Abraham Lincoln: a History — Volume 01 eBook

[Relocated Footnote (1):  Jefferson Davis, who was a member of President Pierce’s Cabinet (Secretary of War), thus relates the incident:  “On Sunday morning, the 22d of January, 1854, gentlemen of each committee {House and Senate Committees on Territories} called at my house, and Mr. Douglas, chairman of the Senate Committee, fully explained the proposed bill, and stated their purpose to them through my aid, to obtain an interview on that day with the President, to ascertain whether the bill would meet his approbation.  The President was known to be rigidly opposed to the reception of visits on Sunday for the discussion of any political subject; but in this case it was urged as necessary, in order to enable the committee to make their report the next day.  I went with them to the Executive Mansion, and, leaving them in the reception-room, sought the President in his private apartments, and explained to him the occasion of the visit.  He thereupon met the gentlemen, patiently listened to the reading of the bill and their explanations of it, decided that it rested upon sound constitutional principles, and recognized in it only a return to that rule which had been infringed by the Compromise of 1820, and the restoration of which had been foreshadowed by the legislation of 1850.  This bill was not, therefore, as has been improperly asserted, a measure inspired by Mr. Pierce or any of his Cabinet.”—­Davis, “Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government,” Vol.  I., p. 28.]

[Relocated Footnote (2):  We have the authority of ex-Vice-President Hannibal Hamlin for stating that Mr. Douglas (who was on specially intimate terms with him) told him that the language of the final amendment to the Kansas-Nebraska bill repealing the Missouri Compromise was written by President Franklin Pierce.  Douglas was apprehensive that the President would withdraw or withhold from him a full and undivided Administration support, and told Mr. Hamlin that he intended to get from him something in black and white which would hold him.  A day or two afterwards Douglas, in a confidential conversation, showed Mr. Hamlin the draft of the amendment in Mr. Pierce’s own handwriting.]

CHAPTER XX

THE DRIFT OF POLITICS

The repeal of the Missouri Compromise made the slavery question paramount in every State of the Union.  The boasted finality was a broken reed; the life-boat of compromise a hopeless wreck.  If the agreement of a generation could be thus annulled in a breath, was there any safety even in the Constitution itself?  This feeling communicated itself to the Northern States at the very first note of warning, and every man’s party fealty was at once decided by his toleration of or opposition to slavery.  While the fate of the Nebraska bill hung in a doubtful balance in the House, the feeling found expression in letters, speeches, meetings, petitions, and remonstrances.  Men were for or against the bill—­every other political subject was left in abeyance.  The measure once passed, and the Compromise repealed, the first natural impulse was to combine, organize, and agitate for its restoration.  This was the ready-made, common ground of cooperation.