Meanwhile,great things were coming forward at Washington.
They centered about a remarkable man with whom Lincoln had hitherto formed a curious parallel,by whom hitherto he had been completely overshadowed.Stephen Arnold Douglas was prosecuting attorney at Springfield when Lincoln began the practice of law.They were in the Legislature together.Both courted Mary Todd.Soon afterward,Douglas had distanced his rival.When Lincoln went to the House of Representatives as a Whig,Douglas went to the Senate as a Democrat.While Lincoln was failing at Washington,Douglas was building a national reputation.In the hubbub that followed the Compromise of 1850,while Lincoln,abandoning politics,immersed himself in the law,Douglas rendered a service to the country by defeating a movement in Illinois to reject the Compromise.When the Democratic National Convention assembled in 1852,he was sufficiently prominent to obtain a considerable vote for the presidential nomination.
The dramatic contrast of these two began with their physical appearance.Douglas was so small that he had been known to sit on a friend's knee while arguing politics.But his energy of mind,his indomitable force of character,made up for his tiny proportions."The Little Giant"was a term of endearment applied to him by his followers.The mental contrast was equally marked.Scarcely a quality in Lincoln that was not reversed in Douglas--deliberation,gradualness,introspection,tenacity,were the characteristics of Lincoln's mind.The mind of Douglas was first of all facile.He was extraordinarily quick.In political Strategy he could sense a new situation,wheel to meet it,throw overboard well-established plans,devise new ones,all in the twinkle of an eye.People who could not understand such rapidity of judgment pronounced him insincere,or at least,an opportunist.That he did not have the deep inflexibility of Lincoln may be assumed;that his convictions,such as they were,did not have an ethical cast may be safely asserted.Nevertheless,he was a great force,an immense human power,that did not change its course without good reason of its own sort.Far more than a mere opportunist.
Politically,he summed up a change that was coming over the Democratic party.Janus-like,he had two faces,one for his constituents,one for his colleagues.To the voter he was still a Jeffersonian,with whom the old phraseology of the party,liberty,equality,and fraternity,were still the catch-words.To his associates in the Senate he was essentially an aristocrat,laboring to advance interests that were careless of the rights of man.A later age has accused the Senate of the United States of being the citadel of Big Business.Waiving the latter view,the historian may assert that something suggestive of Big Business appeared in our politics in the 'fifties,and was promptly made at home in the Senate.Perhaps its first definite manifestation was a new activity on the part of the great slave-holders.To invoke again the classifications of later points of view,certain of our historians to-day think they can see in the 'fifties a virtual slavery trust,a combine of slave interests controlled by the magnates of the institution,and having as real,though informal,an existence as has the Steel Trust or the Beef Trust in our own time.This powerful interest allied itself with the capitalists of the Northeast.In modern phraseology,they aimed to "finance"the slave interest from New York.And for a time the alliance succeeded in doing this.The South went entirely upon credit.It bought and borrowed heavily in the East New York furnished the money.
Had there been nothing further to consider,the invasion of the Senate by Big Business in the 'fifties might not have taken place.But there was something else.Slavery's system of agriculture was excessively wasteful.To be highly profitable it required virgin soil,and the financial alliance demanded high profits.Early in the 'fifties,the problem of Big Business was the acquisition of fresh soil for slavery.The problem entered politics with the question how could this be brought about without appearing to contradict democracy?The West also had its incipient Big Business.It hinged upon railways.Now that California had been acquired,with a steady stream of migration westward,with all America dazzled more or less by gold-mines and Pacific trade,a transcontinental railway was a Western dream.But what course should it take,what favored regions were to become its immediate beneficiaries?Here was a chance for great jockeying among business interests in Congress,for slave-holders,money-lenders,railway promoters to manipulate deals to their hearts'content.They had been doing so amid a high complication of squabbling,while Douglas was traveling in Europe during 1853.When he returned late in the year,the unity of the Democratic machine in Congress was endangered by these disputes.Douglas at once attacked the problem of party harmony.He threw himself into the task with all his characteristic quickness,all his energy and resourcefulness.
By this time the problem contained five distinct factors:The upper Northeast wanted a railroad starting at Chicago.The Central West wanted a road from St.Louis.The Southwest wanted a road from New Orleans,or at least,the frustration of the two Northern schemes.Big Business wanted new soil for slavery.The Compromise of 1850stood in the way of the extension of slave territory.
