agreed to establish diplomatic relations. In 1858 an
American envoy, Townsend Harris, negotiated a com-
mercial treaty that opened to American ships six
Japanese ports heretofore closed to foreigners.
President Pierce’s negotiation of a Canadian reciproc-
ity treaty with Great Britain in 1854 and an unsuc-
cessful attempt, also made under Pierce, to annex the
Hawaiian Islands are further demonstrations of the
assertive foreign policy of the period.
Stephen Douglas: “The Little Giant”
The most prominent spokesman of the Young America
movement was Stephen A. Douglas. The senator from
Illinois was the Henry Clay of his generation. Like Clay
at his best, Douglas was able to see the needs of the
nation in the broadest perspective. He held a succes-
sion of state offices before being elected to Congress in
1842 at the age of twenty-nine. After only two terms in
the House, he was chosen United States senator.
Douglas succeeded at almost everything he
attempted. His law practice was large and prosperous.
He dabbled in Chicago real estate and made a fortune.
Politics suited him to perfection. Rarely has a man
seemed so closely attuned to his time and place in his-
tory. Although very short, he had powerful shoulders,
a large head, strong features, and deep-set, piercing
eyes. His high forehead was made to appear even
bolder by the way he wore his hair, swept back in a
pompadour and draped over his collar. His appearance
was so imposing that friends called him “the Little
Giant.” “I live with my constituents,” he once
boasted, “drink with them, lodge with them, pray with
them, laugh, hunt, dance, and work with them. I eat
their corn dodgers and fried bacon and sleep two in a
bed with them.” Yet he was no mere backslapper. He
read widely, wrote poetry, financed a number of young
American artists, served as a regent of the Smithsonian
Institution, and was interested in scientific farming.
The foundations of Douglas’s politics were expan-
sion and popular sovereignty. He had been willing to
fight for all of Oregon in 1846, and he supported the
Mexican War to the hilt, in sharp contrast to his one-
term Illinois colleague in Congress, Abraham Lincoln.
(Douglas accused Lincoln of “taking the side of the
common enemy against his own country.”) That local
settlers should determine their own institutions was,
to his way of thinking, axiomatic. Arguments over the
future of slavery in the territories he believed a foolish
waste of energy and time since he was convinced that
natural conditions would keep the institution out of
the West.
The main thing, he insisted, was to get on with
the development of the United States. Let the nation
build railroads, acquire new territory, expand its trade.
He believed slavery “a curse beyond computation” forStephen Douglas: “The Little Giant” 349A photograph of Commodore Matthew Perry in 1855 juxtaposed with a Japanese portrait of him. When Perry’s squadron arrived in Edo Bay
(Tokyo), the Japanese initially ordered him to leave. Japanese writers had long warned of the “barbarians of the west” who with “squinting eyes
and limping feet” sought to override the “noble nations” of Asia.