[Senator Douglas's success in Illinois]
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SENATOR DOUGLAS'S success in Illinois is a triumph of which he may well be proud.1 It is a victory of the independent Representative over the party dictator, of one brave man struggling alone, in the strength of his personal popularity and his great oratorical powers, against the Administration in his front, and the opposition in his rear. His success has reversed, we trust for ever, the rule that any Senator or Representative who dared to rebel against his party was a lost man. Where Benton failed—in uniting the leadership of his own State with independence of party distinction in the Senate Chamber—Douglas has succeeded.2 Who would not rather now be Douglas, than be the President? Senator Seward's3 Rochester speech, taking higher anti-slavery ground than ever, is well for Douglas.4 It affords him now the opportunity of organizing a great middle conservative party, neither proscribing slavery, like Seward, nor fostering it, like Buchanan.5 To this end events seem to point—and all the little stipendiaries of the Administration party (such as the Eagle of this city) which have been denouncing Douglas as a vile traitor, will now be glad to fawn upon him. The Jersey Telegraph probably will again hoist his name to its mast-head as the candidate for 1860.
Notes:
1. Stephen Arnold Douglas (1813–1861), nicknamed the "Little Giant," was a U.S. Senator from Illinois from 1847 to 1861. Douglas promoted the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 and ran for President against Abraham Lincoln in 1860. He was a well-known proponent of "Popular Sovereignty," the idea that the question of slavery should be left for voters of a given state to decide. For more information, see T. Gregory Garvey, "Douglas, Stephen Arnold (1813–1861)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
2. Thomas Hart Benton (1782–1858) served on the U.S. Senate for 30 years as a representative from Missouri and was one of the leading advocates for westward expansion. [back]
3. William H. Seward (1801–1872) served as a New York State senator in 1830, and U.S. senator in 1849. He would run, unsuccessfully, for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860 and instead became Secretary of State from 1861 to 1869 under Presidents Lincoln and Johnson. Whitman would clerk for Seward during the Civil War, a job he obtained with the help of a recommendation letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson. [back]
4. On 25 October 1858, William H. Seward delivered a speech in Rochester, New York, titled "The Irrepressible Conflict" which addressed the incompatibility of slave states and free states within one unified nation; Seward argued that, eventually, the nation would either become a wholly slaveholding nation or a free-labor nation and critiqued the Democratic Party for their involvement in the matter. [back]
5. James Buchanan (1791–1868) was the fifteenth President of the United States (1857–1861). Late in life Whitman still considered Buchanan "perhaps the weakest of the President tribe—the very unablest" (With Walt Whitman in Camden, Monday, November 5, 1888). For more information on Whitman and his disdain for Buchanon, see also Bernard Hirschorn, ""To a President" (1860)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]