Wrestling With His Angel by Sidney Blumenthal

Author:Sidney Blumenthal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

A SELF-EVIDENT LIE

Douglas believed his best-laid plans would gain him every prize. He would win the favor of all parts of the Democratic Party, sail his bill safely through its factions, North and South, Scylla and Charybdis. He would be hailed for his legislative genius that once again had saved the Union. He would build the transcontinental railroad. He would multiply his wealth into a fortune. He would be president. “It is within the author’s personal knowledge,” wrote Samuel S. Cox, an influential Ohio Democrat and later a congressman who was close to Douglas, “that Mr. Douglas was averse to the Dixon proposition. Reluctantly he amended his bill by adopting Dixon’s proposition.” But the version of the Missouri Compromise repeal that he finally adopted was the one that Phillips and the F Street Mess advised the president to sign under the watchful gaze of Jefferson Davis. “He undertook to defend it on a principle”—popular sovereignty. But, according to Cox, Douglas had an agenda that he did not make public. “He decided to divide the territory into two governments. He thought to make one slave, and one free state.” After obliterating the Missouri Compromise, Douglas now would re-create a new line of demarcation, providing something for each side—Kansas a slave state, Nebraska a free one. Cox’s reminiscence, undoubtedly based on his conversations with Douglas, disclosed that rather than establishing the basis for Kansas and Nebraska to be free states Douglas intended one of them to be a slave state. His ulterior design contradicted his frequent claim during the debate over the Compromise of 1850 that slavery would be “effectively excluded” from the new territories “by the laws of nature, of climate.” The reality known to all was that slavery flourished in western Missouri on land no different from and contiguous with Kansas. In splitting the territory, the nonintervention principle would be invoked to justify an armed intervention to secure slavery in at least half of it. And there was another underlying motive to the division of the territory into Kansas and Nebraska. With two territories there would be two routes for the Pacific railroad, one northern and one central, one originating in Superior City and one in Chicago. Two territories meant that Douglas could achieve all his aims, including two windfall profits. “He proposed,” recalled Cox, “but events disposed of his scheme.”

John Pettit

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