1853.

CONGRESS IN TRANQUIL MOOD.

279

from any cause of serious disquietude. He had no radical change to suggest in finance; but he proposed increasing the army and navy, and extending to Utah and New Mexico the public land system, from which over $53,000,000 had accrued to the treasury up to the present time. And recognizing the reserved powers of the people in the several States, as things now tended, he took the Virginian view, adverse to public improvements at the cost of the national treasury.*

1854.

When the new year opened and Congress reassembled after the holidays, Franklin Pierce stood strong in the general confidence of the people of both sections. Swept into the Presidency as he had been by a great popular uprising, men of all parties who knew nothing of his personal fitness or antecedents had rallied to his support with zeal and even with enthusiasm. Juvenile in appearance, with a tinge of sadness occasioned by domestic sorrow, finely bearing himself hitherto on all public occasions, most statesmen looked upon him as one who would lead the people into new and green pastures of peace and conciliation. The conditions under which he began were certainly favorable to such hopes; for the Whigs were now dismembered and destroyed, and he stood the chosen leader of an overwhelming majority. But it is a foible of every democracy to make pets of the plausible and untried, and in its susceptible mood to invest its favorite with virtues and talents which he never possessed; for the public is like an ardent lover, and looks through a highly refracting medium.

Why were our Northern people so easily self-deceived? Why had they not perceived that political signs already pointed to pleasing the South beyond measure? Southern expansion, however, was a slow and uncertain project, and a more immediate benefaction of slave territory was in

* President's annual message; Executive Documents. This last statement glanced unfavorably at projects of a Pacific railway at the national

cost.

order from the sycophantic politicians. In the KansasNebraska bill leaps forward the swift generator of new national discontent, new parties. Its originator was Stephen A. Douglas, ambitious, forceful, and subservient; he had put his shoulder to the wheel of tropical annexation, a team which slavery drove; but now he mounted his own chariot. The bell of opportunity strikes, and the fog now lifting shows the great pacification of 1850, no longer the land's end of strife, as the charts had described it, but the rounding-point into a vast and illimitable jungle of sectional controversy, where tigers roar and scorpions stiffen to attack.

January 4.

The Senate was the scene of this agitating discovery. Here, without warning or suggestion, and as though selfish for the sole paternity of his scheme, Douglas, as chairman of the committee of territories, reported on the 4th of January a bill for the territorial government of Nebraska, a region embraced under the old Louisiana purchase, and apportioned to freedom by the famous Missouri compromise act of 1820. One of the sections of this bill, copying the language used under the late compact of 1850 with reference to Utah and New Mexico,* provided that whenever Nebraska should be admitted into the Union as a State or States, it should come in "with or without slavery," as its Constitution at the time of admission might prescribe. "A proper sense of patriotic duty," explained Douglas, "enjoins the propriety and necessity of a strict adherence to the principles, and even a literal adoption of the enactments, of the adjustment of 1850."

"Slavery takes the field," was the instant comment of conscience presses at the North. These had perceived with no complacency that of the territorial committees appointed in each House, an Illinois truckler was chairman,† while the majority consisted of slaveholders; and at once they

*Supra, p. 199.

† Richardson, of Illinois, was chairman of the House committee on territories, and he and Douglas acted in concert.

1854.

NEW DOGMA OF NON-INTERVENTION.

281

January 16.

denounced the bill as a covert attempt to override the Missouri compromise. To take the ground more manfully, Dixon, of Kentucky, gave notice of an amendment to the bill, which would repeal expressly the Missouri restriction; and this manoeuvre forced Douglas forward; for on the 23d of January he reported January 23. a substitute bill from his committee, which went all lengths for the new principle of 1850, henceforth to be vaunted as "popular sovereignty." This second bill provided for the establishment of two territories, one to be called Nebraska, and the other Kansas. By it that 8th section of the Missouri compromise act which ordained freedom alone north of the extended parallel of 36° 30' * was distinctly pronounced void, and slavery and freedom were allowed an equal chance to propagate. All questions pertaining to slavery in these territories of Kansas and Nebraska, and in the new States to be formed from them, the local dwellers should decide through their proper representatives; all cases involving title to slaves and to personal freedom should be referred to the local courts, with a right of appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States; and the fugitive-slave law should be faithfully executed under all conditions. "The object is not," explained Douglas, "to admit or to exclude slavery, but to remove whatever obstacles Congress has placed in the way of it, and to apply to all our territories the doctrine of non-intervention." †

The new domestic policy thus sprung so unexpectedly upon the country was the secret contrivance of a few aspiring Democrats, obsequious to slavery's propaganda. The people, whether North or South, had neither initiated such a step nor dreamed of taking it. Nor had Douglas himself the hardihood of precipitating the new and iniquitous issue, without previous assurances of the President's support and approval. With the introduction in the Senate of his second territorial bill came the contempo

*See vol. iii., p. 165.

† Congressional Globe.

raneous rumor that our Young American administration would support him and bear the measure through. That rumor was well founded.

January 22.

This measure was not palatable to all of Pierce's cabinet. Marcy, it is well known, was dissatisfied and vexed with the scheme from first to last; though loving party and place too well to forsake his post. Jefferson Davis, the Secretary of War, was the President's inspirer in this business, and, by his own admission, negotiated the compact between the White House and the territorial committee rooms of the capitol. These committees, as he relates, agreed to report their Kansas-Nebraska bill in the new shape, if assured that the President would favorably consider it. This was on a Saturday; Monday was the day for reporting the bill; and on Sunday, the 22d of January, Douglas and the other members of the two committees paid the President a private visit under the Secretary's personal convoy. Leaving the others in the reception chamber, Davis entered the private apartments of the White House, where Franklin Pierce kept his sabbath seclusion. First explaining the situation to the President alone, he brought him into the reception room for an interview with the committees. Pierce listened to the bill as it was read over, and to the exposition of it, and expressed his approbation. "I consider the bill based," he said, "upon a sound principle, which the compromise of 1820 infringed upon, and to which we have now returned."* The Kansas-Nebraska bill was not Davis assures posterity-inspired by the President and cabinet; † to some, certainly, of the cabinet, it must have proved a surprise; but if his own instigation of the policy began with the Lord's-Day interview he describes, the surroundings of his tale are singular. Irreconcilable even to disloyalty as he had been with the compact of 1850, because it refused his own ultimatum to extend the 36° 30' line to the Pacific, it must have been a sweet revenge to assert, as from henceforth he constantly asserted, that the

* Jefferson Davis's Confederacy, 27

t Ibid.

SO

1854. REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE.

283

1850 compromise annulled and abandoned the 36° 30' line altogether.

The grand debate opened in the Senate upon the report of this remarkable substitute bill, and lasted until nearly the close of May. We have no more of those pict- Januaryuresque tableaux which made that debate of four May. years earlier so memorable; no consummate Clay attuned the chords of fraternal feeling; no Webster bent the strong bow of argument; no pallid Calhoun glided in and out of the chamber, like a spectre of dissolution. Douglas, with his coarse but vigorous style of expression, his sneers and grimaces at negro philanthrophy, all for demagogue effect, and that smart and dexterous sword-play of sophistical argument in which he excelled all debaters of his times for gaining the immediate advantage, was the Spartacus of this later exhibition, swelling prodigiously with the munificence of his new laissez-faire doctrine for settling the territories. Slaveholding coadjutors kept him in the arena as their gladiator, wishing, so far as possible, to make the new concession appear as a boon, a peace-offering tendered their section by the free States in the spirit of equity and magnanimous justice. Samuel Houston, John Bell, and Edward Everett were among the conservative dissenters from this new legislation; but the opposition marshalled more instinctively under a trio of senators, Seward, Chasc, and Sumner, whose more radical antagonism to slavery extension, and whose detachment from the mediating policies which had brought the country into such mischief, qualified them better for leading in this unexpected crisis. To fame's only sure temple the entrance is through freedom's door; and these three statesmen, equal in ability and force of character to any who encountered them, and yet so differing among themselves in temperament and methods as to supply one another, rather than blend in perfect harmony, grew into the heroes, the representative men, of the next six years' chronicles. "We are on the eve of a great national transaction," said Seward, as this debate approached its climax, "a transaction that will close a cycle in the history of our country."