The Life of Stephen A. Douglas
- Pages
- about 201
- Category
- History
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 3.7 h at 250 wpm
From the opening
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.
A short sample. Read the whole book
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