man hopes or expects, when you have not time to pass it in the early spring, at the long session, that you are going to consider it at the short session. When you come here at the next session, the objection will be that you must not bring forward a measure of this magnitude, because it will affect the political relations of parties, and it will be postponed then, as it was two years ago, to give the glory to the incoming administration, each party probably thinking that it would have the honor of carrying out the measure. Hence, sir, I regard the proposition of postponement till December to mean till after the election of 1860.

I desire to see all the pledges made in the last contest redeemed during this term, and let the next president, and the parties under him, redeem the pledges and obligations assumed during the next campaign. The people of all parties at the last presidential election decreed that this road was to be made. The question is now before us. We have time to consider it. We have all the means necessary, as much now as we can have at any other time. The senator from Massachusetts intimates that, the treasury being bankrupt now, we can not afford the money. That senator also remarked that we were just emerging from a severe commercial crisis-a great commercial revulsion-which had carried bankruptcy in its train. If we have just emerged from it, if we have passed it, this is the very time of all others when a great enterprise should be begun. It might have been argued when we saw that crisis coming, before it reached us, that we should furl our sails and trim our ship for the approaching storm; but when it has exhausted its rage, when all the mischief has been done that could be inflicted, when the bright sun of day is breaking forth, when the sea is becoming calm, and there is but little visible of the past tempest, when the nausea of sea-sickness is succeeded by joyous exhilaration, inspired by the hope of a fair voyage, let men feel elated and be ready to commence a great work like this, so as to complete it before another commercial crisis or revulsion shall come upon us.

Sir, if you pass this bill, no money can be expended under it until one section of the road has been made. The surveys must be completed, the route must be located, the land set aside and surveyed, and a section of the road made, before a dollar can be drawn from the treasury. If you can pass the bill now, it can not make any drain on the treasury for at least two years to come; and who doubts that all the effects of the late crisis will have passed away before the expiration of those two years.

Mr. President, this is the auspicious time, either with a view to the interests of the country, or to that stagnation which exists between political parties, which is calculated to make it a measure of the country rather than a partisan measure, or to the commercial and monetary affairs of the nation, or with reference to the future. Look upon it in any point of view, now is the time; and I am glad that the senator from Louisiana has indicated, as I am told he has, that the motion for postponement is a test question; for I confess I shall regard it as a test vote on a Pacific railroad during this term, whatever it may be in the future. I hope that we shall pass the bill now.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE CAMPAIGN OF 1858.

THE reader who has given attention to those pages of this book relating to the Lecompton controversy in Congress will of course be informed of many of the events connected with and leading to the most memorable election held in the State of Illinois during the year 1858. To many persons, however, it will be serviceable that, before entering upon the description of the contest of that year, a brief repetition of some leading facts, and a detailed history of others, should be given now.

When the announcement was made by telegraph from St. Louis that Mr. John Calhoun and his associates in the Lecompton Convention had, for the purpose of securing for their mon、 strosity a legal substance which it could never obtain at the hands of the people, wantonly and wickedly resolved to de clare the Lecompton Constitution as already made, and waiting only the sanction of Congress to erect it as the government of the people of the unfortunate Territory, there was in all Illinois a universal expression of indignation. Calhoun had for many years been an active Democrat in the central part of the state, and he was believed to be a man who, whatever other failings and imperfections he might have, would never consent, under any circumstances, to embarrass or injure his party friends by rash or unjustifiable political action. In short, he was esteemed by all as a safe and reliable" man, who could not be seduced, under any state of things, to do political acts, the effect of which was to destroy, or, to say the least, embarrass and place his party in a most unenviable position before the country. For many days those who had a personal acquaintance with the "Lord President," as he was subsequently styled by the papers of the state, declined giving credit to the reports of the action of the convention, but these doubts were but of short duration; letters from a number of persons in the Territory, and from Calhoun himself, soon removed all question, not only as to the action of the convention, but also as to the full participation of Calhoun in the iniquitous proceedings.

From one end of the state to the other, the Democratic newspaper press immediately and determinedly denounced the action of the convention, and of the daring attempt by Calhoun and his associates to defraud the people of Kansas of a sacred right; to violate the entire spirit of the Kansas-Nebraska Act; to repudiate the saving and most peculiar principle of the Cincinnati platform; to disregard and contemptuously set aside the peremptory and pointed instructions of Mr. Buchanan, and the earnest advice and appeals of Governor Walker. In the very expressive language of Mr. Buchanan, no Democrat in Illinois "had any serious doubt" but that the convention would submit the Constitution to the people, and each Democrat in the state felt that the convention, in utterly scorning and repudiating the instructions of Mr. Buchanan to Governor Walker, had sought, through pure wantonness, to treat the instructions of the venerable President as the "fogyism" of old age. The Chicago Times, Springfield Register, Quincy Herald, Galena Courier, Peoria News, and Alton Democratthe daily Democratic papers of the state-without any previous consultation or understanding, simultaneously, and with all their power, proclaimed the indignant feeling of the Democracy in their respective localities, and called upon the party to take immediate action, by meetings and resolutions, to sustain Mr. Buchanan and the Cincinnati platform against the cowardly and insolent attempt on the part of the Lecompton Convention to treat both with sovereign contempt. The weekly Democratic press of the state followed with great unanimity, and within ten days from the receipt of the first intelligence of the action of the Lecompton Convention, Illinois, speaking through the Democratic press, had become unanimously pledged to the support and defense of the President in his ef forts to preserve the Cincinnati platform pure and inviolate. No Democrat in Illinois believed the silly slander of a Northern senator, that "the administration was a little weak in the knees;" and all relied implicitly that the policy of the government, so clearly and emphatically enunciated in the speeches of Governor Walker and in his instructions from the hand of General Cass, would be carried out to the last extremity, thereby vindicating the power and majesty of the great principle embraced in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, so cordially and unanimously ratified and adopted by the Democracy at Cincinnati.

There was not one Democratic newspaper in all Illinois that did not, with all its power, sustain the President and Governor Walker against the unfortunate and ill-judged action of John Calhoun and his associates at Lecompton.

Judge Douglas was at that time in Chicago; though no public meeting was held at which he could offer his views, there was no doubt entertained by any one, Democrat or Republican, as to his determination to sustain the President in the policy so recently declared by the administration. In a few days Democratic newspapers in other states came into Illinois sustaining the administration and denouncing the Lecomptonites. From the entire Northwest there was not a Democratic paper which opposed the administration by sustaining Calhoun. The papers of New York gave to the Democracy of Illinois the most unbounded assurance that the Democracy of that state would unite with their Western brethren in a vigorous support of the President. Some weeks later, the Washington Union, which, since the action of the Kansas Convention, had remained silent, appeared with an elaborate editorial, claiming in behalf of the slaveholder the constitutional right to carry his slaves into any state or Territory of the United States, and hold them in such state or Territory by virtue of a constitutional right, in defiance of the laws of such state or Territory. As this matter has been treated of in one of Mr. Douglas's speeches, it is unnecessary to do more here than to repeat that this article of the Union was the first indication that the Democracy of Illinois had that any change was contemplated in the policy of the administration; and following immediately upon this strange declaration of the most unsound and untenable propositions was a quasi endorsement of the Lecompton fraud, and a suggestion that the best course to pursue was to acquiesce in it, and thus get rid of a "distracting question." Still, so complete had been Mr. Buchanan's committal to the principles of the Kansas-Nebraska Act; so acknowledged and boasted of General Cass's devotion to unrestrained squatter sovereignty; so well known Mr. Cobb's liberal views, proclaimed so eloquently upon the hills and in the valleys of Pennsylvania during 1856; so emphatic had been Mr. Toucey's endorsement of the right of self-government, that human intellect refused to understand how, in one moment, and without any rational pretense or occasion, an administration could thus

suddenly give the negative to its past history and official acts, and render ridiculous at least a majority of its members by making them active supporters of proceedings planned and perpetrated in positive conflict with their opinions and speeches during a long, excited, and severe political contest of but very recent date.

Up to the appearance of these articles in the Washington Union, the Republican party had been panic-stricken. The only hope that that party could have had of perpetuating its existence in the Northwest was a want of fidelity on the part of the Democracy to the Cincinnati platform; and when the Democracy of the Northwest, without a dissenting voice, united in sustaining the administration in its Kansas policy and in repudiating the action of the Lecompton Convention, because it violated the Cincinnati platform, that party saw its own extinction as plainly as it could be written. Its first hope was that Douglas, with a view of being considered the peculiar friend of the South, would sustain the Lecompton Convention. That hope being dissipated, the Republican party was preparing for its demise, when, from a quarter most unexpected, came words of cheering consolation, of hope, and of future glory. There is no use in disguising the fact, even were it possible to do so, that, had the administration, in December, 1857, remained true to its previously maintained policy, and urged upon Congress the duty of disregarding any and all propositions for the admission of Kansas tainted with fraud, and not approved by the free and deliberate choice of the people, the Republican party would have virtually ceased to exist as an organization in the Northwestern States. It would have at once been reduced to a mere handful of abolition fanatics, who by education, as well as natural tastes, habits, and associations, will always cling to the theory that the only way of elevating the negro is by removing every law, custom, or other hinderance to the degradation of the white man to the level of the negro. The thousands who had by their votes, during the previous three years, given a consequence and a power to the Republican party, because of a sincere belief that the policy of the Democratic party had been and would continue to be shaped and changed to promote the ends and purposes of the South as opposed to those of the North, upon the official declaration by the President that he would not sanction or approve of