5

Wages of Whiteness

G. W. Armstrong could not believe what Stephen Douglas had done. The Memphis carpenter had revered “the embodiment [of] the Great head of Democracy” so much that he named his only son Stephen A. D. Armstrong. Now, that former esteem only magnified his dismay. In an emotional December 1857 letter, Armstrong recanted his support for Douglas’s presidential aspirations, compared the senator to recreant Democrats like Martin Van Buren, and begged him to “be a man a patriot and a hero” and cut ties with the “Black Republicans.” Armstrong expressed more grief than anger, but his outburst indicated a broader unraveling of the Mississippi Valley’s political bonds.¹

Armstrong was appalled by Douglas’s opposition to the Lecompton Constitution, which, if accepted by Congress, would bring Kansas into the Union as a slave state. President James Buchanan, like Jefferson Davis and most southern Democrats, favored Lecompton, but Douglas and a coalition of northern Democrats and Republicans condemned it as a mockery of self-government. Controversy over Lecompton raged far into 1858 and foreshadowed the Democracy’s 1860 rupture.

Far from an isolated squabble, the Lecompton battle heralded an escalation of chronic disputes among Democrats who rallied around white supremacy and anti-abolitionism but never agreed on how white men should govern. It marked an especially explosive confrontation between Douglas’s majoritarianism and Davis’s quest to shield slaveholders’ property rights from nonslaveholding majorities. The struggle and its aftermath rattled a seemingly triumphant Democracy, revealed the fragility of racism and negative partisanship as foundations of party unity, and compelled Democrats to confront issues that had haunted them for decades.

Reverberations from the Lecompton battle quickly reached Illinois and Mississippi, forcing Davis and Douglas to prove that the Democracy advocated local interests. For Douglas, this meant defending his Senate seat against a formidable Republican foe who sought to brand him a traitor to northern values while simultaneously disrupting the Democracy. Meanwhile, Davis sparred with proslavery extremists who castigated him for courting northern allies. Davis and Douglas survived these assaults by adopting more overtly sectional positions, thus deepening the divide between them. By 1859, long-simmering contests over the Democracy and American democracy had reached a rolling boil.

The Lecompton quarrel fed on rising expectations. Democrats ended 1856 hopeful that the Kansas conflagration would soon be extinguished and that their darkest days were past. Much of the work that Democrats undertook that year remained undone, but their party had survived a serious test.

But Democrats could not wish away the Kansas imbroglio that dominated the first session of the Thirty-Fourth Congress. Party leaders defended popular sovereignty and blamed antislavery fanatics for territorial turmoil, but the conflict defied resolution. Republicans pressed for Kansas statehood under the Topeka constitution, which would exclude slavery and African Americans alike. Democrats worked to settle the dangerous controversy but refused to recognize the Topeka government, which Pierce deemed insurrectionary.² Instead, Douglas sponsored a bill authorizing Kansas voters to write a constitution and apply for statehood once the population reached the 93,420 threshold that would entitle them to a representative in Congress.³ Blaming antislavery zealots for the violence, he defined Bleeding Kansas as a battle between Democratic champions of self-government and a meddlesome medley of Know-Nothings and abolitionists.⁴ He also began crafting a constitutional foundation for popular sovereignty. Previously, Douglas had defended it as pragmatic and fair to westerners, but now he denied that Congress could establish or prohibit slavery in a territory, since this would deprive the nascent state of its equality with other states. Following a contemporary trend of transmuting policy questions into constitutional debates, Douglas took a large step toward eliding the distinction between states and territories.⁵

Douglas’s bill flopped, but other plans remained in circulation. In June, Georgia senator Robert Toombs suggested permitting Kansas voters to select convention delegates under careful supervision intended to prevent the fraud and violence that had marred previous territorial elections. Most Democrats welcomed the Toombs bill and hoped it would boost their chances in the pending presidential race. Republicans defeated it in the House of Representatives, however, leaving Douglas fuming over their alleged desire to milk Kansas for partisan gain.⁶ Nevertheless, he voted with Republicans and against most southern Democrats on several infrastructure bills, including one to improve the Illinois River and another, which failed, to construct a Pacific railroad.⁷ These votes underlined the political disarray of the mid-1850s: partisanship dominated Kansas debates, while sectional alignments were forming on internal improvements. Douglas’s agenda stalled because no single party would adopt it wholesale.

Meanwhile, 1856 devolved into the most sanguinary year in the Kansas Territory’s bloodstained history. In late May, proslavery forces demolished the antislavery stronghold of Lawrence; shortly after, abolitionists led by John Brown killed five proslavery settlers in a grisly nocturnal sortie. The subsequent guerrilla war increased the body count and kept Kansas in national headlines. Even if reports were exaggerated, as skeptics have claimed, the bloodletting put Democrats on the defensive.⁸ As a distraught Ohioan told Douglas, “A good many Democrats in this state are leaving our party, and becoming violent against you and the administration,” because of the “present proceedings in Kansas.” Peace might salvage the party’s fortunes, but “if towns are sacked and burned, and men killed there, I fear a storm will rise at the North that can’t be stayed by the most prudent statesman.”⁹

The bloodshed also crept eastward, most infamously in the attack on Senator Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts Republican, by Preston Brooks, a Democratic congressman from South Carolina. On May 19 and 20, Sumner delivered a blistering speech in which he likened slavery expansion to rape and denounced the authors of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, deriding Douglas as “the squire of Slavery, its very Sancho Panza, ready to do all its humiliating offices.”¹⁰ Two days later, Brooks beat Sumner into unconsciousness with a gold-headed cane. Many Democrats agreed that Sumner got his comeuppance, but the disparate reactions of northern and southern Democrats are instructive. While listening to Sumner’s speech, Douglas grumbled, “That damn fool will get himself killed by some other damn fool,” a remark consistent with his self-identification as a moderate stuck between sectional extremists.¹¹ Some northern Democrats joined in public demonstrations of outrage against Brooks and condemned his assault on civility and free speech.¹² But southern Democrats closed ranks behind Brooks. Davis could not attend a South Carolina gathering held in Brooks’s honor, so he published a letter expressing “high regard and esteem” for Brooks, a victim of “vilification, misrepresentation, and persecution.”¹³ While northern Democrats panned both Brooks and Sumner as fanatics, southern Democrats hailed the cane-wielding Carolinian as a sectional hero.

Amid the bloodshed, Democrats scrambled to unite for the 1856 election. Ahead of the national convention in Cincinnati (a nod to the burgeoning West), Democratic contenders jockeyed for the nomination, and Douglas was very much a candidate, even before supporters officially raised his name in February.¹⁴ As in 1852, he received a flood of letters endorsing his nomination, mostly from the North and West, with a sprinkling from the South.¹⁵ Among his rivals was Davis, whose friends began speculating about his own presidential prospects in 1853. An April 1856 Democratic Review article ranked him among the contenders, citing his bravery at Buena Vista as his primary credential.¹⁶

The Cincinnati convention exposed Democrats’ serious divisions. Pierce remained popular in the Deep South, where many Democrats, including Davis, hoped to renominate him. Pennsylvania’s James Buchanan, who as minister to Great Britain was relatively untarnished by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, had considerable northeastern support, while Douglas attracted westerners, Young Americans, and a smattering of southerners.¹⁷ When balloting commenced on June 5, Buchanan and Pierce raced ahead of Douglas, with Lewis Cass a distant fourth. The next day, Douglas surged into second place thanks to rising support from the border and upper South, but after sixteen ballots, it was clear that he or Buchanan would have to yield. Illinois Douglasite William A. Richardson rose to read a letter from Douglas authorizing withdrawal of his name if Democrats could unite behind a strong candidate; shortly thereafter, Buchanan prevailed on the seventeenth ballot.¹⁸ Democrats balanced the ticket with Kentuckian John C. Breckinridge and crafted a platform with an ambiguous territorial policy: congressional “non-interference” with territorial voters’ right to enter the Union with or without slavery as they chose.¹⁹ Democrats spent the next four years wrestling over the Cincinnati platform, which northerners read as an endorsement of squatter sovereignty and southerners as a confirmation of the common-property doctrine.²⁰ Southern Democrats knew that Buchanan would lose the slave states if he adopted “the old Cass heresy of squatter sovereignty.”²¹

Bitterly disappointed, Douglas expected a reward for his party loyalty. He was only forty-three years old and had received assurances from Buchanan’s backers that the Pennsylvanian would eschew a second term and endorse him in 1860. Many Democrats thought he deserved it; an hour after Buchanan’s nomination, one delegate assured Douglas that the “hearts of the representatives of the Democracy melted at your magnanimity; and you are already determined upon as the successor of Mr. Buchanan in 1860.”²² Douglas also claimed victory on the platform and regarded the election as a referendum on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, so he campaigned tirelessly in Illinois while keeping tabs on the key swing state of Pennsylvania. Late in the canvass, Douglas liquidated some Chicago real estate and donated the proceeds to the party’s Pennsylvania war chest, ultimately investing over $40,000 in Buchanan’s campaign.²³

Fear of disunion permeated the 1856 election and energized Douglas’s efforts to defeat the Republicans. Their party had coalesced swiftly by drawing support from former Whigs, Free-Soilers, and anti-Nebraska Democrats and had nominated dashing frontiersman and former California senator John C. Frémont for president. Their platform decried slavery as one of the “relics of barbarism,” demanded that Congress bar its expansion, and urged statehood for Kansas under the Topeka constitution.²⁴ Republicans had brought antislavery into the northern political mainstream, and some southerners called for secession in the event of a Republican triumph. “If Fremont should be elected President,” announced a Mississippi Democratic editor, the slave states should “establish an independent Confederacy,” peacefully if possible but “in war and blood” if necessary.²⁵ Jefferson Davis hoped that a Democratic victory would avert disunion but quietly advised that slave states should ready their militias.²⁶ Amid multiplying threats of secession, many southern votes for Buchanan reflected sectionalism rather than nationalism, since fealty to the Union was conditional upon the success of a southern-directed Democracy.²⁷ Southern ultimatums put northern Democrats in an awkward position, arming them with arguments about the dangers of Republicanism while tainting their party with prospective treason.²⁸

Buchanan eked out a victory, winning 45 percent of the popular vote, carrying every slave state but Maryland (won by American Party candidate Millard Fillmore), and adding five free states—California, Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey—to snag 174 electoral votes. Frémont took every other free state and a plurality of northern popular votes, cementing the Republicans as Democrats’ chief rival in the North. Meanwhile, the Democracy kept tilting southward: Pierce carried all but two free states in 1852, but Buchanan won only five and received a majority of the popular vote only in Pennsylvania and Indiana.²⁹ Northern Democrats began to rebuild after the 1854 disaster, raising their congressional delegation from twenty-five to fifty-three. But Republicans won portentous victories, including the election of ex-Democrat William H. Bissell as governor of Illinois, whose triumph over William A. Richardson, Douglas’s right-hand man, was a stinging blow.³⁰

Southern Democrats had no reason for complacency, either. Indeed, shortly after the election, a Mississippian warned Davis that the future “is big with peril.”³¹ Buchanan won 56 percent of the slave-state popular vote and nearly swept the region, but the South was not monolithic; opposition parties remained active and fire-eaters still doubted that any national party could crush the Republican menace. When Davis returned to the Senate, he would need to demonstrate that Democrats could meet the rising expectations of white southerners who were alarmed by Republicanism and keen on a variety of proslavery projects.³² Democrats would have to maintain party unity while governing a bitterly polarized nation.

Democratic infighting marred even joyful occasions, such as Douglas’s marriage to Adele Cutts, a twenty-year-old Washington belle related to Dolley Madison and Rose O’Neal Greenhow. Following their campaign-trail courtship, the couple were married by a Catholic priest in late November 1856, during the brief interval between Election Day and the opening of a new session of Congress.³³ Douglas’s admirers appreciated Adele’s influence on her husband, whose slovenly appearance improved after the wedding. Enemies were less charitable: Varina Davis accused the “the dirty speculator and party trickster, broken in health by drink,” of using “his first wife’s money” to buy “an elegant, well-bred woman because she is poor and her Father is proud” and sneeringly hoped that Douglas “may wash a little oftener.”³⁴

James Buchanan shared this disdain, and from the start of his presidency, his hostility to Douglas’s wing of the party stirred a personal, factional, and ideological quarrel. Since Douglas’s withdrawal had secured Buchanan’s nomination, it would have been politic to reserve plum appointments for Douglasites, but the aging Pennsylvanian regarded the western upstart as a dangerous rival. So, he snubbed Douglas, threw northwestern patronage to Indiana’s Jesse Bright, and stacked his cabinet with proslavery southerners and like-minded northerners.³⁵ These appointments tilted the party further southward, reflecting Buchanan’s determination to “arrest … the agitation of the Slavery question at the North & to destroy sectional parties.”³⁶

Buchanan counted on the Supreme Court to derail antislavery activism, but in embracing its most infamous decision, he magnified sectional strife and Democratic discord. In his inaugural address, Buchanan alluded to a decision that would end the Kansas controversy and “speedily and finally” settle the question of timing—when could territorial voters decide on slavery?—which divided the Democracy.³⁷ The case was Dred Scott v. Sandford, in which an enslaved Missouri man sued for his freedom on the grounds of his longtime residence in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory. Buchanan promised to abide by the decision, whatever it said; in fact, he already knew the outcome thanks to covert communications with several justices.³⁸

Shortly thereafter, when the Court ruled 7–2 against Scott’s bid for freedom, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney sought to chisel proslavery dogma into American jurisprudence. First, he rejected Scott’s standing, not merely because of his enslavement but also because of his ancestry; in a grotesquely flawed historical argument, Taney insisted that African Americans could not be citizens, for they had always “been regarded as beings of an inferior order … and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Gaining momentum, Taney held that the Missouri Compromise’s free-soil provision, which covered one area where Scott had lived, was unconstitutional because Congress had no power to bar slavery from a territory. Echoing John C. Calhoun, he declared that Congress had only “the power coupled with the duty of guarding and protecting the owner in his rights.” Finally, Taney addressed an issue that was not before the Court but provoked Democrats’ intraparty disputes: whether a territorial legislature could prohibit slavery. Since Congress could not enact such a ban, he reasoned, neither could it delegate that power to territorial governments. In one swoop, Taney dismissed African American citizenship, gutted free-soilism, and smashed squatter sovereignty.³⁹

Democrats hoped the case would settle the territorial controversy and upend the Republicans. Robert J. Walker promised Douglas that the decision “would give renewed confidence at home and abroad in the stability of our institutions, and insure another democratic victory in 1860.”⁴⁰ Another correspondent celebrated Taney’s racism, opining that although “the masses” knew little constitutional law, the vindication of white supremacy would resonate with even “unsound and ignorant” minds.⁴¹ Douglas and Davis initially shared the enthusiasm. Speaking in Springfield in June 1857, Douglas defended the Court from the “poisonous shafts of partisan malice,” parroted Taney’s bigotry, and accused Republicans of advocating racial equality, while tiptoeing around questions about popular sovereignty.⁴² In several Mississippi speeches, Davis eagerly seconded Taney’s repudiation of squatter sovereignty.⁴³

Thanks to Buchanan’s election and Taney’s ruling, the Democracy appeared harmonious, victorious, and firmly under southern control. But this was an illusion. Soon, the Kansas controversy and proslavery southerners’ soaring expectations would rekindle a smoldering struggle within a badly divided party.

Taney’s ruling did not cause the Democratic rupture but did expose its buried roots. Taney relied on two pillars of proslavery ideology: white supremacy and the sanctity of property. These dogmas coexisted uneasily and made proslavery politics, as historian Merrill Peterson observed, “a fantastic mixture of racist democracy and planter aristocracy.”⁴⁴ The challenge for proslavery crusaders was to recruit white multitudes to defend property owned by a small minority; in an age of mass white male suffrage, elite interests needed popular appeal.

Elites often fear majoritarian assaults on property rights, but the uniqueness of slaveholders’ property compounded the problem, since enslaved people’s capacity for resistance made them uniquely dangerous chattels. Slave property, Davis acknowledged, was “the most delicate species of property” and “must be held under special laws and police regulations, to render it useful or profitable to the owner, or that it may not be injurious to the community under which it is held.”⁴⁵ Thus, masters demanded far more from nonslaveholders than passive acquiescence. It was not enough to dissuade them from espousing abolitionism or abetting slave rebellions; they had to be reliable supporters of slavery and active participants in its maintenance. Slavery imposed a burden on all free people, who shared the risk of insurrection and the task of preventing it. As voters, slave patrollers, pursuers of fugitives, and suppressors of rebellions, nonslaveholding whites helped police slavery, an ongoing process that transcended the master-slave relationship. Slavery, noted Republican statesman and postbellum historian Henry Wilson, was “a social matter, and men were obliged to join hand in hand in its guilt, or to relinquish it altogether.”⁴⁶

Yet even within the South, masters could not take nonslaveholders’ support for granted, particularly not when elite interests clashed with popular sentiments. After Nat Turner’s 1831 insurrection, for instance, Virginia masters scrambled to prove that slaves were under control, lest panicked yeomen massacre valuable human chattels or embrace gradual emancipation.⁴⁷ Slaveholders’ response to Hinton Helper’s Impending Crisis of the South (1857) showed that mistrust of nonslaveholding majorities persisted a generation later. Appealing to racism and economic self-interest, Helper urged poor whites to rid the South of slavery and African Americans alike. Planter-politicians banned the book and denounced its author.⁴⁸ Outside the South, masters needed public help to recapture fugitives, conquer new lands, and fill federal offices with friendly occupants. At the local, regional, and national levels, therefore, maintaining mass support for slavery was an unending project with enormous stakes. If slaveholders could harness white men’s democracy to their interests they could defy the world, but majoritarian backlash could ruin them.⁴⁹

To transmute proslavery politics into a populist crusade, slaveholders turned to racism. Particularly as the proportion of white southerners who held slaves declined in the 1840s and 1850s, southern elites appealed to racism to smother class antagonism and enlist poorer whites in safeguarding a slaveholding society.⁵⁰ Rather than stratify wealth, they insisted, slavery lifted all white men into an aristocracy of color. “The presence of these laborers of an inferior race,” Davis told Mississippians in 1857, “elevated the white man,” liberating him from “humiliating discrimination and dependence among individuals of our own race,” which would otherwise “leave but the name of political equality.”⁵¹ Like-minded northerners also insisted that whites’ dignity, liberty, and equality depended on black subordination. White men, averred New York Democrat Daniel Dickinson in an attack on the Wilmot Proviso, would be “degraded” by competing with blacks for jobs.⁵² Historians disagree as to how solidly whites in the South, let alone nationwide, were unified by racism, but some argue that this racist glue also cemented Democratic solidarity by aligning plain republicans with planters.⁵³

Antebellum racism was pervasive and pernicious, but to conclude that it gave the Slave Power uncontested control over the Democracy elides several tensions that plagued the party and led to its rupture. These pressures intensified during the Lecompton debate and pitted Davis against Douglas in a ferocious struggle.

The first source of strain was the fact that racists do not always agree with each other, since white supremacy’s defective logic can lead to conflicting conclusions. Antebellum racism bolstered support for conquering tropical provinces and keeping their dark-skinned inhabitants at arm’s length; reopening the African slave trade and leaving it closed; spreading slavery westward and barring black people from western lands; protecting slavery indefinitely and abolishing it gradually; maintaining a vast enslaved labor force and colonizing freed blacks overseas.⁵⁴ The deplorably broad consensus that the United States must remain a white man’s country splintered when whites had to make policy.

Historians rightly contrast Davis and Douglas’s prejudice against Lincoln’s comparatively enlightened views, but the two Democrats diverged on vital issues.⁵⁵ Historian James Oakes warns against assuming that a “racial consensus” stifled conflict in the nineteenth-century U.S., a point that the Davis-Douglas rivalry demonstrates quite clearly.⁵⁶ Davis defended slavery as a positive good, a divinely ordained boon to the enslaved, and the only system in which black and white people could coexist. He criticized southerners who apologized for slavery as a necessary evil and braided biblical and pseudo-historical arguments to argue that “the good of society requires that the negro should be kept in his normal condition” of slavery.⁵⁷ For Davis, maintaining white supremacy meant protecting slaveholders’ property rights as the foundation of white domination.

Douglas was no egalitarian, but he denied that alleged racial inferiority mandated enslavement and envisioned a decentralized system in which white voters determined the fate of African Americans in their communities. Undemocratic by modern standards, Douglas’s brand of white supremacy was anathema to Davis because it subordinated property rights to local majorities, authorizing whites of all classes to decide whether to shoulder the burden of slavery. Douglas also supported and served as a vice president of the American Colonization Society. Excoriated by abolitionists for its patently racist goal of whitening the country by deporting free African Americans, the society also drew fire from proslavery crusaders, including Davis, who believed it threatened slavery.⁵⁸ Douglas’s northern admirers often echoed the society’s aversive racism, and some even endorsed black self-government so long as it occurred outside the United States.⁵⁹ Davis and Douglas united against egalitarians, but their prejudices pointed in different directions. This would become clear in the Lecompton struggle’s acrimonious aftermath.

Powerful southerners suspected that northern bigotry was poorly calibrated to sustain slavery, so they fostered overtly proslavery racism with help from local allies like John Van Evrie. A New York physician, author, and editor, Van Evrie published books, pamphlets, and a periodical, the Day Book, which DeBow’s Review hailed as “a great engine for good.”⁶⁰ Among his efforts was an anthology that included a scientific racist treatise by Samuel Cartwright, Taney’s Dred Scott opinion, and an introduction in which Van Evrie hailed the case as the greatest event in North American history since the Declaration of Independence.⁶¹ For a quarter of a century, Van Evrie hammered on one theme: slavery was “a normal condition, a natural relation … in harmony with the order, progress, and general well-being of the superior [race], and absolutely essential to the very existence of the inferior race.”⁶²

Davis appreciated Van Evrie’s labors and became his patron. While secretary of war, Davis praised the forthcoming Negroes and Negro “Slavery” (1853) for exposing the “fallacy” of abolitionism, an endorsement that Van Evrie proudly printed in his book.⁶³ Davis later recommended Van Evrie for an Interior Department sinecure, which would support him while he finished another book, effectively a federal subsidy for proslavery propaganda, and John A. Quitman disseminated copies of Van Evrie’s work during the 1856 election.⁶⁴ Vehement opposition to Douglas among Van Evrie’s northern devotees reveals the friction between rival racist worldviews. In an 1860 letter to Davis, one of Van Evrie’s Vermont aficionados mocked the “Douglas Democratic abolitionists.”⁶⁵ In his own correspondence with the Mississippian, Van Evrie excoriated northern Democrats for favoring squatter sovereignty and free territories and pledged to repair the damage by propagating southern ideals.⁶⁶

Nonslaveholders’ racism notwithstanding, few masters wanted to leave their property rights up to a vote. Hence a second source of tension in the Democratic coalition: the sometimes veiled but always present antidemocratic thrust of proslavery politics.⁶⁷ Southern politicians boldly expressed these sentiments during the Lecompton controversy: they denied that rule by “the people” meant rule by “the majority” in Kansas; denounced an “absolute majority” as “the most cruel, rapacious, intolerant and intolerable of all tyrants”; and warned that defeat of the Lecompton Constitution would convert the United States into “a pure Democracy” ruled by “an irrepressible mob.”⁶⁸ These ideas had thrived in proslavery thought for years. In his seminal 1832 proslavery text, Thomas Dew opined that “the exclusive owners of property ever have been, ever will, and perhaps ever ought to be, the virtual rulers of mankind,” a sentiment approvingly quoted by southern writers into the 1850s.⁶⁹ Davis wholeheartedly agreed, recoiling from the prospect of slavery being subjected to “the paramount purpose of a reckless majority.”⁷⁰ This antimajoritarian ethos bred hostility to popular sovereignty. As a Georgian wrote in 1856, “The citizens of a territory according to the Democratic creed may control the matter [of slavery], but not according to my doctrine. No number of citizens or people have a right to take away my property so long as we live under the Constitution.” If “the free community steal or trespass on the property of the slave-owner … Congress is bound to protect it.”⁷¹ In polities where property rights undergirded racial hierarchy, reactionary critiques of democracy remained vibrant.

Southern statesmen acted on these impulses by reducing the power of local and national majorities. Southern Democrats used the two-thirds rule to maintain a minority check on presidential nominations, and during the 1850–51 crisis, Davis advocated imposing a similar rule on Congress to give the South a sectional veto.⁷² From 1835 to 1844, southern congressmen shielded slavery from debate by gagging antislavery petitions.⁷³ They also worked within their own states to protect slavery from popular meddling. Mississippi’s 1832 state constitution prohibited the legislature from emancipating slaves without masters’ consent.⁷⁴ A generation later, a clash over Virginia’s state constitution pitted westerners, who supported a one (white) man, one vote policy, against eastern planters, who defended property requirements for office holding and the incorporation of property into legislative apportionment, lest western schemes allow property “to be plundered at the discretion of the majority.”⁷⁵ Virginia’s comparatively egalitarian 1851 constitution provoked southern critics of universal white male suffrage to denounce government by “King Numbers” as “a thorough and complete absolutism.”⁷⁶ Clearly, planter-politicians’ efforts to garner mass support for slavery did not mean that they relished sharing power. Rather, they demanded exclusive control over slavery as well as public assistance for its maintenance, belying claims that slavery promoted white equality. There were some majority rights that masters did not feel bound to respect.

Tensions over race, property, and democracy eroded Democratic solidarity in three ways. First, they made racism a fragile foundation for party unity. Though sometimes regarded as a monolithic force, racism divided Democrats when they attempted to build concrete policies upon divergent beliefs. Douglas conflated white supremacy with white men’s equality and would empower local white majorities to establish slavery, prohibit it, or outlaw black migration, as in Illinois. This collided with Davis’s dedication to slavery’s perpetual stability, grounded in masters’ right to impose the burden of slavery on any community they chose. United by loathing of antislavery activists, Davis and Douglas could not agree on how white men should rule. Like anti-abolitionism and negative partisanship, racism rallied Democrats against common enemies but provided no single template for lawmaking.

Second, slaveholders’ peculiar concerns compelled them to ask for far more than a weak government. Mere insulation from federal interference could not sustain a property regime that required so much collective effort to maintain. Northern Democrats resisted frontal attacks on slaveholders’ property rights, but they quarreled with southern allies over how far to extend federal power to protect them. By the late 1850s, southern Democrats were primed to ask for even more from their northern counterparts. Since proslavery politics was a moving target, Democrats’ relationship to slavery was subject to constant and rancorous renegotiation.

Finally, these tensions made territories likely settings for intraparty battles. Conflicts between popular sovereignty and the common-property doctrine had long divided Democrats, and the ongoing turmoil in Kansas, coupled with the Dred Scott decision, raised the stakes. A triumph for southern Democrats, Taney’s ruling rendered local and national majorities impotent to bar slavery. But as events in Kansas and Congress stoked further conflict, it was an open question whether northern Democrats would acquiesce. The issues were not new, but the intensity of the debate prevented Democrats from papering over their disagreements.

Hoping to stanch the bleeding from the Democracy’s self-inflicted wound, Buchanan named Robert J. Walker as the Kansas Territory’s fourth governor in May 1857. Pennsylvania-born but deeply rooted in Mississippi and devoted to the Democracy, Walker seemed ideally suited to the task, and Douglas persuaded him to accept the appointment, arguing that honest execution of popular sovereignty would pacify Kansas and vindicate the Democratic Party. In a polarized political climate, however, Walker could not please everyone. Southerners who expected him to champion slavery detested his inaugural address for implying that Kansas was destined to be a free state and insisting that any state constitution be submitted for popular approval.⁷⁷ Mississippi legislators expressed “unqualified condemnation” of Walker, and Democrats across the Deep South denounced his perfidy.⁷⁸

Proslavery partisans in Kansas tried to outflank Walker by expediting statehood. Because free-state voters had boycotted the June 1857 election of delegates to the latest convention, it was a proslavery conclave that met in Lecompton in October to write a state constitution. Alarmed by recent regular elections that ensured an antislavery majority in the next territorial legislature, Lecompton delegates were determined to achieve slave statehood before free-staters took power.⁷⁹ Accordingly, they wrote a constitution that embodied the antimajoritarian, proslavery ethos. Article 7 declared that “the right of property is before and higher than any constitutional sanction, and the right of the owner of a slave to such slave and its increase is the same and as inviolable as the right of the owner of any property whatever,” echoing Davis’s argument that paper constitutions merely recognized masters’ primordial property rights. Other provisions barred legislators from emancipating slaves without masters’ consent or preventing slaveholders’ migration into the state. The constitution could not be amended until 1864, and “no alteration shall be made to affect the rights of property in the ownership of slaves.” Crucially, the delegates ignored Buchanan’s private entreaties and refused to submit the entire document to Kansas voters, instead allowing them only to decide on whether to include Article 7; even if it were rejected, “the right of property in slaves now in this Territory shall in no manner be interfered with.” Either way, slavery would be embedded in Kansas.⁸⁰

Douglas began receiving advice about the Lecompton Constitution months before it reached Congress in December. Kansas contacts advised that northern settlers were Douglas’s true allies and that proslavery Democrats’ obstinate opposition to a popular referendum would trigger a crisis. The alienation between northern and southern Democrats in Kansas was portentous.⁸¹ Meanwhile, friends across the free states worried that proslavery trickery would cause the “utter destruction” of the northern Democracy.⁸² By late fall, most northern Democrats concluded that the Lecompton Constitution would desecrate popular sovereignty and demolish their party. (Conversely, some southern Democrats believed that admitting a free Kansas would ruin the party in the South.⁸³ Democrats had made too many promises.) Three-quarters of Indiana’s Democratic newspapers opposed Lecompton, as did all but one in Illinois and large majorities in Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio.⁸⁴ Douglas remained undecided in late November but pledged to oppose Lecompton if it were the “act and will of a small minority, who have attempted to cheat & defraud the majority by trickery & juggling.”⁸⁵ Two weeks later, driven by zeal for popular sovereignty and dread of popular backlash, he swore hostility to the “Lecompton Fraud.”⁸⁶ Illinois Democrat Thomas L. Harris regretted Buchanan’s support for Lecompton but boasted that “we will whip out the whole concern.” “Douglas,” he predicted, “will make the greatest effort of his life in opposition to this juggle.”⁸⁷

As Davis prepared to return to the Senate, he made his own position clear: the South must secure Kansas. Speaking in Mississippi, Davis vowed to abandon Buchanan if he opposed the Lecompton Constitution; denounced popular sovereignty and Walker; lauded slave labor as a boon to world civilization that could profitably be used to raise tobacco and hemp in eastern Kansas; and warned that if abolitionists captured Kansas, they would assail Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas. According to this domino theory, Kansas stood between the South and destruction by antislavery encirclement. Davis also advised that congressional rejection of Lecompton would confront the South with the question it faced in 1851: resistance or submission? He favored resistance and spoke of stockpiling arms and strengthening southern militias.⁸⁸ Eager to snag a new slave state and please their constituents before the fall 1857 elections, southern Democrats defended Lecompton’s legitimacy.⁸⁹

As Davis and Douglas sped toward a collision, Buchanan received divided counsel. Southern Democrats echoed Davis’s threat to disown the administration, and some advocated secession if Lecompton were rejected.⁹⁰ But other powerful voices begged Buchanan to demand its submission to Kansas voters. According to Governor Walker, even proslavery partisans admitted that “a very large majority of the Settlers are for a free state.”⁹¹ Democratic public intellectual George Bancroft offered historically informed guidance, contrasting Andrew Jackson’s battle against nullification with Pierce’s timid administration, which had “died of Jefferson Davis” and other proslavery schemers who were now trying to dupe Buchanan. Allow Kansans to make their own government, Bancroft advised, and peace would prevail.⁹² But Buchanan decided that Lecompton’s passage would wreck the Republicans and unite Democrats behind his leadership. In his December 8 message to Congress, Buchanan endorsed the Lecompton Constitution and promised that “excitement” would “speedily pass away” after Kansas statehood. He had planted his flag in the southern camp.⁹³

Congressional debate erupted immediately. After hearing Buchanan’s message, Douglas brusquely rebuked its approval of the “proceedings of the Lecompton convention.” Davis objected that it was “premature” to discuss the message but then did precisely that, concurring with Buchanan that no popular referendum on Lecompton was necessary.⁹⁴ Douglas and Davis had sketched the basic arguments they would reiterate deep into 1858.

The next day, Douglas asserted that he was not merely feuding with Buchanan but battling for the Democracy’s soul. Claiming ideological consistency, he insisted that the principles of the Kansas-Nebraska Act demanded that the entire Lecompton Constitution be referred to Kansas voters. Douglas cast the conflict in terms of majority versus minority rule by accusing Lecompton delegates of “disfranchis[ing]” voters who loathed the proffered constitution and would boycott the vote, “thus referring the slavery clause to a minority of the people of Kansas.” He professed to “care not” how Kansans voted, emphasizing that he opposed Lecompton because it was undemocratic, not because it was proslavery. To tremendous applause, Douglas closed with a statement about party loyalty. He prized Democratic unity, “but if the party will not stand by its principles, its faith, its pledges, I will stand there, and abide whatever consequences may result from the position.” He would resist the Lecompton Constitution “to the last” and defend “the great principle of popular sovereignty … against assault from any and all quarters.”⁹⁵ These comments revealed a shift in Douglas’s thinking. Previously, he had seen antislavery dissidents like John Wentworth and Lyman Trumbull as the primary threats to the Democracy, but now the danger came from proslavery proponents of minority rule.

Douglas’s defiance scrambled political alignments. In editorials, diaries, and letters, most northerners hailed his course. Conspicuous in their reactions was the image of Douglas as a northern paladin. Still committed to national party cohesion, Douglas did not identify as such, but many northerners, including some who formerly regarded him as a proslavery stooge, did. Four days into the debate, New York diarist George Templeton Strong mused that Douglas had “seced[ed] from the Administration and the South.”⁹⁶ An Indiana Democratic editor hailed Douglas as “the giant of the North.”⁹⁷ A Pennsylvanian praised Douglas’s “noble stand” against “this nefarious outrage sought to be inflicted by the Lecompton Convention [and] by the fire eaters of the South.”⁹⁸ Some admirers already imagined Douglas riding northern support to the White House; one predicted that “the North will ralley [sic] around you for their standard bearer for 1860.”⁹⁹ Once reviled as a pawn of the Slave Power, Douglas now appeared to be its enemy. A New Yorker vowed that if the “Southern fire eaters” provoked civil war, they would reap nothing but “death … to them and their peculiar institutions.” In any event, he enthused, “the slave Power will not govern this country but three years” longer.¹⁰⁰

Many northern Democrats adopted this sectional outlook on the controversy, criticizing their southern counterparts and arguing that the party would collapse if it jettisoned popular sovereignty. An outraged New Jerseyan reported that his “blood boil[ed] with indignation” over southern Democrats’ attacks on Douglas and their short-sighted zeal for Lecompton.¹⁰¹ A Michigan Democrat hated to see the Cincinnati platform discarded by the “Administration and the Southern wing of the Party” and worried that the northern Democracy would be “blotted out.”¹⁰² Even bigots balked at endorsing minority rule. “Be not driven from the Democratic party by a set of nigger drivers aided by Northern party heads,” exhorted a New Yorker. “The people will, ere long, see that in this last contest you was the true expounder of Democracy, and not your opponents.”¹⁰³ Bracing for the worst, some vowed to follow Douglas out of the party, although most hoped to remain within the Democratic fold.¹⁰⁴

The Lecompton conflict aggravated sharp ideological divisions that Democrats had repressed but never resolved, and Douglas’s advocates recognized the struggle between white men’s democracy and planters’ property. One New Yorker contrasted Douglas’s fidelity to majoritarianism against the South’s only principle: “that of protecting & enhancing the value of its slave property.”¹⁰⁵ An Illinoisan urged Douglas to persevere against an administration that debased the Kansas-Nebraska Act by “favor[ing] and assist[ing] a minority to do things repugnant to a large majority” of Kansas inhabitants.¹⁰⁶ Some predicted a showdown with Douglas’s Mississippi rival: “Jeff Davis desires to break a lance with you,” observed an Illinoisan who eagerly anticipated the battle.¹⁰⁷

Republicans looked on with mixed emotions. Accustomed to deriding northern Democrats as lackeys of the Slave Power, prominent Illinois Republicans initially downplayed Lecompton’s significance, but some reconsidered. In early December, Lyman Trumbull doubted that the “‘Rumpus’ among the bogus Democracy will amount to much.”¹⁰⁸ Twenty days later, however, he granted that Douglas had “materially damage[d] his prospects with the South” and might become a Republican.¹⁰⁹ Some were torn between adopting Douglas as an ally and rebuffing him as an opportunist. William H. Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner, accused Douglas of caring only about reelection; his motives were “as base as his base nature.”¹¹⁰ But the next day, Herndon admitted his willingness to support Douglas to serve a greater good: “Mr. Douglas will in due time become Republican and attempt to lead our forces,” he informed abolitionist Theodore Parker, “and I may have to vote for the wretch—I will do so to kill a worse—Slavery.”¹¹¹ Outside Illinois, many Republicans were readier to accept Douglas. “I say nothing about motives,” declared Massachusetts senator Henry Wilson. “I leave motives to God.” The Illinoisan was “of more weight to our cause than any ten men in the country … and I know that Douglas will go for crushing the Slave power to atoms.”¹¹² These sentiments unnerved Illinois Republicans who considered Douglas an unworthy ally.¹¹³

But they also feared Douglas’s appeal among the Republican rank and file. In a famous letter to Trumbull, Abraham Lincoln criticized New York editor Horace Greeley’s pro-Douglas paeans, apprehending that his 10,000 Illinois readers might not “stand firm” against the Democracy.¹¹⁴ If Lincoln had perused Douglas’s mail, his anxiety would have increased, for it included numerous Republican endorsements. One Ohio Republican admitted having felt “deep bitterness” toward Douglas over the Kansas-Nebraska Act but now prayed that God would sustain him.¹¹⁵ An Indianan who had never voted Democratic in his life vowed to support Douglas and circulate his speeches.¹¹⁶ From Kansas came word that Republicans appreciated Douglas’s defense of territorial self-rule.¹¹⁷

Many of these correspondents, moreover, were warming to popular sovereignty. A self-identified “Black Republican” from New York endorsed the policy so long as it was “fairly and honestly administered.” He once suspected it was a “game to benefit the South,” but Douglas’s anti-Lecompton stance “did much to remove my prejudice.”¹¹⁸ Similarly, a Pittsburgh Republican belatedly accepted the Kansas-Nebraska Act, believing that popular sovereignty “is, perhaps, all we need” to make Kansas free. He predicted that if northern Democrats continued to defy the “aggressions of the Slave Power,” they would sweep the North.¹¹⁹ The dynamics of the Lecompton struggle encouraged Republican conversions, since southern hostility to majority rule suggested that popular sovereignty might really be a free-soil policy.¹²⁰ Thus, some erstwhile opponents decided that Douglas stood for freedom. “If the people of Kansas can be protected in their just rights against fraud,” wrote one Free-Soiler, “all will yet be right, and Slavery with its unlimited demands will be kept out of that devoted territory.”¹²¹ Douglas seemed uniquely capable of persuading former foes, and Republicans rightly worried that he would disrupt their diverse coalition.

Particularly noteworthy was Douglas’s magnetic effect on prodigal Democrats. “I had been driven to act with parties whose sentiments did not altogether suit me,” wrote a Bay State correspondent, “because of the downright dishonesty” of many leading Democrats. Now he hoped northern Democrats would regroup behind the “principles of ‘Squatter Sovereignty.’”¹²² An Ohioan who had bolted the Democracy “because I thought it given over to the Slave Power” was now “willing to forget and forgive and extend the right hand of fellowship.”¹²³ These defections alarmed Republicans who knew that dissident Democrats had long galvanized antislavery politics.¹²⁴ Historians have parsed crucial differences between Republicans and northern Democrats on issues ranging from slavery to gender norms, but late antebellum party affiliations were mutable, and Douglas’s anti-Lecompton crusade ensured that movement between parties flowed both directions.

Partisan loyalties were flexible in Illinois despite leading Republicans’ antipathy toward Douglas. From Carrollton came word that most Republicans “heartily approve[d]” Douglas’s position.¹²⁵ In Chicago, “hundreds of Democrats” who had voted Republican while awaiting a “plausible excuse to return to the democratic fold” were ready to jump.¹²⁶ Statewide, erstwhile Republicans signaled acceptance of popular sovereignty if honestly executed, since they believed it would make Kansas free.¹²⁷ Some Republicans even endorsed fusion, reckoning that Douglas deserved their support for opposing the common-property doctrine.¹²⁸ Republicans’ internal debate was not a geographic dispute between malleable easterners and Illinois purists; it was an ideological quarrel between those who would embrace Douglas and popular sovereignty and those who saw both as dangerous.

Douglas’s most astounding admirer was Jonathan Blanchard, an Illinois abolitionist with unimpeachable credentials. Born in Vermont two years before Douglas, Blanchard had lectured for the American Anti-Slavery Society, studied at Lane Seminary, been a delegate to London’s 1843 World Anti-Slavery Convention, and, since 1845, served as president of Knox College, a Galesburg institution that later produced a vocally Republican audience for the fifth Lincoln-Douglas debate. Blanchard had twice sparred with Douglas, once in an epistolary assault on the Fugitive Slave Act and once in a live discussion of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.¹²⁹ In May 1858, however, he praised Douglas for “boldly resist[ing]” the South and declared that God had placed him “on the side of freedom against all unconstitutional demands of the slave power.” Blanchard backed Douglas’s reelection to the Senate and hoped he would win the presidency in 1860.¹³⁰ This endorsement suggested Douglas might swallow the antislavery movement whole.

Douglas had no intention of switching parties or embracing abolitionism, but he did coordinate with Republicans, including in a mid-December strategy session with Congressmen Schuyler Colfax (Indiana) and Anson Burlingame (Massachusetts). Colfax’s meeting notes are instructive. Douglas accused Davis and other “Southrons” of contemplating secession and suggested that “the formation of a great Constitutional Union party” might be necessary to defeat them. He resolved to allow Kansans to write a new constitution, to advance his northwestern agenda by admitting Minnesota and Oregon as free states, and to place southern radicals in the position of “insurgents” so that the “Army & the power of the Nation would be against them” in case of war. Douglas and Colfax agreed that a temporary alliance was vital, even if new issues would soon divide Republicans and anti-Lecompton Democrats.¹³¹

This bipartisan cooperation handed Douglas’s foes an inflammatory argument. After Douglas first repudiated the Lecompton Constitution, Albert Gallatin Brown sarcastically congratulated Henry Wilson on the “new leader of the Republican party.”¹³² A recent southern migrant to Illinois denounced Douglas as an “abolitionist in disguise” and the “bedfellow” of Charles Sumner, Salmon Chase, and William Seward.¹³³ Douglas’s northern adversaries—acolytes of dough-faced James Buchanan, William Bigler, and Jesse Bright—echoed these indictments, with one Philadelphian blasting Douglas for backsliding into the free-soilism that had made him zealous for California statehood.¹³⁴ Southern critics made similar accusations. A South Carolina editor branded Douglas “a traitor to the South” and condemned him for being “frequently closeted with leading abolitionists.” Boldly advocating southern primacy, he concluded, “The Democratic party, and particularly the Southern Democracy, (which is identical with what the national Democracy is, or should be,) needs no alliance with those who are polluted with the leprosy of Abolitionism.”¹³⁵ Southern attacks reflected loathing of popular sovereignty; as Varina Davis recalled, this heresy, embraced by Democratic “abolitionists,” was “eminently dangerous” to slavery.¹³⁶ Despite their rhetorical power, however, the “Republican” and “abolitionist” epithets obscured a vital point: Douglas resisted Lecompton from within the Democratic Party. Northern bolts, from the Barnburners of 1848 to the Republican exodus of 1854–56, had magnified southern power over the Democracy. But Douglas’s resistance threatened the southern hegemony that slave-state Democrats cited as proof of the party’s reliability. Lecomptonites tarred Douglas as an apostate, but his prestige among Democrats actually made him a deadlier foe.

Douglas’s swelling popularity therefore emboldened fire-eaters who questioned whether the Democracy could deliver a slaveholding Kansas. Antislavery was rising like Mississippi floodwaters, warned John A. Quitman, and Lecompton’s defeat would prove that northern Democrats had been swept away.¹³⁷ Nervous southern Democrats declared that congressional rejection of the Lecompton Constitution would justify secession. Davis vowed that the slave states would resist such “degradation” to the extremity of “pulling down … this grand political fabric of ours to its foundation,” and similarly militant talk echoed in private correspondence and the southern press.¹³⁸ A Mississippi congressman urged constituents to prepare for war, for when “the sun of the Union sets, it will go down in blood.”¹³⁹ With the Democracy and the Union’s futures hanging in the balance, Davis and Douglas fought over Kansas and the deeper question of whether property rights would trump majority rule.

The battle raged throughout early 1858 and further alienated northern Douglas Democrats from the party’s chiefly southern pro-Lecompton wing. Although often incapacitated by an excruciating eye ailment, Davis participated when able.¹⁴⁰ Meanwhile, Douglas, buoyed by Kansas voters’ overwhelming rejection of the Lecompton Constitution on January 4, led the opposition.¹⁴¹ Had northern Democrats all accepted Lecompton, it would have passed easily, for the party controlled 128 of 234 House seats and 37 of 62 in the Senate. But with much of the northern wing in revolt, southern Democrats struggled to force Lecompton through Congress; even if southerners voted as a bloc in the House, they still needed over two dozen northern votes.¹⁴² The clash rattled southern Democrats because it exposed the limits of their power and weakened their argument for the party’s soundness on slavery.

Debate intensified when Buchanan formally submitted the Lecompton Constitution to Congress on February 2. Douglas promptly countered with a protest petition from Kansas officeholders.¹⁴³ Six days later, Davis came from his sickbed to praise Buchanan, insist that Kansas needed slave labor, and accuse critics of opposing Lecompton for its slavery clause, thus impugning those, like Douglas, who professed indifference over slavery’s future in Kansas.¹⁴⁴

Douglas replied at length on March 22. He denied that Lecompton reflected the will of Kansas’s free-state majority; hailed popular sovereignty as the galvanizing principle of the American Revolution; reiterated that it was Lecompton’s antimajoritarian genesis to which he objected; and charged southerners with supporting Lecompton solely for slavery’s sake. He also rebutted a series of editorials published in the Buchanan administration’s mouthpiece, the Washington Union, which affirmed the Lecompton Constitution’s elevation of slavery above state or territorial power. This doctrine, which sprouted from seeds planted by Calhoun and fertilized by Davis and Taney, would insulate slaveholders’ property rights from local or national majorities. Appalled, Douglas warned that this would nationalize slavery and deliver “a death blow to State rights.” The idea that slavery “goes everywhere under the Constitution … and yet is higher than the Constitution, above the Constitution, beyond the reach of sovereign power … will not be tolerated.”¹⁴⁵ Democrats’ efforts to contain the dispute failed because it touched issues far beyond Kansas. Douglas anticipated future conflict by pledging to defend the right of any state or territory to prohibit slavery.

As debate ground on, correspondents deluged Douglas with letters. Northern Democrats thanked him for rebuking a perversion of popular sovereignty.¹⁴⁶ Old Free-Soilers, including Jacob Brinkerhoff, one of the Wilmot Proviso’s original proponents, hailed Douglas as an ally.¹⁴⁷ Admirers of all parties praised Douglas’s defense of majority rule, and some Republicans applauded popular sovereignty.¹⁴⁸ Congratulations came from unlikely quarters, including the correspondent who, after hearing Douglas’s March 22 speech, requested a donation to Wilberforce University, an African American institution named for a British abolitionist.¹⁴⁹ From the South came variations on an ultimatum: relent or face personal and national ruin.¹⁵⁰

Buchanan launched a two-pronged campaign to force Lecompton through Congress and bring party rebels to heel. In Congress, he turned the screws on wavering northern Democrats, offering threats and inducements to change their votes. The administration resorted to outright bribery (one agent admitted spending over $30,000) and left a trail of corruption that Republicans uncovered and exploited in the 1860 election, another case of antislavery activists capitalizing on Democrats’ internal battles.¹⁵¹ Buchanan also wielded the patronage club against western Douglasites. In February 1858, Douglas complained that Buchanan was “removing all my friends from office & requiring pledges of hostility to me from all persons appointed to office.”¹⁵² The president struck hardest in Illinois and Ohio, dismissing recalcitrant postmasters from lucrative jobs in Chicago, Cleveland, and Columbus. Buchanan and Douglas had quarreled over patronage for a year, but these sackings clearly aimed to cow northern Democrats into submission; in fact, they only escalated intraparty conflict.¹⁵³

Buchanan notched a preliminary victory on March 23 when the Senate voted 33–25 to accept the Lecompton Constitution. Davis was out sick, while Douglas predictably voted nay with the Republicans and three Democrats: Charles Stuart of Michigan, George Pugh of Ohio, and David Broderick of California.¹⁵⁴ But the House, where the Douglasite-Republican coalition was stronger, passed a rival bill that would return the constitution to Kansas for amendment and a popular referendum.¹⁵⁵ Caught between their most popular leader and their president, some northern Democrats scrambled to cut a deal. William English of Indiana, a member of the conference committee tasked with reconciling the Senate and House bills, lent his name to a possible compromise. It would submit the Lecompton Constitution to Kansas voters with the stipulation that if they rejected it, they must wait until their population reached 93,420 (the minimum for one representative) to reapply for statehood; if they adopted Lecompton, Kansas would be admitted with a generous federal land grant of four million acres, although this was substantially less than the twenty-three million acres requested by the Lecompton convention.¹⁵⁶

Contrary to a persistent misconception, the English Compromise did not offer extra land to bribe Kansans into sanctioning slavery. Rather, the reduced land grant was the pretext for referring the Lecompton Constitution to the voters; the bait was expedited statehood. The compromise addressed northern objections by returning the constitution to Kansas voters, while the acreage adjustment allowed southern hair-splitters to claim that land, not slavery, was at stake in the territorial referendum.¹⁵⁷ Douglas found it tempting, but a conversation with Broderick—who allegedly roared that, rather than acquiesce, Douglas “had better go into the street and blow out your brains!”—stiffened his spine.¹⁵⁸ He spurned the compromise for two reasons: it failed to refer the entire constitution to territorial voters, and it rigged the scales by postponing statehood if they voted no. He deemed this an insidious form of congressional intervention: with “inducements on one side, and penalties on the other, there is no freedom of election.”¹⁵⁹ Douglas’s opposition actually persuaded some southern holdouts to accept the English Compromise, and it passed the Senate on April 30. Once again, Douglas voted nay with Broderick, Stuart, and the Republicans, while Pugh joined southerners, including Davis, and pro-administration northerners like Bigler and Bright in the affirmative.¹⁶⁰ In the House, enough anti-Lecompton Democrats switched sides to pass the compromise bill and Buchanan signed it, lamely claiming victory. That August, Kansas’s free-state majority rejected the Lecompton Constitution by a decisive vote: 11,300 to 1,788.¹⁶¹

The Lecompton conflagration exacerbated intraparty conflict in three ways. First, it cemented Douglas’s place as the North’s leading Democrat, embittering Buchananites and alarming southern Democrats who felt the reins of power slipping away. Second, Douglas’s improved standing among a startlingly wide range of northerners encouraged a perceptible, though always incomplete, convergence between northern Democrats and Republicans. They divided on many issues, but Lecompton united them against a flagrantly proslavery perversion of popular sovereignty, which some Republicans now saw as a free-soil policy. Although only partial, this convergence disturbed Republican stalwarts and southern Democrats alike, for they both saw danger in Douglas’s broad appeal.¹⁶² Finally, that convergence promoted a parallel merger between southern Democrats and fire-eaters. As northern allies became unreliable, southern Democrats veered toward hardline proslavery policies to win support at home, thus moving closer to their extremist rivals.¹⁶³ This trend was foreshadowed in the 1840s when southern Democrats adopted Calhoun’s position on slavery expansion, but the Lecompton battle accelerated the process.

Democrats thus entered the summer of 1858 more sectionally polarized than ever before. The competing claims of majority rule and property rights could not be reconciled with vague promises of “non-intervention,” and party unity could not be ensured by shrill appeals to white supremacy. When forced to govern, northern and southern Democrats turned on each other, hailing Douglas and Davis as champions of hostile sectional factions. Soon, both faced constituents riled up by sectionalism and suspicious of Democratic duplicity. They weathered the storm, but winning at home further eroded the brittle bonds of party unity.

Lecompton demolished Davis’s already fragile faith in Douglas Democrats, but not his determination to maintain a national party that would promote slaveholders’ interests. So, when Congress adjourned in June 1858, Davis did not head south; instead, he embarked on a northern tour calculated to rebuild Democratic unity on his terms.¹⁶⁴

Ostensibly seeking a healthier climate, Davis seized every opportunity to speak, from a shipboard Independence Day oration to speeches in New England and New York City. He promised that sectional agitators could not wreck the Union. He gloried in the Democracy’s future, a fashionable theme at Maine’s state Democratic convention, and quoted Thomas Jefferson’s adage about northern Democrats being the South’s natural allies. He dabbled in demagoguery, contrasting mongrelized Latin Americans with North America’s spotless Anglo-Saxons who built their republic on the rock of white supremacy. He defended slavery as a positive good and accused abolitionists of assailing property rights.¹⁶⁵ It was familiar fare: a bid for cross-sectional unity grounded in nationalism, racism, and anti-abolitionism. The tour netted Davis an honorary degree from Bowdoin College and, as Varina recalled, nurtured his hopes for “a peaceful adjustment of the sectional dissonance.”¹⁶⁶

But the Democracy was in serious trouble. One deceptively minor incident illuminated the gap between Davis’s values and those of his hosts. While in Maine, he and Varina attended commencement exercises at the Portland Free High School, where the daughter of what Varina deemed “a dissipated, ignorant washer-woman” exhibited her talent for calculus. The Davises wondered whether the young woman’s state-sponsored education had made her dissatisfied—if a “cheery working woman” had been “spoiled” by book learning. They considered taking her back to Mississippi but decided that she had the “habits of her class” and could not be placed “on the social plane of our family.”¹⁶⁷ Thus they spurned the ethos of upward mobility shared by Douglas, Lincoln, and northerners of all parties.¹⁶⁸

Davis’s audiences, moreover, consisted mainly of those northerners who were most likely to cheer him. New England Democrats like Caleb Cushing, who had served in Franklin Pierce’s cabinet and introduced Davis at Faneuil Hall, were an embattled minority who depended on federal patronage. This left them sensitive to administration pressure and eager to toe the line on Lecompton.¹⁶⁹ Had Davis visited the Northwest, his reception would have been chilly.

Most alarming was the southern backlash against Davis’s tour: even before the senator returned home, firebrands attacked him for courting Yankees and yielding on the territories. In Portland, Davis averred that territories were “the common property of the States” and that “whatever is property in any one of the States must be so considered in any of the territories.” But then he observed that territorial legislatures could “refuse to enact such laws and police regulations” as were necessary to “give security” to slaveholders’ property, thus practically nullifying their abstract right.¹⁷⁰ Davis was merely stating a fact, not advocating a policy.¹⁷¹ But his comments provoked Deep South critics to call him a “Union-shrieking conservative” whose oratory was a “pitiable spectacle of human weakness.”¹⁷² Weeks before returning home, Davis began fighting to restore his reputation.¹⁷³ Sectionalism had shaken Mississippi’s political landscape, and Davis staggered to regain his footing.

As Davis defended his northern overtures, Douglas struggled to prove that the Democracy was not a cat’s-paw of the South. The stakes were enormous because he was running for reelection against a formidable challenger. “I shall have my hands full,” Douglas mused upon learning that Abraham Lincoln sought his seat. He respected Lincoln’s mastery of the politician’s craft and praised the lanky lawyer as “the best stump-speaker, with his droll ways and dry jokes, in the West.”¹⁷⁴ The 1858 Illinois senate race is a mainstay of Lincoln lore, but it also reveals much about Douglas and the Democracy.¹⁷⁵

Lincoln and Douglas were neither polar opposites nor variations on a theme. Both had moved west and thrived in Illinois, where Lincoln settled after a hardscrabble boyhood in Kentucky and Indiana. They served together in the state legislature, clashing over tariffs and banking while cooperating on internal improvements. Since then, Douglas had soared to national prominence while Lincoln (save for one term in Congress) remained in Illinois, built a flourishing law practice, and helped organize the Republican Party. He narrowly missed a senate seat in 1855 but remained an incisive critic of Douglas and popular sovereignty. Some of Lincoln’s views—support for enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, interest in colonization, and opposition to the Lecompton Constitution—resembled Douglas’s, but on fundamental territorial policy they were starkly opposed. Douglas would defer to local majorities, while Lincoln would use a national majority to block slavery’s expansion and steer it toward extinction. Lincoln’s principled opposition to Douglas had fueled his personal and partisan advancement; now he hoped to topple the northern Democracy’s leading senator.¹⁷⁶

This comparison clarifies Lincoln and Douglas’s hard-fought contest, which is sometimes misportrayed as a distillation of the sectional conflict. The debates, suggests one scholar, “held within themselves the essence of the whole tragic story of slavery, secession, and civil war,” for Illinois “represented in microcosm the sectional forces that were tearing at the political fabric of America itself.”¹⁷⁷ This reading dramatizes the campaign by distorting it. Lacking a cotton kingdom, Illinois was not a microcosm of antebellum America. Without a Calhounian contender, the Lincoln-Douglas canvass featured strictly northern political views, and without an abolitionist in the running, it did not even cover the range of northern opinion. Only by truncating the political spectrum and conscripting Douglas to represent a southern position, which he denounced throughout the Lecompton controversy, can the election encapsulate the sectional conflict. Its significance was subtler: for Lincoln, it was an opportunity to oust an opponent whom northern voters found all too appealing; for Douglas, it was a struggle to garner northern support without further alienating southern allies.

The Lincoln-Douglas race did, however, receive national attention. Many northern Democrats were up for reelection, but Douglas’s race loomed largest because of his outsized political stature. “The eyes of the whole Nation are now directed to this State,” wrote a Springfield resident in April 1858, “[and] the contest bids fair to be a most animated one.”¹⁷⁸

Complicating matters was a third candidate who, perhaps because he missed the renowned debates, is often overlooked. In late summer, Buchanan’s Illinois supporters (called Danites) convinced ex-senator Sidney Breese to enter the field as the genuine Democratic candidate. Some Danites thought Breese could prevail; others accepted a probable Lincoln victory as the price of revenge against Douglas, whom they despised more than a Republican.¹⁷⁹ In hindsight, Breese’s campaign seems quixotic, but it threatened to upend Douglas’s strategy. Historians regularly identify southern Illinois—Egypt—as a Douglas stronghold, packed with southern sympathizers who loathed Lincoln’s antislavery views. But Egypt was also where Breese expected to run best.¹⁸⁰ Thus, Douglas would have to parry Lincoln’s attacks without driving Egyptians into Breese’s camp. As Lincoln put it, Douglas was “lean[ing] Southward” to “keep the Buchanan party from growing in Illinois.”¹⁸¹ Eager to siphon votes away from Douglas, Republicans covertly cooperated with the Danite campaign.¹⁸²

Breese’s candidacy was part of a broader administration attack on Douglas. That a president would conspire against a leading senator of his own party underscores the severity of the Democratic rupture. Northeastern Buchananites like William Bigler and Daniel Dickinson advised Danites and aided their fund-raising efforts.¹⁸³ Pro-administration speakers crisscrossed Illinois, accusing Douglas of courting Republicans and urging Democrats to abandon him.¹⁸⁴ Southern Democrats pitched in, none more zealously than Louisiana senator John Slidell, who openly hoped for Lincoln’s victory. Slidell encouraged prominent Democrats to disown Douglas and visited Chicago to coordinate with Danites, including postal employees who could suppress Douglas’s campaign materials. There, he claimed that slaves on Douglas’s Mississippi plantation were ill-clothed and malnourished, an accusation that soon appeared in Republican papers. After departing, Slidell advised Buchanan that Breese would probably lose but that patronage pressure could turn Illinois against Douglas by 1860.¹⁸⁵ So intense was the assault that some observers regarded the election as an extension of Douglas’s battle against the administration.¹⁸⁶

Still, Lincoln was Douglas’s principal rival, and the resulting campaign was a key chapter in Lincoln’s rise to the presidency. But the contest was also part of the history of the antebellum Democracy. This perspective foregrounds Republicans’ ambivalence about the Lecompton controversy, their decisive influence on Democratic fragmentation, and the complex politics of race. By putting a wide swath of voters back into play, the Lecompton controversy shaped Lincoln’s and Douglas’s strategies. In their scores of speeches and seven famous debates, Lincoln and Douglas were not simply competing for Whig and Know-Nothing voters in central Illinois (although they were a key constituency) but were also seeking to influence Democrats throughout the state, including both Danites and wavering free-soilers who might return to the Democracy.¹⁸⁷ Douglas strove to rebuild Illinois’s Democratic coalition, while Lincoln sought to turn both antislavery and proslavery Democrats against him.

Lincoln’s alarm over Douglas’s broadening appeal influenced his tactics. Appalled by some Republicans’ readiness to embrace Douglas and popular sovereignty, Lincoln initially relied on a staple message: Douglas flouted northern interests and ideals. This meant downplaying the Lecompton rupture and running against the villain of 1854 rather than the hero of 1858, a key theme of the quotable “House Divided” speech with which Lincoln inaugurated his campaign in June. The Lecompton controversy was merely a “squabble,” Lincoln insisted, and Douglas’s “care not” attitude about slavery could not sustain real resistance to the Slave Power. Indeed, “Stephen” was plotting with “Franklin [Pierce], Roger [Taney], and James [Buchanan]” to legalize slavery nationwide; commencing with popular sovereignty and the Dred Scott decision, the four “workmen” had fashioned a monstrous edifice that needed one more Supreme Court ruling to elevate slavery beyond the reach of local, state, or federal law.¹⁸⁸ This was familiar ground: Lincoln had long condemned popular sovereignty as morally bankrupt and its leading spokesman as a proslavery Mephistopheles. Speaking to antislavery activists who now regarded Douglas as an ally, Lincoln dismissed Lecompton and leveled the conspiracy charge to prove that Douglas was still the same old doughface.¹⁸⁹

But Lincoln sensed that this strategy was not foolproof. Privately, he acknowledged the severity of Democrats’ sectional split, opining in late July that Douglas “care[d] nothing for the South—he knows he is already dead there,” and he recognized that Douglas opposed the nationalization of slavery.¹⁹⁰ Especially damaging to the “four workmen” indictment was Douglas’s readiness to embrace his image as a foe of the Slave Power. When Douglas launched his campaign in July, he cast the Lecompton quarrel in sectional terms, recalling how he “boldly and fearlessly” defended popular sovereignty against “the almost united South.”¹⁹¹ He also averred that popular sovereignty had advanced freedom by eliminating slavery in the Northeast and blocking it from the Old Northwest. During the final debate at Alton in mid-October, Douglas attributed the South’s regional minority status to popular sovereignty’s antislavery effects, an argument unlikely to gratify slaveholders.¹⁹² These comments enabled sympathetic Republicans to regard Douglas as the free-soiler they wanted him to be.

Lincoln adapted by sapping the foundation of Douglas’s ostensibly national party. During the fifth debate at Galesburg, Lincoln argued that Douglas was “becoming sectional too” and that the day was “rapidly approaching” when Douglas’s popularity, like Republicans’, would be restricted to the North.¹⁹³ More famously, at the second debate in Freeport, Lincoln confronted Douglas with the questions that divided him from the administration and its southern supporters, including whether a territorial government could outlaw slavery before statehood and whether he would endorse a Supreme Court ruling that states could not prohibit slavery.¹⁹⁴ This was a striking departure from the conspiracy charge: the more Lincoln isolated Douglas from the southern Democracy, the less Douglas resembled a proslavery artificer.¹⁹⁵ But rigid consistency is no prerequisite for political success, and Lincoln’s aim was to inspire doubt about Douglas in as many minds as possible. Critiques of popular sovereignty would resonate with free-soilers, while the Freeport questions would rile the Danites.¹⁹⁶ Lincoln’s layered strategy reflected the opportunities and pitfalls that the Lecompton battle presented to Republicans.

The Freeport exchange also spotlights how antislavery activism stoked Democratic infighting. This dynamic was already visible in the 1840s, when Free-Soilers blocked extension of the Missouri Compromise line and forced a showdown between popular sovereignty and the common-property doctrine. But it became especially clear when Lincoln propounded his questions and Douglas responded with his “Freeport Doctrine.” To the question about the Supreme Court nixing state laws against slavery, Douglas lamely replied that the ruling was unthinkable.¹⁹⁷ He had to tread more carefully on the eminently practical question of whether a territory could prohibit slavery. Douglas’s response was predictable: what mattered was local legislation, not Supreme Court rulings (or federal laws), since slavery “cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere, unless it is supported by local police regulations,” which could be passed or rejected by local authorities. Territorial voters could elect representatives “who will by unfriendly legislation effectually prevent the introduction” of slavery.¹⁹⁸ Douglas rehashed this point in subsequent debates, insisting that unfriendly local legislation was constitutional and actually more effective than a federal ban.¹⁹⁹ In the final debate, Douglas quoted Davis’s Portland speech, implying that southern Democrats concurred.²⁰⁰

Early Lincoln lore held Douglas’s candor at Freeport derailed his presidential aspirations by ruining his reputation in the South. Scholars have shown, however, that Douglas had made similar statements before 1858, and some contend that the absence of backlash against previous iterations of the Freeport Doctrine proves that it had been acceptable to proslavery southerners until Douglas, reeking of Lecompton treachery, turned them against it.²⁰¹ That said, the Freeport statement did inhibit Democratic reunification. Northern admirers celebrated it as proof that Douglas was still resisting proslavery pressure.²⁰² And while the statement changed few southerners’ minds about Douglas, opponents denounced his continued hostility toward the Dred Scott ruling and proslavery territorial policy.²⁰³ Criticism of Davis’s alleged flirtation with this heresy, moreover, forced him closer to the fire-eaters. Pressure from Republicans and fire-eaters prevented Democrats from veiling their territorial policy in artful ambiguity.

Douglas counterattacked by alluding to popular sovereignty’s antislavery potential but also by unleashing some of the most maliciously racist demagoguery of his career.²⁰⁴ He launched his campaign by affirming that the U.S. government was “made by the white man, for the benefit of the white man, to be administered by white men.”²⁰⁵ He echoed this preemptive perversion of the Gettysburg Address throughout the debates, insisting that American egalitarianism did not apply to black people, that Republicans would flood Illinois with emancipated slaves, and that abolitionists like Lincoln valued black equality more than white liberty.²⁰⁶ With minutes left in the last debate, Douglas announced, “I care more for the great principle of self-government … than I do for all the negroes in Christendom.” Warming to his theme, he added, “I would not endanger the perpetuity of this Union, I would not blot out the great inalienable rights of the white men for all the negroes that ever existed.”²⁰⁷ Lincoln made concessions to popular prejudice, but his expansive views of the Declaration of Independence and all workers’ right to the fruits of their labor were, in contrast, remarkably enlightened.²⁰⁸

Why did Douglas harp on race? Historians have explored the strategic dimensions of Lincoln’s sometimes racist rhetoric, but few have analyzed Douglas from this angle.²⁰⁹ He was deeply prejudiced, but, like Lincoln, he was also a consummate politician whose words were intended to win votes, not bare his soul. In 1858, Douglas’s vituperative remarks were sadly well suited to his aims. Appeals to white supremacy were standard Democratic fare, particularly amid intraparty conflicts, as seen when Davis sounded the horn of white supremacy in his New England tour. In resorting to race-baiting, Douglas was relying on a tested strategy.

Racism helped Douglas court two key constituencies: wavering free-soil Democrats and embittered Danites. Free-soil politics was compatible with racism, as demonstrated in Kansas’s Topeka constitution, which barred black migration as well as slavery, and Douglas knew that racist second thoughts might tempt erstwhile Democrats to abandon the Republicans.²¹⁰ “There are scores of men,” wrote friends in west-central Illinois, “who have voted with the Republicans who cannot swallow the doctrine of Negro Equality.”²¹¹ By denouncing Lincoln in explosively racist terms, Douglas sought to lure them back. Racist appeals could also convince Danites, and attentive southern Democrats, that Douglas was infinitely preferable to his opponent, thus soliciting their support without yielding anything substantive on territorial policy. Racism was the lowest common denominator among the diverse voters Douglas wanted to assemble into a rejuvenated Democratic coalition.

Ironically, however, Douglas’s ugly campaign underscored differences between his views and those of proslavery crusaders. When Douglas criticized Lincoln’s inclusive reading of the Declaration of Independence, for instance, he reaffirmed his belief in white men’s equality; unlike proslavery radicals, he did not categorically dismiss Jefferson as a moonstruck idealist.²¹² Douglas also qualified his claims about black inferiority in ways that defied proslavery doctrine. In his first debate with Lincoln, Douglas averred, “I do not hold that because a negro is our inferior that therefore he ought to be a slave.” Rather, he believed that blacks should “have and enjoy every right, every privilege, and every immunity consistent with the safety” of American society. This, he concluded, “is a question which each State and each Territory must decide for itself.” Conflating state and territorial self-government, Douglas extended popular sovereignty over every aspect of race relations and approved widely divergent local policies, including Maine’s enfranchisement of African American men.²¹³ Douglas repeated these points in every debate where he spoke first, suggesting that he regarded it as a strategically advantageous position, and had made similar statements, including condoning black suffrage, in the Senate.²¹⁴ Proslavery southerners were not so flexible; secessionists later listed black enfranchisement among their grievances against the North.²¹⁵ Douglas’s racism played better in Egypt than in Dixie.

After an exhausting campaign, Douglas prevailed. Republican candidates actually received a plurality of the votes, garnering 125,430 to the Douglas Democrats’ 121,609 (Danites took around 5,000), but heavily Republican northern Illinois was underrepresented in the legislature, so Democrats retained a majority and in January 1859 elected Douglas over Lincoln, 54–46.²¹⁶ In response, Douglas proclaimed, “Let the voice of the people rule,” a bit of majoritarian bravado that flouted the electoral arithmetic.²¹⁷ Nevertheless, his victory was a bright spot for northern Democrats, who lost a net total of eighteen seats in Congress and fared especially poorly in the Northeast, although they minimized their losses in the Northwest and actually drew more votes than in 1856. Northern Democrats were reeling, and recovery depended on steering toward Douglas and away from Buchanan and the South.²¹⁸

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. Douglas had responded by insisting that Democrats could secure free soil in the West, while Davis delivered some of the most fire-eating oratory of his career.

Addressing the state legislature days after Lamar’s scorching speech, Davis strove to restore his reputation. Insisting that he had visited New England only for medical purposes, Davis reported that proslavery southerners had “a large body of true friends” there. Douglas, of course, was not one of them. At considerable length, Davis refuted claims that he had endorsed “squatter sovereignty” in Maine. Newspapers had mangled the story, and Douglas had deliberately misrepresented him at Alton. Indeed, proclaimed Davis, he and Douglas had never agreed on territorial policy. Slaveholders’ peculiar need for protection “does not confer a right to destroy” their property rights, as Douglas claimed, “but rather creates an obligation to protect.” Rehashing an old argument, Davis condemned popular sovereignty and free soil as equally odious. “Between such positions, Mississippi cannot have a preference, because she cannot recognize anything tolerable in either of them.” Looking to the future, Davis turned his guns on the Republicans and denounced their criticisms of slavery, an institution that promoted white equality by relegating menial labor to “the servile race.” If a Republican were elected president, Mississippi must leave a union with those who would “deprive you of your birthright” and “reduce you to worse than the colonial dependence of your fathers.” Rather than endure abolition rule, Davis would rally “Mississippi’s best and bravest … to the harvest-home of death.”²²³

Thus far it was all sound and fury, but Davis had tacked toward Lamar and Brown’s extremism. He still cherished the Democracy, and perhaps he could temper radical words with moderate deeds.²²⁴ But his constituents, like Douglas’s, expected results. Douglas had failed to deliver a Pacific railroad, homestead legislation, or peace in Kansas, while Davis had neither made Kansas a slave state nor corralled wayward northern Democrats. With another session of Congress commencing in December and a presidential election less than two years away, the Democracy, battered by Lecompton and its bitter aftermath, was crumbling. Already planning for the 1860 convention, one of Davis’s closest Mississippi allies predicted that “wholly unreliable” northern Democrats would “unite to force Douglas upon the south.” In that event, southern Democrats should bolt and nominate their own candidate: Jefferson Davis.²²⁵ The prophecy was only partially accurate, but it reflected serious damage already done to party unity.