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Reviews
Stephen A. Douglas and the Dilemmas of Democratic Equality
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By James L. Huston
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(Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group, 2007. Pp. xi, 221. Illustration, notes, bibliographic essay, index. $39.00.)
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| James L. Huston's book presents an intriguing reinterpretation of the life of Illinois' famous antebellum senator. Huston uses Douglas's life to shed light on America's path from its pre-revolutionary heritage of "hereditary preferment and inequality" to a future based on the then-revolutionary axioms of human equality (p. vii). This transition, experienced most dramatically in the first half of the nineteenth century, posed difficult dilemmas: which Americans were equal, in what ways were they equal, and how would their equality be maintained? In no small measure, writes Huston, these dilemmas shaped the politics of antebellum America and the life of Douglas. |
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Huston contends that Douglas's impressive leadership in building the Illinois Democratic Party in the 1830s reflected his strong commitment to a more egalitarian society. The Democrats stood for the equal rights of the people against the special privileges enjoyed by elites. In order to acquire the political power to press for such rights, however, the Democrats needed to create a party organization to express the people's will. This was Douglas's great contribution as an early partisan political leader in Illinois, and his reward was political preferment and influence. |
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But the politics of egalitarianism quickly became more divisive. As an advocate of commercial development, Douglas differed from those in his party who believed that the promotion of commerce exacerbated class divisions and imperiled democracy. Hence he supported many commercial enterprises—including those that required government support, such as the building of the Illinois Central Railroad in the early 1850s—as long as they promised widespread social benefits. However, Douglas did realize that commercial growth generated sharp disparities in wealth and income. The solution that he and the Democratic Party endorsed in the 1840s was national expansion, which promised cheap land for poor and rich farmers alike. Yet Manifest Destiny likewise challenged egalitarian ideals, primarily because despised non-white inhabitants lived in lands coveted by Americans. Douglas, like almost all Democrats, advocated the expulsion or subordination of such peoples upon acquisition of their territory. Ironically, the Democrats' promotion of equality among white Americans both justified and promoted wider inequality. |
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National expansion also raised the thorny issue of slavery, which profoundly challenged the Democrats' creed of equality. The Mexican-American War left the United States with a vast domain to settle. Most Southerners desired to plant slavery in the new territories, believing they had a constitutional right to do so; antislavery northerners implacably opposed them. This division threatened to rend the Union. Douglas's solution, embodied in the Compromise of 1850, enabled territorial settlers to regulate slavery under the doctrine of popular sovereignty. But popular sovereignty was something of a conundrum. On the one hand it reflected egalitarian ideals, because the people's will decided slavery's fate. On the other, it subsequently legitimized the right of some humans to enslave others in a nation whose democracy rested on the presumption of equality. Douglas resolved the dilemma by maintaining that non-white races were "utterly incapable of governing themselves" (p. 85). Although northern Democrats, persuaded by this reasoning, considered popular sovereignty a reasonable sectional compromise, most southerners demanded that the federal government protect territorial slavery. Ultimately, Lincoln's election impelled southerners to abandon a Union that they believed disregarded their rights. Ironically, secession thus illustrated the most fundamental dilemma arising from the political creed of equality. Perceiving secession as a destruction of democracy rather than a defense of liberty, Douglas supported the Republicans' effort to maintain the Union by force. |
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Graham A. Peck, associate professor of history at Saint Xavier University, Chicago, has published articles about Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas in the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association.
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