Stephen Douglas's Enlightenment: Democracy, Race, and Rights in Civil War–Era Political Thought

In 1859 Frederick Douglass fumed over the fact that Stephen A. Douglas had received an invitation to a "Woman's Rights Convention." Guilty of "defending the sovereign mob in any of our territories to buy and sell women on the auction block," the Little Giant was undeserving, Douglass told his newspaper audience. Frederick Douglass questioned the commitment of Stephen Douglas, antebellum America's greatest proselytizer of democracy, to equal rights and self-rule. Throughout the 1850s, Douglas and the Democratic Party promoted their policy of popular sovereignty, whereby "the people" could democratically expand slavery to new territories, as the "great principle of self-government." Frederick Douglass saw it differently. If Stephen Douglas were the advocate of women's rights, it was a Southern white woman's "sovereign right to decide whether she should enslave her black sisters." "This would be popular sovereignty of the DOUGLAS order," he concluded.¹

Popular sovereignty frustrated more than antislavery Americans like Douglass. They and other observers across the political spectrum would have echoed a Pennsylvania Republican who asked, "Did you ever meet such a miserable humbug as this of 'Douglas' territorial Sovereignty'?" In his groundbreaking work on the conservative consensus in the Civil War–era North, Adam I. P. Smith finds that Northern Democrats and Republicans converged on popular sovereignty as a practical means to prevent new slave states. Yet, approaching popular sovereignty as political theory and not only as conservative compromise policy unearths important distinctions between Democrats and Republicans and between Democrats and other "conservatives." Democrats, like some Republicans, were part of the 1850s stampede toward the political center. Long after historians of the twentieth century have done so, scholars of the Civil War era are appreciating conservatism as a significant cultural and political force. At a time when, as Smith notes, "calling something conservative was a way of legitimizing it," Democrats nationwide sought that label. They contended that popular sovereignty would preserve the status quo because self-governing white men would reaffirm gender and racial order. In a rhetorical sleight of hand, Democrats offered majoritarian democracy as a "conservative" alternative for maintaining white supremacy and sectional harmony.²

Massachusetts Democrat Benjamin F. Hallett accordingly advertised the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which applied popular sovereignty to those territories, as a "conservative doctrine concerning slavery" and as "one of the most democratic things in the world." Popular sovereignty's democratic premise, however, alarmed conservatives who found majority rule incompatible with social order. It also unnerved American liberals who, like Jacksonian Democrats, were dedicated to Enlightenment notions of equal rights derived from a state of nature and consensual government based on social contract. The distinction between liberalism and conservatism in antebellum America should not be overdrawn. Some conservatives, ranging from proslavery apologists to antidemocratic New England Whigs, reveled in hierarchy, rebelled against the Enlightenment, and snubbed social contract and natural rights. Yet in a political culture lacking viable alternatives, other conservatives sought to make liberal principles conducive to social stability. Most conservatives thus shared liberals' anxiety over arbitrary power violating rights, even if they asserted that rights and duties coalesced within an extant social order instead of a theoretical state of nature. They especially wanted to insulate property rights and minority rights from democratic majorities. Wary of democracy to varying degrees, conservatives often aligned with liberals, who were generally optimistic about self-rule, in hoping to check power, protect rights, and achieve orderly self-government through institutions and written constitutions.³

Reflecting this common concern for rights, antislavery liberals attacked popular sovereignty for permitting democratic power to nullify rights through the spread of slavery. Frequently allies, liberalism and democracy become antagonists when democracy overrides the equal individual rights foundational to liberalism. Jacksonian Democrats had long adhered to the Enlightenment legacy of natural rights and self-government, which continued to distinguish Northern and Southern Democrats in the 1850s from conservatives uneasy with the liberal tradition. For American liberals opposed to slavery, however, Democrats promulgated a racist, illiberal, and unenlightened majoritarianism that contravened the careful balance of inviolable rights and self-government central...