Almost President by Scott Farris

drive other Southerners to embrace secession.
    Yancey’s belief in the power of the Democratic Party to unite the nation was proven correct after the war. Then, the Democratic Party played a vital, if controversial, role in the reconstruction of the nation. It had survived the war intact, one of the few national institutions ready to welcome white Southerners back with open arms, and one of the few that Southerners would willingly join. As such, the Democratic Party was an important tool in bringing white Southerners back into national affairs and providing them with lawful means to express their political passions—though this did not prevent appalling post-war violence against newly freed blacks.
    While Republicans continued to “wave the bloody shirt” during every national election for a generation after the war ended, because of Douglas’s leadership in establishing the Democrats as loyal opposition, the label “party of treason” fell short of its intended effect. The Democratic Party was competitive in national elections during and after the war. Indeed, it emerged from the war with its political fortunes improved. Republicans had been united by the war effort, but with the war over, fissions developed within the party. Meanwhile, Southern states, which would overwhelmingly vote Democratic for the next one hundred years, perversely saw their political strength increase: Slaves had counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional apportionment, but post-slavery African Americans now counted as full human beings.
    That the end of slavery could increase the political influence of slaveholding states is another illustration of Douglas’s complicated legacy. Compared with his fellow Illinoisan, the sainted Lincoln, the man known as “The Little Giant” may seem a small man indeed. Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass charged that no man in antebellum America had “done more to intensify hatred of the negro” than Douglas. No Northern politician had tried harder to appease the slave-holding South, and no individual, because of his introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, was more directly responsible for the chain of events that led to the Civil War.
    Yet . . . no man had worked harder to prevent that war or to rally public opinion behind Lincoln and the Union. Douglas’s premature death was brought on by a lifetime of heavy drinking but even more by exhaustion from his yearlong exertions on behalf of the Union. Months before the 1860 election, realizing that he could not defeat Lincoln, Douglas devoted the remainder of his campaign not to soliciting votes, but to convincing Southerners that Lincoln’s election could not justify secession. Despite death threats, including one from future Confederate president Jefferson Davis, Douglas traveled into the heart of Dixie to make his case. After the election, Douglas worked feverishly with Kentucky senator John Crittenden to try to forge a last-minute compromise to end the secession crisis.
    While Douglas’s and Crittenden’s proposals were unacceptable to Lincoln (and some were genuinely outrageous, such as prohibiting even free blacks from voting), their work provided a valuable service to the Union. Faith in Douglas’s ability to forge an acceptable compromise led four Southern states to delay their secession until after Lincoln’s inaugural. This delay, particularly in the secession of Virginia, gave Lincoln crucial time to form a government, preventing the Confederacy from becoming a fait accompli before he could take office and plan his response to the secession crisis.
    The slave-holding border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland declined to secede at all, which led an admirer to write to Douglas that without his efforts by March 1, 1861, “Mason and Dixon’s line would now be the boundary of the Southern Confederacy”—and the Mason-Dixon line was north