The Life of Stephen A. Douglas | Page 3

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Prepared by Brett Fishburne ([email protected])

The Life of Stephen A. Douglas
by William Gardner

Preface.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum, (of the dead speak nothing but good), is the
rule which governed the friends of Stephen A. Douglas after his death.
"Of political foes speak nothing but ill," is the rule which has guided
much of our discussion of him for forty years. The time has now
arrived when we can study him dispassionately and judge him justly,
when we can take his measure, if not with scientific accuracy, at least
with fairness and honesty.
Where party spirit is as despotic as it is among us, it is difficult for any
man who spends his life amid the storms of politics to get justice until
the passions of his generation have been forgotten. Even then he is
generally misjudged--canonized as a saint, with extravagant eulogy, by
those who inherit his party name, and branded as a traitor or a
demagogue by those who wear the livery of opposition.
Douglas has perhaps suffered more from this method of dealing with
our political heroes than any other American statesman of the first class.
He died at the opening of the Civil War. It proved to be a revolution
which wrought deep changes in the character of the people. It was the
beginning of a new era in our national life. We are in constant danger
of missing the real worth of men in these ante-bellum years because
their modes of thought and feeling were not those of this generation.
The Civil War, with its storm of passion, banished from our minds the
great men and gigantic struggles of the preceding decade. We turned
with scornful impatience from the pitiful and abortive compromises of
those times, the puerile attempts to cure by futile plasters the cancer
that was eating the vitals of the nation. We hastily concluded that men
who belonged to the party of Jefferson Davis and Judah P. Benjamin
during those critical years were of doubtful loyalty and questionable
patriotism, that men who battled with Lincoln, Seward and Chase could
hardly be true-hearted lovers of their country. Douglas died too soon to
make clear to a passion-stirred world that he was as warmly attached to

the Union, as intensely loyal, as devotedly patriotic, as Lincoln himself.
The grave questions arising from the War, which disturbed our politics
for twenty years, the great economic questions which have agitated us
for the past fifteen years, bear slight relation to those dark problems
with which Douglas and his contemporaries grappled.