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the Senate. All who had presumed to measure strength with him in this body had been covered with disgrace, and Mr. Buchanan, who, it was well known, had now conceived a hatred for this fearless champion of intervention and popular sovereignty, proportionate to the humiliating consciousness which he could not but feel of baffled management and counteracted trickery, prepared, as a solace for his wounded pride, to aid, as far as he might be able, in having Mr. Douglas defeated in the approaching contest for senatorial honors in Illinois; in which contest all the true friends of popular freedom, and all the sympathizers with harassed and persecuted merit, were in feeling enlisted on the side of one who had thus far shown himself so far superior, both in moral and intellectual power, to all who had ventured into combat with him. It is a fact which has not heretofore awakened the consideration which is due to such conduct, that Mr. Buchanan and those of the Democratic party who concurred with him in feeling, made the most strenuous, but, for the most part, covert and illicit efforts to secure the defeat of Mr. Douglas for re-election to the national Senate in Illinois. If Douglas could be now beaten (these men argued), the national Senate would be henceforth enfranchised from the potential influence which he had been for several years exerting in furtherance of doctrines which were altogether repugnant to the theory that the power of the government might be properly used for the propagation of African slavery, and for the purpose of extending its domain even into regions not especially adapted to it. On the other hand, there were, and for reasons not wholly dissimilar, persons in public life of exorbitant ambition, of capacities wholly

unfit to contest with the illustrious champion of popular sovereignty in the field of parliamentary debate, who intensely sighed for his absence from that arena where he had been recently acquiring such a surpassing and peculiar renown, in order to multiply the chances of their own future advancement, and at the same time facilitate the employment of Federal power as an efficient agent not only for the exclusion of slavery from the regions where it did not now subsist, but for its complete extinction where it had heretofore stood protected by the most sacred constitutional guarantees. All who were any where opposed to the grand conservative principle-alike valuable in politics, in religion, and in morals, quieta non movere—and who were still bent on the agitation of the question of slavery for any purpose, were alike opposed to the clear-headed and magnanimous statesman who now plainly and painfully perceived the error which he had impulsively committed in acquiescing in the attempt to rescind, by special legislative enactment, the Missouri Compromise, which had so long maintained the peace of the country and held in suppression the factious restlessness of sectional demagogues. Mr. Douglas felt an intense scorn for the shallow, sophisticating dogmatists both of the South and of the North, who noisily babbled forth the ineffably nonsensical jargon, which is yet mistaken for true political philosophy, that there must be an absolute similitude between the property interests and municipal arrangements of communities bound together by a mere federative compact, in order to secure them against collisions and misunderstandings. He had read the history of confederacies similar to ours, in other lands and

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in other ages, and he had examined the profound expositions of political wisdom which had made at different times their appearance in the world from the days of Aristotle and Cicero to those of Madison and Hamilton, Jay and Marshall, Webster and Calhoun; and he would just as soon have supposed it impossible that two persons of opposite sexes could live in nuptial harmony, as he would have attached his faith to that essentially identical one which asserts, "I believe this government can not permanently endure half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect that it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the farther spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in a course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new, North as well as South." Mr. Douglas as little believed with the moonstruck abstractionists of New England that freedom and social happiness could not possibly subsist in a country inhabited by races in several material respects distinguishable from each other, without the absolute blending of all the members of them both in one homogeneous miscegenating mass, as he did with the swelling and pompous slaveholding rhetorician of the South that the republic would never see perfect repose until he should have the happiness of hearing "read the muster-roll of his slaves at the foot of Bunker Hill Monument."

The contest for the senatorial toga in Illinois, in the year 1858, attracted far more attention than any similar

struggle has ever commanded. The Republican party, some of the members of which had been on several occasions, during Mr. Douglas's conflicts on the floor of Congress with the pro-slavery champions, heard to express more or less of sympathy for the fearless and indomitable champion of non-intervention, could not forego the tempting opportunity now presented of taking advantage of the feud which existed in the Democratic party for the purpose of securing an additional senator of their now rapidly growing faction from the great Northwestern state which Mr. Douglas had so long and so faithfully represented. This party now brought forward, as its champion in the contest just commencing, a man who has since acquired much fame, and has left behind him many claims to the enduring respect and kindness of his countrymen. I shall hereafter have occasion to speak much of this remarkable personage-sometimes in approval, sometimes in condemnation; but I am glad to know that I shall be saved from the task of indulging in language of harsh reprobation or of unkind decrial in reference to one over whose recent untimely fate the whole republic has profoundly grieved, and the foul and barbarous manner of whose "taking off" has filled the bosoms of all civilized people with sentiments of the most lively horror and resentment. At present I shall only notice one or two material facts connected with this canvass, for which the worthy individual to whom I have just alluded had not the smallest responsibility. The first of these facts is, that a Democratic administration openly and unblushingly employed its official patronage in Illinois to defeat, if possible, the re-election to the na

FEDERAL PATRONAGE THROWN AGAINST DOUGLAS. 251 tional Senate of the ablest and most effective champion of the Democratic cause who was now any where on the public stage. The second fact to which I shall allude in passing is, that the exclusive pro-slavery champions every where in the South publicly avowed their earnest desire, and apparently, too, with general popular approval, that Mr. Lincoln should be chosen to the Senate instead of Mr. Douglas. How could the South reasonably expect to be defended hereafter by the Democratic statesmen of the North against abolition assailment, when she could be thus deluded into ungenerous, impolitic, and positively ungrateful conduct toward the most fearless and gifted of her Northern Democratic defenders? In spite of all the adverse circumstances brought into operation against him, Mr. Douglas was re-elected to the Senate by a small majority, and in a short time was able to show himself once more in that body, where very speedily he subjected to just responsibility several of the most leading of those senators who had enlisted in the unmanly and disreputable conspiracy for his overthrow.

And now do we not see a cause of future political weakness to the South, and her manifest exposure to multiplied future ills, which a provident sagacity might have averted, and the detrimental influence of which, attributable mainly to unprovoked injustice, and an almost unprecedented want of magnanimity and true manliness, might easily have been counteracted, if persistent folly and persecuting malice had in good season given way to returning equity and true heroism of spirit? As the Father of Poesy paints Achilles retiring indignantly to his tent, and his valiant myrmidonic legions withdrawn.