The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (25 page)

While Davis and Gadsden tried to work their magic to get the federal government to build a southern railroad, northern railroad promoters were equally busy. Leading the effort was Stephen A. Douglas.

In January 1854, the diminutive Illinois Democrat introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The bill called for organizing the northern half of the Louisiana Purchase, every inch of soil between the southern border of Missouri and the Canadian border. That, in turn, would make a northern railroad to the Pacific more feasible. It would silence all those who said that the federal government could not build a railroad through unorganized “Indian country.”

The bill, however, was divisive. Indeed, it was incredibly divisive, undoubtedly the most divisive piece of legislation presented to Congress before the Civil War, maybe in all of American history. For it also called for repealing the Missouri Compromise, the ban on slavery in the northern half of the Louisiana Purchase, the land above the famous 36°30´ line. In its place, Douglas inserted language that would allow the settlers to vote slavery up or down.

The repeal sparked an outburst of anger and resentment from Maine to Missouri. A sacred agreement, after thirty-four years, had been violated. Free soil was now open to slavery. The richest acres might end up in the hands of slaveholders. How could this abomination be stopped? When could the settlers make a decision? When could they vote slavery up or down? While the area was still a territory? Or only at the time it became a state? That was uncertain. And that sparked even more fury.

What motivated Douglas? That has long been a matter of dispute. On the one hand, Douglas undoubtedly had a strong belief in popular sovereignty. He never doubted the virtues of the people and their capacity for self-government. And he especially rejected the notion that frontier settlers needed to be taught the rudiments of government.
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He had grown up in Vermont, in a state in which ordinary white males had governed themselves since frontier days. There had been no property qualifications for voting or holding office and no statewide governing authority that even tried to tell local communities what to do. Even if a Vermont governor had been so inclined, the mountainous terrain and harsh winters made it all but impossible for much of the year. In the dead of winter and long into spring, each mountain valley was cut off from its neighbors, and each Vermont village was largely on its own. The only governing bodies that truly mattered, therefore, were the local town meetings. And in Douglas’s judgment, they had worked well, much better than any distant government.

Stephen A. Douglas, “the Little Giant.” Reprinted from Ben: Perley Poore,
Perley’s Reminiscences,
2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1886), 1:315.

Douglas was also a political animal. On moving to Illinois, he had become a kingpin in the state Democratic Party and quickly risen to the top of state politics. Did he seek the presidency? Most of his biographers think he did. And if that was the case, the only way he could have gotten the Democratic nomination was with strong Southern support. The Democratic Party, unlike its Whig rival, required the party nominee to have the support of a two-thirds majority at the nominating convention. And that rule, as Douglas well knew, made it possible for any well-organized minority in the party to stop the choice of the majority from getting the nomination.

That had happened in 1844, when Douglas was a young man just making a name for himself in the Democratic Party. In that year, Southern Democrats had used the two-thirds rule to derail the candidacy of Martin Van Buren of New York. Since then, it had become a mighty weapon for Southern Democrats, one that had forced Northern presidential hopefuls to pay heed to their wishes or suffer the fate of Van Buren. Only Northern Democrats like Lewis Cass and Franklin Pierce, two aspirants who were widely regarded as Northern men with Southern principles, had been able to get the nomination. And in Pierce’s case, it had taken him forty-nine ballots to do so.
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So as a Democrat who hoped to be president, Douglas knew he had to cater to the South. He had no choice. At the same time, he also probably found it easy to do. He had, after all, Southern interests. For even though he was a free-state politician, he was also a Mississippi slaveholder. In 1847, he had married Martha Martin, the daughter of a wealthy North Carolina planter. As a wedding present, her father had offered Douglas a Mississippi plantation of some twenty-five hundred acres and over one hundred slaves. Douglas thought that would be politically embarrassing. So he convinced his father-in-law to leave the property to Martha in his will. A year later the old man died, and Douglas became the manager of his wife’s Mississippi property. She died in 1853, and the property then went to their infant sons. But Douglas continued to manage it and profit from it until the Civil War.
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As a Mississippi slave owner and free-state senator, Douglas undoubtedly knew that removing the ban on slavery north of the famous 36°30´ line would make him incredibly popular in the slaveholding South. Slave-state leaders clearly regarded the restriction as a stigma, as an insult to their way of life. The debates in Congress made that abundantly clear. The line was “infamous,” declared Senator David R. Atchison of Missouri. It was “a festering thorn” in “the side of the South,” said Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina. It was “a miserable line,” as it embodied “a congressional imputation against one half of the states,” echoed Representative Philip Phillips of Alabama.
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Moreover, in Douglas’s judgment, the ban on slavery had hurt his Northern constituents far more than it hurt Southern slaveholders. No slaveholder in his right mind really wanted to settle there, contended Douglas. The land just wasn’t fit for slavery. Since 1820, however, the South had refused to let the land be organized, and at the same time the federal government, through numerous Indian treaties, had encouraged various eastern tribes to relocate there. The ban thus had turned the whole area into “Indian country,” which, in turn, not only blocked the development of both a northern and a central railroad route to the Pacific but also stymied the potential growth of Chicago and St. Louis, frustrated commercial interests in both northern and southern Illinois, and by default ensured that New Orleans would become the premier city in the Mississippi basin. Wrote Douglas in 1853: “This policy evidently contemplated the creation of a perpetual and savage barrier to the progress of emigration, settlement and civilization in that direction.”
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Without question, then, Douglas had multiple reasons for introducing the Kansas-Nebraska Act. But especially pressing, in 1854, was gaining a strip of land for a northern railroad to the Pacific. Time was running out.

Douglas had been promoting railroad development for nearly twenty years. In 1836, as a member of the Illinois legislature, he had introduced a bill proposing two railroads, the Illinois Central, which he expected to run from the terminus of the proposed Illinois and Michigan Canal at La Salle to the mouth of the Ohio River at Cairo, and the Northern Cross, which he envisioned running from the Mississippi River at Quincy to the terminus of the proposed Wabash and Erie Canal at Terre Haute. Later, when he went to Congress, he had tried hard to get federal land grants to build the Illinois Central and complete the Northern Cross.
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Douglas had also been an early proponent of a Pacific railroad. In October 1845, he had responded to a scheme put forth the previous year by Asa Whitney, a New York merchant engaged in the China trade. Whitney had promised to build a Pacific railroad for the federal government if Congress would sell to him a strip of land sixty miles wide for 16 cents an acre. As he sold the land, he would plow the money back into laying track. He proposed going from Milwaukee to the mouth of the Columbia River. In an open letter to Whitney, Douglas offered an alternative scheme. Instead of running the railroad west from Milwaukee, he suggested that it begin in Chicago, go through Council Bluffs, and end in San Francisco “if that country could be annexed in time.” And instead of using settlers’ money to build a railroad, he proposed using the railroad to attract settlers. To facilitate this entire enterprise, he called on Congress to organize the land west of Iowa as the Nebraska Territory.

At the time, however, Douglas lacked the necessary political clout to get Congress to do his bidding. He was just a freshman congressman, just thirty-two years old, with a victory margin in the last election of less than 51 percent of the vote. He also lacked the support of the Illinois legislature, which directed its senators to vote at first for the Whitney route and later for a southern route favored by Senator Sidney Breese. The issue was ticklish, for while half the state wanted a Chicago route, the other half preferred St. Louis. Douglas, meanwhile, bought up property that would skyrocket in value if the Chicago route was chosen. However, not until 1852, the third time that he introduced a bill organizing the Nebraska Territory, did he have the support of his home state legislature. In that year, he bought an additional seventy acres in Chicago and thus increased his economic stake in the outcome.
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By this time, the effort to build a Chicago-to-Pacific railroad had become more complicated because of a political dogfight in nearby Missouri.

In 1850, pro-slavery forces had finally gotten their wish. They had succeeded in ousting Thomas Hart Benton from the Senate. The old warrior, who had been in the Senate for thirty years, fought back and in 1852 won election to the House of Representatives. In hustling for votes, he demanded a Pacific railroad and the organization of Nebraska. His pro-slavery enemies, in turn, vehemently objected to his Nebraska proposal on the grounds that Missouri would then be surrounded on three sides by free soil. They insisted that the ban on slavery north of 36°30´ be removed.

Leading them was Senator David Atchison. A forty-five-year-old Transylvania University graduate, Atchison had earned the sobriquet “Bourbon Dave.” Tall and imposing, he was a hard-drinking, hard-cussing man, often coarse, sometimes ferocious, usually swaggering. About twenty-five years younger than Benton, Atchison had just gotten started as a lawyer and a planter in the Missouri River valley in 1829, the year Benton became a major player in Jacksonian politics. Fourteen years later, in 1843, Atchison got himself elected to the Senate, emphasizing, among other things, the need for more slaves to work Missouri’s river bottomlands.

As a Jacksonian Democrat, Atchison got along with Benton on most economic matters, but not on western expansion. To Atchison, Benton was a traitor to Southern slaveholders. Benton was a slaveholder, and in the 1820s he had often touted the expansion of slavery. But since the 1820s, he had been more concerned with the lot of small farmers. He had authored bill after bill that enabled squatters on government land to buy up to 160 acres for the minimum price of $1.25 an acre. He had also tried to get the federal government to cut the price of federal land that it had a hard time selling. He saw the northern half of the Louisiana Purchase from the same perspective, not as slave country but as a place where the sons and daughters of Missouri’s non-slaveholding farmers might someday prosper. And with that and a Pacific railroad in mind, he tried to get it organized as a federal territory.

Atchison objected. He put together a Southern coalition to defeat such bills, ostensibly because Indians had not yet been removed, but in reality because his slaveholding constituents could not bring in their slaves.
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So Douglas, if he wanted to achieve a northern or central railroad, had to find some way to neutralize Atchison. And by December 1853, he also felt that time was running out.

Not only did Southerners now seem to have an edge. They also never let Douglas forget that the northern half of the Louisiana Purchase was “Indian country” and thus closed by law to emigration and to travel. That barrier, he concluded, somehow had to be removed. And it had to be done quickly. For if Southerners got a railroad before the Indian barrier was removed, slave-state senators would have the whip hand. They could delay forever a second route “by merely refusing to permit the extinguishment of Indian titles in the Indian country.” Thus, as Douglas saw it, he had no choice. He had to organize the land before Congress authorized a southern railroad. Only then would Northerners have a chance of having a transcontinental railroad to the gold country.
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So on January 4, 1854, Douglas accepted David Atchison’s terms. He agreed to a bill that promised Nebraska eventual admission to the Union “with or without slavery.” He tried to keep the language neutral, playing down the assault on the Missouri Compromise. But free-soilers weren’t fooled. They knew that Bourbon Dave had emerged victorious.

Yet the wording was too halfhearted and ambiguous to satisfy Southern hotspurs. They demanded more. Representative Philip Phillips, an Alabama Democrat, called for language that explicitly repealed the Missouri Compromise. So did Senator Archibald Dixon, a Kentucky Whig. Douglas, after taking a carriage ride with Dixon, agreed to an amendment that Dixon had fashioned. He knew it would “raise a hell of a storm.”