CHAPTER XVIII.

DOMESTIC AFFAIRS.

MR. DOUGLAS was first married on the 7th of April, 1847, in Rockingham county, North Carolina, to MISS MARTHA DENNY MARTIN, only daughter of Col. Robert Martin, of that county. With his bride he returned to the State of Illinois, whose senator he had become but a month previously. Everywhere during his tour he was greeted with affection by his constituents, with all the attention that friendship could suggest, and all the respect which the gentleness and amiability of his accomplished bride could not fail to inspire. Her gentleness, and her strong native good judgment were of great service to him in many a season of perplexing and troublesome excitement. She made home an abiding place of peace and tranquility, where all the associations were of a refined and Christian character. In extending hospitality to the multitudes who thronged her husband's mansion, she was judicious and yet munificent. She won the respect of all his friends, and divided with him their unbounded admiration. After a happy life of nearly six years with a husband whose interest was the object of her wordly life, she died at his residence in Washington City, on the 19th of January, 1853, leaving three children, two boys, and one girl, the latter an infant, who survived its mother but a few months. The two boys are now bright, active, intelligent youths, and reside with their father.

In November, 1856, Mr. Douglas was married at Washing ton City to MISS ADELE CUTTS, the beautiful and accomplished daughter of Hon. James Madison Cutts, long a resident of that city.

DOUGLAS' PLANTATION AND SLAVES.

In speaking of the domestic affairs of Judge Douglas, it may not be out of place to introduce and dispose of a matter which on frequent occasions has served his political and personal enemies with a pretext for the most unscrupulous abuse. That matter is his "ownership of slaves."

In 1847, on the day after his marriage, Colonel Martin

placed in Mr. Douglas' hands a sealed package of papers. Upon an examination of these papers Mr. Douglas found among them a deed of certain plantations, including the servants upon them, in the State of Mississippi, which deed vested the title to both land and servants in him absolutely. He at once, without one moment's hesitation, sought Colonel Martin and returned him the deed, stating that while he was no abolitionist, and had no sympathy with them in their wild schemes and ultra views respecting slavery, yet he was a northern man by birth, education and residence, and was totally ignorant of that description of property, and as ignorant of the manner and rules by which it should be governed, and was therefore wholly incompetent to take charge of it and perform his duty towards it properly, particularly at a distance of fifteen hundred miles from where he resided, and where he should continue to reside at all times with the people to whom he owed so much. He said that he preferred Colonel Martin should retain the property, at least during his lifetime, and if in the meantime no disposition was made of it, he could then by will leave directions as to the manner in which he desired it disposed of.

Colonel Martin died on the 25th of May, 1848, leaving a will in which he provided for the disposal of his entire estate. In this will he recited the fact that he had a year previously offered the plantations in Mississippi, with the slaves upon them, to his son-in-law, Stephen A. Douglas, who had declined to receive them. He then declared substantially, that in the event of the death of his daughter, Martha D. Douglas, leaving surviving children, it was his wish and desire that the slaves upon those Mississippi plantations should remain and continue the property of those children; and he willed this in the firm belief that the negroes would be better off and better cared for as slaves in the family in which they had been born and raised than if set at liberty and sent to the free states; but he provided, that in the event of his said daughter dying, leaving no surviving children, the negroes should be sent to the coast of Africa and should be supported there one year, at the expense of his estate, and then be declared free.

This is the entire history of the manner in which Mr. Doug las became "the owner of plantations stocked with slaves ;" and of the manner and the reasons by which the ownership of

the slaves was continued by their grandfather to the children, after Mr. Douglas, for the reasons given, had declined the absolute gift of the entire property.

It has been thought proper and just toward Mr. Douglas that this matter should be stated clearly and distinctly. At the time that Col. Martin made him the valuable present, Mr. Douglas was not blessed with an over abundance of treasure. As a pecuniary gift this was of great value, and in his circumstances would, if converted into money, have enabled him, by judicious investments in Chicago and elsewhere in Illinois, to have laid the foundation for a princely fortune. The gift was clogged with no conditions. He was at liberty to convert plantations and slaves into cash at any moment. How many of those who have denounced him as a slaveholder, as being the " owner of human beings," and the "proprietor of human chattels," would have resisted the offer that he declined, is a question which the observer of the general hollowness of abolition pretensions will have no difficulty in answering.

A senator from Ohio, with a want of taste, a want of a becoming sense of the proprieties of life, shortly after the death. of Mrs. Douglas, was shameless enough to introduce the matter into a debate in the Senate. The remarks made by Mr. Wade on that occasion elicited the following feeling, touching, manly reply from Mr. Douglas:

"Mr. President, the senator from Ohio [Mr. Wade] has invaded the circle of my private relations in search of materials for the impeachment of my official action. He has alluded to certain southern interests which he insinuates that I possess, and remarked, that where the treasure is there the heart is also. So long as the statement that I was one of the largest slaveholders in America was confined to the abolition newspapers and stump orators I treated it with silent contempt. I would gladly do so on this occasion, were it not for the fact that the reference is made in my presence by a senator for the purpose of imputing to me a mercenary motive for my official conduct. Under these circumstances, silence on my part in regard to the fact might be construed into a confession of guilt in reference to the impeachment of motive. I therefore say to the senator that is insinuation is false, and he knows it to be false, if he has ever searched the records or has any reliable information upon the subject. I am not the owner of a slave,

and never have been, nor have I ever received and appropri ated to my own use one dollar earned by slave labor. It is true that I once had tendered to me, under circumstances grateful to my feelings, a plantation with a large number of slaves upon it, which I declined to accept, not because I had any sympathy with abolitionists or the abolition movement, but for the reason that, being a northern man by birth, by education and residence, and intending always to remain such, it was impossible for me to know, understand, and provide for the wants, comforts and happiness of those people. I refused to accept them because I was unwilling to assume responsibilities which I was incapable of fulfilling. This fact is referred to in the will of my father-in-law as a reason for leaving the plantation and slaves to his only daughter, (who became the mother of my infant children), as her separate and exclusive estate, with the request that if she departed this life without surviving children the slaves should be emancipated and sent to Liberia at the expense of her estate; but in the event she should leave surviving children, the slaves should descend to them, under the belief, expressed in the will, that they would be happier and better off with the descendants of the family, with whom they had been born and raised, than in a distant land where they might find no friend to care for them. This brief statement, relating to private and domestic affairs, (which ought to be permitted to remain private and sacred), has been extorted and wrung from me with extreme reluctance, even in vindication of the purity of my motives in the performance of a high public trust. As the truth compelled me to negative the insinuation so offensively made by the senator from Ohio, God forbid that I should be understood by any one as being willing to cast from me any responsibility that now does, or ever has attached to any member of my family. So long as life shall last-and I shall cherish with religious veneration the memory and virtues of the sainted mother of my children-so long as my heart shall be filled with parental solicitude for the happiness of those motherless infants, I implore my enemies, who so ruthlessly invade the domestic sanctuary, to do me the favor to believe that I have no wish, no aspiration, to be considered purer or better than she who was, or they who are, slaveholders.

Sir, whenever my assailants shall refuse to accept a like

amount of this species of property tendered to them, under similar circumstances, and shall perform a domestic trust with equal fidelity and disinterestedness, it will be time enough for them to impute mercenary motives to me in the performance of my official duties.”

The " ownership of slaves" has for several years been one of the favorite themes upon which the lower and more disreputable class of the opposition have loved to dilate in denounc ing Douglas to sympathetic audiences. Men of respectability, even among the abolitionists, have ceased to discourse of it. But in 1858, in the memorable contest to which a proper share of this book is devoted, the matter was revived and assumed a new and more intensified color by men who, in uniting with the abolitionists to accomplish a common end, felt compelled to resort to fabrications which no honorable Republican would stoop to invent.

It will be remembered that Illinois during that year was visited by several distinguished men, some of whom had such a profound regard for the rights of the South that they sought the election of Lincoln, with his negro equality doctrines, by the defeat of Douglas. In the list of statesmen who found, during 1858, a hitherto unknown salubriousness in the air of the northwest, was the Hon. JOHN SLIDELL of Louisiana, who being, as was well known, or at least, as it was supposed, a friend, confident, and adviser of the President in the days of the Danite rebellion, attracted by his venerable appearance, as well as by the classic purity of his language upon the subject of Douglas' reelection, the especial regard of the entire Danite faction, and of the more numerous and respectable party, the Republicans. It was understood-and when we say understood we mean that it was openly declared by the President's followers that Mr. Slidell was the main instrument by which certain changes in the federal offices in Illinois had been made. Dr. DANIEL BRAINARD, surgeon to the marine hospital, owed his appointment to the united and friendly exertions of FRANCIS J. GRUND, and Senator John Slidell. Par nobile fratrum! Immediately after Mr. Slidell's final leave of Chicago it was stated upon the streets and in public places that Senator Douglas (then absent in other parts of the state) was not only a slaveholder, but one that had no parallel in wickednesss, even in Uncle Tom's Cabin. We will not repeat the stories which