by 35 votes in a total poll of 36,742.[15] In 1840, he was appointed secretary of state, and in 1841, elected a judge of the supreme court under the circumstances already mentioned. In 1843, he was elected to the lower house of Congress and was reëlected twice, but before taking his seat the third time he was chosen by the legislature, in 1846, Senator of the United States for the term beginning March 4, 1847, and was reëlected in 1852. In Congress he had taken an active part in the annexation of Texas, in the war with Mexico, in the Oregon Boundary dispute, and in the Land Grant for the Illinois Central Railway. In the Senate he held the position of Chairman of the Committee on Territories.

      In the Democratic party he had forged to the front by virtue of boldness in leadership, untiring industry, boundless ambition, and self-confidence, and horse-power. He had a large head surmounted by an abundant mane, which gave him the appearance of a lion prepared to roar or to crush his prey, and not seldom the resemblance was confirmed when he opened his mouth on the hustings or in the Senate Chamber. As stump orator, senatorial debater, and party manager he never had a superior in this country. Added to these gifts, he had a very attractive personality and a wonderful gift for divining and anticipating the drift of public opinion. The one thing lacking to make him a man "not for an age but for all time," was a moral substratum. He was essentially an opportunist. Although his private life was unstained, he had no conception of morals in politics, and this defect was his undoing as a statesman.

      On the 4th of January, 1854, Douglas reported from the Senate Committee on Territories a bill to organize the territory of Nebraska. It provided that said territory, or any portion of it, when admitted as a state or states, should be received into the Union with or without slavery, as their constitution might prescribe at the time of their admission. The Missouri Compromise Act of 1820, which applied to this territory, was not repealed by this provision, and it must have been plain to everybody that if slavery were excluded from the territory it would not be there when the people should come together to form a state.

      Douglas did not at first propose to repeal the Missouri Compromise. He intended to leave the question of slavery untouched. He did not want to reopen the agitation, which had been mostly quieted by the Compromise of 1850; but it soon became evident that if he were willing to leave the question in doubt, others were not. Dixon, of Kentucky, successor of Henry Clay in the Senate and a Whig in politics, offered an amendment to the bill proposing to repeal the Missouri Compromise outright. Douglas was rather startled when this motion was made. He went to Dixon's seat and begged him to withdraw his amendment, urging that it would reopen the controversies settled by the Compromise of 1850 and delay, if not prevent, the passage of any bill to organize the new territory. Dixon was stubborn. He contended that the Southern people had a right to go into the new territory equally with those of the North, and to take with them anything that was recognized and protected as property in the Southern States. Dixon's motion received immediate and warm support in the South.

      Two or three days later, Douglas decided to embody Dixon's amendment in his bill and take the consequences. His amended bill divided the territory in two parts, Kansas and Nebraska. The apparent object of this change was to give the Missourians a chance to make the southernmost one a slave state; but this intention has been controverted by Douglas's friends in recent years, who have brought forward a mass of evidence to show that he had other sufficient reasons for thus dividing the territory and hence that it must not be assumed that he intended that one of them should be a slave state. The evidence consists of a record of efforts put forth by citizens of western Iowa in 1853–54 to secure a future state on the opposite side of the Missouri River homogeneous with themselves, and to promote the building of a Pacific railway from some point near Council Bluffs along the line of the Platte River. These efforts were heartily seconded by Senators Dodge and Jones and Representative Henn, of Iowa. They labored with Douglas and secured his coöperation. So Douglas himself said when he announced the change in the bill dividing the territory into two parts.

      Most people at the present day, including myself, would be glad to concur with this view, but we must interpret Douglas's acts not merely by what he said in 1854, but also by what he said and did afterwards. In 1856 he made an unjustifiable assault upon the New England Emigrant Aid Company, for sending settlers to Kansas, as they had a perfect right to do under the terms of the bill; and he apologized for, if he did not actually defend, the Missourian invaders who marched over the border in military array, took possession of the ballot boxes, elected a pro-slavery legislature, and then marched back boasting of their victory. Troubles multiplied in Douglas's pathway rapidly after he introduced his Nebraska Bill, and it is very likely that an equal division of the territory between the North and South seemed to him the safest way out of his difficulties.

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