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Kansas: southern boundary shift

While Douglas was successful in winning popular sovereignty in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, popular sovereignty proved less than successful in Kansas. Proslavery settlers drafted a Kansas constitution at Lecompton; antislavery settlers drafted an opposing Kansas constitution at Topeka. Both constitutions were sent to Washington for approval. Congress approved neither, but Senator Douglas favored the antislavery Topeka constitution over its proslavery rival from Lecompton:

Is there a man within the hearing of my voice who believes the Lecompton constitution does embody the will of a majority of the bona fide inhabitants of Kansas? … We are told that it … has been submitted to the people for ratification or rejection. How submitted? In a manner that allowed every man to vote for it, but precluded the possibility of any man voting against it. We are told that there is a majority of about five thousand five hundred votes recorded in its favor under these circumstances.… On the other hand, we have a vote of the people, in pursuance of law, on the 4th of January last, when this constitution was submitted by the Legislature to the people for acceptance or rejection, showing a majority of more than ten thousand against it.

Though he could not know it at the time, Douglas had just ended his chances to become president. As the 1860 campaign neared, the cost of Douglas’s choice surfaced. Southerners denounced Douglas along the lines stated by former congressman and diplomat William Stiles of Georgia:

In 1854, Mr. Douglas, to curry favor with the South … brought forward his measure for the repeal of the Missouri [Compromise] restriction. The South was enchanted and shouted paeans to the “Little Giant.” … But would they have shouted those paeans … had they supposed it covered, as Mr. Douglas now claims, his odious squatters sovereignty doctrine? Never! Never!! Has not Stephen A. Douglas, then, cruelly deceived and wantonly betrayed the South? Did he not bring forward a measure which he induced us to believe was for our benefit, and does he not show us now and boast that it was for our ruin!2

The Democrats split into two parties during their 1860 convention, both claiming to be the true Democratic Party. The Northern party nominated Douglas; the Southern party chose John C. Breckenridge. By dividing its supporters, the Democrats enabled Republican Abraham Lincoln to win the White House with less than 40 percent of the popular vote.

One month after Lincoln’s election, Southern states began seceding from the Union. Douglas made a final plea to avert the hemorrhage. “Are we prepared for war?” he beseeched his colleagues. “I do not mean that kind of preparation which consists of armies and navies, and supplies, and munitions of war; but are we prepared in our hearts for war with our own brethren and kindred? I confess, I am not.”

The long fuse leading to the Civil War detonated at Fort Sumter in April 1861. Whichever side won, Douglas had lost. On the Sunday following the firing on Fort Sumter, he (after some coaxing from his wife) went to the White House to speak with President Lincoln. The two longtime rivals exchanged pleasantries, then Lincoln read to Douglas his draft of a speech summoning the nation to war. Douglas offered only one criticism, recorded by a mutual friend who was present. “Instead of the call for 75,000 men,” Douglas advised, “I would make it 200,000. You do not know the dishonest purposes of those men as well as I do.”3 He then asked to see a map. Standing next to the president, the man who knew the American map as well as anyone—and who had sought to avoid war as much as anyone—pointed out the geographic weak points in the South.

Six weeks later, he was dead, having fallen ill with typhoid fever. A large monument marks his grave in Chicago. But perhaps the most meaningful monument to Stephen A. Douglas is on the map itself: the equally spaced lines in the middle of the nation. They, and the gap that became