Arguing until Doomsday by Michael E. Woods

Author:Michael E. Woods
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2020-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Southern Democrats had mixed feelings about Douglas’s success, but all their varied responses boded ill for party unity. Hardliners who opposed his reelection now contrived to depose him from party leadership. Pragmatists celebrated Lincoln’s defeat but decreed that future cross-sectional cooperation must be on southern terms.

Mississippi Democrats exhibited the full range of reactions. Addressing the state legislature soon after the Illinois elections, Congressman Lucius Q. C. Lamar arraigned Douglas for having “shot a Parthian arrow into the ranks of his former allies” and “ranged himself under the banner of that hideous fanaticism which threatens to crush the constitution and the South.” He scorned apologists who defended Douglas as the lesser evil. If Douglas was the “best issue which the Democracy of the North can present us, then perish the Democracy of the North! and, if need be, perish the Union! but preserve unblemished the honor, and unhurt the rights, of the South.”219 If planters could not command plain republicans, Lamar would secede.

A few weeks earlier, Senator Albert Gallatin Brown offered a contrary opinion but reached a similarly defiant conclusion. Brown first reviewed the Kansas controversy, vindicating the Lecompton Constitution and condemning popular sovereignty. This led him to Douglas. Brown chided southerners who “indulge[d] in wholesale denunciation” of the Illinoisan, and he hoped that Douglas would “thrash Abolition Lincoln out of his boots.” He refused, however, to forfeit proslavery principle for partisan gain. He respected the “National Democratic party” as the “last bulwark of the Union,” but “if it requires another compromise, and another sacrifice of southern rights, to save it, it may go.” Which rights did he mean? Brown offered a litany of proslavery initiatives: expansion into Central America (“because I want to plant slavery there”), conquests in Cuba and northern Mexico (“for the planting or spreading of slavery”), and, perhaps, reopening the African slave trade. His polestar was slavery—“a great moral, social, and political blessing”—and if the Union ever menaced “my property and my domestic peace, I will destroy it if I can.”220 Douglas derided extremists who threatened the Union by squabbling over slavery; Brown threatened to demolish the Union for slavery’s sake. The Democracy could not serve two masters.

By late 1858, Mississippi Democrats had brought fringe ideas like reviving the African slave trade and enacting a federal slave code for the territories into the political mainstream. Some remained committed to preserving the national Democracy, but many wanted to realize Calhoun’s dream of forging a southern party.221 While Davis was off wooing New Englanders, one Mississippian declared that it was “useless to speak of the North and South uniting in one political party; oil and water will not mingle, and we will only learn too late, we pursue a mirage when we hope for a National party.”222 Thus, Davis returned to a Mississippi where he now appeared soft on slavery, a dramatic reversal from 1851, when his gubernatorial campaign foundered on charges of radicalism. Like Douglas, Davis faced rivals who questioned whether the national Democracy could advance sectional interests.

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