1858 (18 page)

The defeat of the proslavery Lecompton Constitution ended the most controversial intra-organizational fight over a piece of legislation in the history of political parties up to that time. Buchanan, in his rosy world, hoped that the dispute over Kansas had ended the national debate on slavery. Kansas “is now a very peaceful and quiet community,” he wrote. The country was back to normal, he thought, ignoring all evidence to the contrary. “All is peace and all express devotion to the Union,” he trumpeted to his close friends.

Even so, he told them that Douglas was the devil who wrecked everything on Kansas and that Douglas and his supporters were out to ruin him. He said to one friend, “My great object in public life is to leave a fair name behind me, by honorable means,” but that Douglas was making that difficult. Buchanan told an Illinois man, “The…[Douglas] men of your state are not even content to acquiesce in a measure which has been stamped by the national democracy of both houses of Congress.” In the final line of that savage letter, the president wrote that he was having trouble preserving the Union against “its opponents in Illinois.”
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Publicly, the president said nothing about the Douglas crusade to undermine him and his administration, but privately he began to take jobs away from Douglas Democrats, hurting the Little Giant’s state party machine, an organization that he would need desperately if he was going to be reelected to the Senate in 1858 and set himself up to fulfill what he believed—and many others believed—was his destiny: to become president in 1860. “Old Buck,” as the Douglas Democrats sneered at Buchanan, had no interest in using the president’s considerable power over job patronage during his first days in office. Now, his hatred for Douglas growing daily, he turned to those powers and began an effort to dismantle Douglas’s political empire in Illinois.
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Those who spent time with the president in private said that his hatred of Douglas was almost uncontrollable, that the mere mention of the senator’s name brought on long and loud outbursts from Buchanan. Some of his friends thought that his ire for Douglas would cause him to have a nervous breakdown or even a stroke.
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And Douglas? The Little Giant was as defiant of the White House as ever. He wrote one newspaper editor, “We will fight the battle boldly and triumph in the end. Let the enemy threaten, proscribe, and do their best or worst; it will not cause any honest man to falter or change his course.” And he told another senator, “The administration are determined to crush every public man who dissents from their policy…you may rest assured that I will take no step backwards and abate not one iota of the position I have taken, let the consequences be what they may to me personally.”
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The Kansas debate was only round one in the political boxing match between the two powerful and stubborn men, though. There would be more throughout 1858, and in the end one would triumph and one would be ruined.

President Buchanan’s anger with Senator Stephen Douglas did not die down after the contentious winter debates in the Senate over the Lecompton Constitution for Kansas. As the summer approached, Douglas returned home to Illinois to begin his senatorial reelection campaign against up-and-coming Republican state legislator and Douglas’s personal friend, Abraham Lincoln. The president believed this might be the right time to turn up the pressure on Douglas to conform to Buchanan’s vision of America and to support his administration on every issue.

Even though it appeared Douglas would have an easy race against Lincoln, one of many former Whigs trying to revive his stalled career as a Republican, the Little Giant would be seeking all the assistance he could receive in order to win in convincing fashion, thus setting himself up for a White House run in 1860. He would need all of the resources of the national Democratic Party, which was controlled by Buchanan. He would receive none.

The elections reminded the president once again of the many reasons he disliked Douglas. Paramount was his rudeness to the president two years earlier when Buchanan and Douglas were trying to line up votes to win the Democratic nomination in 1856. The men met by chance that May in the National Hotel in Washington. Buchanan, who saw himself as a political veteran, offered Douglas some convention strategy advice. The offended Little Giant shot back, “I expect to choose my Constitutional advisers soon, and am most happy thus to receive your acceptance in advance.”
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Most of all, he always blamed Douglas for the collapse of the Lecompton Constitution. In the spring of 1858, Douglas suddenly found that friends of Buchanan in the Senate were publicly aligning themselves against him in the discussions over Kansas and other topics. He saw it as a conspiracy orchestrated by the president. Douglas accused them of trying to ruin him, writing one man, “There are men under [the president] busy at work to convince everyone that I have betrayed my party and my principles, in order to see if they cannot crush me among my Democratic friends.” At another point, angry at Senator William Bigler from Pennsylvania, a friend of Buchanan’s, Douglas shouted, “I do not recognize the right of anybody to expel me from the Democratic Party!…I shall maintain my views of right whether there be harmony or not… If, in so doing so, I shall happen to come in collision with any of my friends I shall deeply regret it…[but I] must maintain my independent course of action inside the Democratic party.”
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To another he wrote, “If the party is divided by this course it will not be my fault… The contest is a painful one to me, but I have no alternative but to accept the issue and stand by what I deem to be my duty.”
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Douglas seemed to do everything he could to encourage the animosity of the White House. He even met secretly with William Seward and Thurlow Weed in what many saw as a conspiracy by the Republicans to persuade the influential Illinois senator to switch parties. Another persistent rumor flew through Illinois that Douglas, Seward, and Kentucky Democrat John Crittenden were going to form a third “radical” party to serve as a home for all antislavery voters. Another rumor was that a deal had been agreed upon in which new Republican Douglas would support Seward for president in 1860 and then Seward would support him for president in 1864.
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Buchanan believed that the ouster of Douglas’s friends in Illinois would not only weaken the strength of his wing of the party, but set the removed politicians against him and make all of Douglas’s other patronage appointees fear for their employment. He was right.

The president then appointed Dr. Charles Leib as a federal mail agent. Leib grilled federal workers on whether they supported the president in his feud with Douglas. Leib reported back to the White House that most Democrats in the state wanted the Douglas men removed right away, to the delight of Buchanan.

The president then turned his attention on the Illinois newspapers. The party had been awarding lucrative government printing contracts to the
Chicago Tribune
and the
Illinois State Register
; Buchanan canceled them. The president then threatened to cancel government printing jobs that had been given other newspapers unless they supported the administration.

The feud became ugly. Buchanan supporters skewered Douglas and one even seethed that “fealty to Senator Douglas is treason to Democracy.”
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His friends encouraged Douglas to remain firm in his resolve and to steer clear of any rapprochement with the president because a truce would show Douglas as the loser in the dispute, a cowardly figure who had crawled to the White House, hat in hand, to ask forgiveness. Usher Linder wrote him that “any reconciliation between you and the Administration party
soils
you.”
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There would be no truce.

The National Democrats of Illinois, Buchanan’s national party organization, announced that it would field candidates against Douglas in each county. One speaker, John Dougherty, warned the crowd that Douglas would be “crushed and ground to powder.” Members, who called themselves the “Buchaneers,” urged the president to boot the senator out of the Democratic Party.

Leading Democrats understood that Buchanan and his Illinois operatives, called the “Danites” by the Douglas people, were behind everything done to undermine Douglas in Illinois. They defended the chief executive. Cabinet member Howell Cobb wrote, “If Judge Douglas had done as he promised…all of us ought to have sustained him. Such has not been his course. Publicly he attacks the Administration; privately he indulges in the coarsest abuse of the president. Under these circumstances, to ask our support is in my opinion asking too much... [Douglas is] determined to break up the Democratic Party…to unite with anybody and everybody to defeat us.”
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The president believed in his policy of destroying Douglas, but other leading Democrats did not. They thought that it was the type of misguided politics for which Buchanan had become famous. Senator Henry Wise of Virginia, whom Buchanan had offended as soon as he became the president-elect, was one of them. Douglas’s triumph “without the aid of the administration will be its rebuke; his defeat with its opposition will be the death of the administration…”
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Animosity by supporters of Douglas soon spilled over the borders of Illinois into other states, where newspapers from the Midwest to the Northeast not only blamed Buchanan for the attacks on Douglas, but charged that he was trying to destroy an entire wing of the party. Newspapers charged that even Buchanan’s supporters on Kansas were appalled by his efforts to unseat Douglas. The editor of the Dubuque (Iowa) Express wrote, “Even a majority of men who agree with the Kansas policy of the Administration dissent from the course of the president in Illinois and Mr. Buchanan would find himself in a hopeless minority among Democrats was the propriety of his policy towards Douglas submitted to a popular vote of the party.”
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Even the staunchly pro-Buchanan
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, which routinely criticized all of his opponents and constantly demeaned the antislavery leaders of Ohio, backed Douglas in the dispute. Its editor wrote, “He was hunted and hounded…denounced, vilified, and menaced with political extermination. All of the engines of power were turned against him, every accessible avenue of influence was closed to his appeals, every office holder who would not join the [White House] crusade was expelled from office. He had dared to doubt the essential divinity of the Great Mogul of his party and the decree forthwith went out that he was to be hamstrung, beheaded, tied in a sack, and thrown into the sea.”
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Support for Douglas, and denunciation of the president, across the country was so great that even Buchanan’s own vice president, John Breckinridge, announced on October 22, 1858, that he not only supported Douglas but, if called upon, would travel to Illinois and campaign for the Little Giant.
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Douglas denounced his detractors in Illinois and even the opposition of Buchanan cronies in the Senate itself, calling on true Democrats to rally around him. Shrewdly, he told the Senate that he did not think the president was behind this effort to deny him reelection, but just White House renegades, surmising that the tact might lead Buchanan to call off his political assassins.

The White House naturally assumed that Douglas wanted a reconciliation and feared that the party split in Illinois would be followed with intra-party battles elsewhere. A quiet campaign was started to achieve peace with Douglas. Friends of both Douglas and Buchanan continually told Douglas how important he was to the party. Advisers to the president and cabinet members went to Douglas and his friends to bring about reconciliation. The Democratic newspapers that the White House controlled urged Douglas to make peace with the president.
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Douglas’s own father-in-law was recruited by the administration to help persuade Douglas to return to the fold. But the one man who might have convinced Douglas to return to the national party, President Buchanan, showing his political ineptitude once more, never asked Douglas to the White House to discuss their mutual problem; it was something he refused to do.

A stubborn Douglas would not surrender. If he had to run against Lincoln without any help from the national party, so be it. As the summer of 1858 began, Douglas came to several conclusions. There was growing public and press support for him in his war with Buchanan. Congressmen and senators from around the country had rallied around him, as had numerous Democratic newspapers, even the hometown paper of Buchanan’s attorney general, Jeremiah Black. Minnesota governor William Gorman said that “999 out of every 1,000 in our party, except for the office holders under the present administration, are with you.”

A Democrat in Vermont said his fight would not only defeat slavery in Kansas, but win him the White House in 1860. Southerners even supported him. He must have smiled when he received a congratulatory letter from Virginia governor Henry Wise, whom Buchanan had now lost as an ally. Douglas was a popular man in Illinois and believed that he did not really need the Buchaneers to win the Senate election and, if he could defeat Lincoln
and
the Buchaneers, the dual victory would make him invincible in the 1860 presidential election.
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